Kind: captions
Language: en
the following is a conversation with poe
shen lo a professor of mathematics
at carnegie mellon university national
coach of the usa
international math olympia team and
founder of
xp that does online education of basic
math and science
he's also the founder of novid an app
that takes a
really interesting approach to contact
tracing making sure you stay completely
anonymous
and it gives you statistical information
about covet cases in your
physical network of interactions so you
can maintain privacy
very important and make informed
decisions
in my opinion we desperately needed
solutions like this in
early 2020 and unfortunately i think
we will again need it for the next
pandemic
to me solutions that require large-scale
distributed coordination of human beings
need ideas that emphasize freedom and
knowledge
quick mention of our sponsors jordan
harbinger show
on it betterhelp eight sleep and
element check them out in the
description to support this podcast
as a side note let me say that poe and i
filmed a few short videos about simple
beautiful math concepts
that i will release soon it was really
fun
i really enjoyed poe sharing his passion
for math with me in those videos
i'm hoping to do a few more short videos
in the coming months
that are educational in nature on ai
robotics math science philosophy
or if all else fails just fun snippets
into my life on music
books martial arts and other random
things
if that's of interest to anyone at all
this is the lex friggman podcast and
here's my conversation
with po shenlo you know you mentioned
you really enjoy
flying and experiencing different people
in different places
there's something about flying for me i
don't know if you have the same
experience
that every time i get on an airplane
it's incredible to me
that human beings have actually been
able to achieve this
and when i look at like what's happening
now with humans traveling out into space
i see it as all the same thing it's
incredible that humans are able to get
into a box
and fly in the air and
and safely and land in the same it seems
like
and everybody's taking it for granted so
when i observe them
it's quite fascinating because i see
that cleanly mapping
to the world where we're now on uh
in rockets and traveling to the moon
traveling to mars
and at the same kind of way i can
already see the future
where we will all take it for granted
so i don't know i don't know if you have
uh you personally when you fly
have the same kind of magical experience
of like how the heck did humans actually
accomplish this
so i do especially when there's
turbulence
which is you know like on the way here
yeah there was turbulence and
the the plane jiggled even the flight
attendant had to hold on to the side
and i was just thinking to myself it's
amazing that this happens all the time
and the wings don't fall off you know
like
given how many planes are flying but
then i often think about it and i'm like
you know a long time ago i think people
didn't trust elevators
yeah in a 40-story building in new york
city and
now we just take it completely for
granted that you can step into this
shaft
which is 40 floors up and down and it
will just not
fail yeah again i'm the same way with
elevators but also buildings
when i'll stand on the 40th floor and
wonder
how the heck are we not falling right
now
like how how amazing it is with the high
winds
like structurally just the earthquakes
and the vibrations i mean
natural vibrations in the ground like
how is this how are
all of these you go like new york city
all of these buildings standing
i mean to me one of the most beautiful
things actually mathematically too is uh
bridges
i used to build bridges in high school
from like toothpicks just like out of
the pure joy
of like physics making
some structure really strong
understanding
like from a civil engineering
perspective what kind of
structure will be stronger than another
kind of structure like suspension
bridges and then you see that at scale
humans being able to span a body of
water with a giant bridge
and it's i don't know it it's so
humbling
it makes you realize how
how dependent we are on each other sort
of i talk about love a lot but
there is there's a certain element in
which we
little ants have just a small amount of
knowledge about
our particular thing and then we're
depending on a network
of knowledge that other experts hold and
then
most of our lives most of the quality of
life we have has to do with the
the richness of that network of
knowledge
of that collaboration and then sort of
the ability to build on top of it
levels of abstractions you start from
like bits in a computer
then you can have assembly and you can
have c plus so you have an operating
system that you can see plus plus and
python finally some machine learning on
top
all of these are abstractions and
eventually we have ai that runs all of
us humans but
anyway uh but speaking of abstractions
and programming in high school you wrote
some impressive games for amaz i got a
chance to
in browser somehow it's magic got a
chance to play them
alien attack one two three and four
what's the hardest part about
programming those games
and maybe can you tell the story about
about building those games
sure i actually tried to do those in
high school because i was just curious
if i could
and yeah and that's a good starting
point for anything right yeah yeah it's
like could you but
the appealing thing was also it was a
soup to nuts kind of thing
so something that has always attracted
me is i like
beautiful ideas i like seeing beautiful
ideas but i actually also like
seeing execution of an idea all the way
from beginning to end in something that
works so for example in high school i
was lucky enough to grow up
in the late 90s when even
a high school student could hope to make
something sort of comparable to the
shareware games that were out there
not i say the word sort of like still
quite far away but at least i didn't
need to hire a 3d
cg artist there weren't enough pixels to
draw anybody
even i can draw right bad art of course
but
the point is i wanted to know is it
possible for me to try to do those
things
where back in those days you didn't even
have an
easy way to draw letters on the screen
in a particular font
you couldn't just say import a font it
wasn't like python so
for example back then if you play those
games in the in the web browser which is
emulating
um the the old school computer
those even the letters you see those are
made by individual calls to draw pixels
on the screen so you built that from
scratch almost building a computer
graphics library from scratch
yes the primitive that i got to use was
some code i copied off of a book
in assembly of how to put a pixel on the
screen in a particular color
and the programming programming language
was pascal
ah yeah the first one was in pascal but
then the
other ones were in c plus plus after
that how's the emulation in the browser
work by the way is that is that true
real
because it's pretty cool you get to play
these games that have a very much
90s feeling to them ah so it's literally
making an ms-dos environment which is
literally
running the old exe file wow
that could be more amazing than the
airplane so it wasn't so much about the
video games it was more about can you
build something
really cool from scratch yes and
you did a bunch of programming
competitions
what was your interest your love for
programming
what did you learn to that experience
especially now that
as much of your work has taken a long
journey through mathematics
i think i always was amazed by how
computers
could do things fast if i wanted to make
it an abstract
analysis of why it is that i saw some
power in the computer
because if the computer can do things so
many times faster than humans
where the hard part is telling the
computer what to do and how to do it
if you can master that asking the
computer what to do
then you could conceivably achieve more
things and those contests i was in
those were the opposite in some sense of
making
a complete product like a game as a
product
those contests were effectively write a
function to do something extremely
efficiently
and if you are able to do that then you
can unlock more of the power of the
computer
but also doing it quickly there's a time
element from the human perspective to be
able to
program quickly there's something nice
so there's like almost like an athletics
component
to where you're almost like uh an
athlete
seeking optimal performance as a human
being trying to write these programs
and at the same time it's kind of art
because you're
the best way to write a program quickly
is to write a simple program
you used to have a damn good solution so
it's not necessary you have to type fast
you have to think through a really clean
beautiful
solution i mean
what do you think is the use of those
programming competitions do you think
they're ultimately something you would
recommend for students for people
interested in programming or people
interested in building stuff
yes i think so because especially with
the work that i've been doing nowadays
even
trying to control kovit something that
was very helpful from day one
was understanding that the kinds of
computations we would want to do
we could conceivably do on like a four
core cloud machine on amazon web
services
out to a population which might have
hundreds of thousands or millions of
people
the reason why that was important to
have that back of the envelope
calculation with efficient algorithms
is because if we couldn't do that then
we would bankrupt ourselves before we
could get to a big enough skill
if you think about how you grow anything
from small to big
if in order to grow it from small to big
you also already need 10
000 cloud servers you'll never get too
big
and also the nice thing about
programming competitions is that you
actually build
a thing that uh works so you
you finish it there's a completion thing
and you realize
i think there's a magic to it where you
realize that
it's not so hard to build something that
works
to have a system that uh successfully
takes in inputs and produces outputs and
solves a difficult problem
and that directly transfers to building
a startup essentially that can help
some aspect of this world as long as
it's mostly be
based on software engineering things get
really tricky when you have to
manufacture stuff
that's why people like elon musk are so
impressive that they it's not just
software
tesla autopilot is just not just
software it's it's like you have to
actually
like have factories that build uh cars
and there's like a million components
involved in in the machinery required to
assemble those cards and so on but in
software one person
can change the world which is uh uh
incredible
but on the mathematics side what uh if
you
look back or maybe today what made you
fall in love with mathematics
for me i think i've always been very
attracted
to challenge as i already indicated with
the writing the program
i guess if i see something that's hard
or supposed to be impossible it
certain sometimes i say maybe maybe i
want to see if i can pull that off
and with the mathematics the math
competitions presented problems
that were hard that i didn't know how to
start
but for which i could conceivably try to
learn how to solve them
so i mean there are other things that
are hard called like get something to
mars get people to mars
and i didn't i still don't think that
i'm
able to solve that problem on the other
hand the math problems struck me as
things which are
hard and with significant amount of
extra work i could figure it out
and maybe they would actually even be
useful like that mathematical skill is
the core
of lots of other things
that's really interesting maybe you
could speak to that because
a lot of people say that math is hard
as a kind of negative statement
it always seemed to me a little bit like
that's kind of a positive statement
that all things that are worth having in
this world are hard
i mean everything that people think
about
that they would love to do whether it's
sports
whether it's art music
and all the sciences they're going to be
hard if you want to do something special
so is there something you could say to
that idea that math is hard
should it be made easy or should it be
hard
ah so i think maybe i want to dig in a
little bit onto this hard part and say
uh i think the interesting thing about
the math is that
you can see a question that you didn't
know how to
start doing it before and over a course
of
thinking about it you can come up with a
way
to to solve it and so you can move from
a state of
not being able to do something to a
state of being able to do something
where you help to take yourself through
that instead of somebody else
spoon feeding you yes that technique so
actually here i'm already digging into
maybe part of my teaching philosophy
also which is that
i actually don't want to ever just tell
somebody
here's how you do something i actually
prefer to say here's an interesting
question
i know you don't quite know how to do it
do you have any ideas
this is i'm actually coming up with i'm
actually explaining another way that you
could try to do teaching
and i'm contrasting this to a method of
watch me do this
now practice it 20 times i'm trying to
say a lot of people
consider math to be hard because maybe
they can't remember
all of the methods that were taught but
for me
i look at the hardness and i don't think
of it as a memory hardness
i think of it as a can you invent
something
hardness and i think that if we can
teach more people
how to do that art of invention
in a pure cognitive way not as hard as
the actual hardware stuff right but like
in terms of the concepts and the
thoughts and the mathematics teaching
people how to
invent then suddenly actually they might
not even find math to be that
tiresomeness hard anymore but that
rewardingness hard
of i have the capability of looking at
something which i don't know what to do
and coming up with how to do it i
actually think we should be doing that
giving giving people that capability
so hard in the same way that invention
is hard
that is ultimately rewarding so maybe
you can dig in
that a little bit longer which is um
do you see basically the way to teach
math is to present a problem
and to give a person a chance to try to
invent a solution
without with minimal amount of
information first
is that is that basically how do you
build that muscle of invention
in a student yes so the way that i i
guess i have
two different sort of ways that i try to
teach actually one of them is
in fact this semester because all my
classes were remotely delivered i even
threw them all onto my youtube channel
so you can see
you can see how i teach at carnegie
mellon but i'd often say
hey everyone let's try to do this any
ideas
and that actually changes my role as a
professor
from a person who shows up for class
with a script of what i want to talk
through
i actually i don't have a script the way
i show up for class is
there's something that we want to learn
how to do and we're going to do it by
improv
i'm talking about the same method as
improv comedy which is where
you tell me some ideas and i'll try to
yes and them
you know what i mean and then together
we're gonna come up with a proof
of this concept where you were deeply
involved
in creating the proof actually every
time i teach the class we do every proof
slightly differently because it's based
on how the students came
up with it and that's how i do it when
i'm in person
i also have another line of courses that
we make that is delivered online
those things are where i can't do it
live but
the teaching method became also similar
it was just here's an interesting
question
i know it's out of reach why don't you
think about it and then automatic hints
we feed automatically hints
uh through you know through the internet
to go and let the person
try to invent so that's like a more
rigorous prodding of invention
but you did mention disease and
coven and you've been doing some very
interesting stuff from a mathematical
but also software engineering angle
of coming up with ideas it's back to the
i can
i see a problem i think i can help uh
so you stepped into this world can you
tell me about
your work there under the flag of novid
and uh both the the software and the
technical details of how the thing works
sure sure so first i want to make sure
that i say this is actually team effort
i happen to be the one speaking but
there's no way this would exist without
an incredible team of people who inspire
me every day to
work on this but i'll speak on behalf of
them so
the idea was indeed that we stepped
forward
in march of last year when the world
started to become our part of the world
started to become our part meaning the
united states
started to become paralyzed by coven the
shutdown started to happen
and at that time it started as a figment
of an idea which was
network theory which is the area of math
that i work in
could potentially be combined with
smartphones and some kind of
health information anonymized exactly
how
we didn't know yet we tried to
crystallize it and many months into this
work
we ended up accidentally discovering
a new way to control diseases which
is now what is the main impetus of all
of this work is to take this idea
and polish it and hopefully have it be
useful not only now
but for future pandemics the idea is
really simple to describe
um actually my main thing in the world
is i come up with obvious
observations that's that's i'll explain
it now einstein did the same thing
and he wrote a few short papers
but but so the idea is like this if we
describe
how usually people control disease
for a lot of history it was that you'd
find out
who was sick you'd find out who they've
been around
and you try to remove all of those
people from society against their will
yes now that's the problem the against
the will part
gives you the wrong kind of a feedback
loop which makes it hard to control the
disease because then the people you're
trying to control keep getting other
people sick
you can see already how i'm thinking and
talking about this feedback loops this
is actually related to something you
said earlier
about even like how skyscrapers stay in
the air uh the whole point is
control theory you actually want to or
even how an airplane stays
you need to have control loops which are
feedbacking in the right way
and what we observed was that the
feedback control loop for
controlling disease by asking people to
be removed from society against their
will
was not working it was running against
human incentives and you suddenly are
trying to control seven
billion eight billion people in ways
that they don't individually want
to necessarily do so here's the idea
and this is inspired by the fact that at
the core of our team were user
experience designers
that's actually the in fact the first
thing i knew we needed when we started
was to bring user experience
at the core okay but so um
the idea was suppose there was a penta
suppose hypothetically there was a
pandemic
what would you want you would want a way
to be able to live your life as much as
possible
and avoid getting sick can we make an
app to help
you avoid getting sick notice how i've
just articulated the problem
it is not can we make an app so that
after you are around somebody who's sick
you can be removed from society it's can
we make an
app so that you can avoid getting sick
that would
run a positive feed however i don't know
if i want to call it positive or
negative but they would run a good
feedback loop yes
okay so then how would you do this the
only problem is that
you don't know who's sick because
especially with this disease
if i see somebody who looks perfectly
healthy the disease spreads two days
before you have any symptoms
and so it's actually not possible that's
where the network theory comes in
you caught it from someone what if
we changed the paradigm and we said
whenever there's a sickness
tell everybody how many physical
relationships
separate them from the sickness that is
the trivial idea we added
the trivial idea was the distance
between you and a disease
is not measured in feet or seconds
it's measured in terms of how many close
physical relationships
separate you like these six degrees of
separation like linkedin
simple idea what if we told everyone
that it turns out that actually unlocks
some interesting behavioral feedback
loops which
for example let me let me now jump to a
non-covered example to show why this
maybe it could be useful
actually we think it could be quite
useful imagine there was ebola or some
hemorrhagic fever
imagine it spread through contact
through the air in fact pretend
pretend that's a
that's a disastrous disease it has high
fatality rate
and uh as you die you're bleeding out of
every
orifice okay so yeah
no not pleasant not pleasant so the
question is suppose that such a disease
broke
who would want to install an app that
would tell them how many relationships
away from them
this disease had struck like a lot of
people a lot of people in fact
almost i don't want to say almost
everyone that's a very strong statement
but a very large number of people
that's fascinating framing like the the
more deadly and transmissible the
disease
the the stronger the incentive to
install it
in a positive sense the in in in the
good
feedback loop sense that's a really good
example it's a really good way to frame
it because
with covet it was not as deadly
as uh as potential pandemics could have
been viruses could have been so
it's sometimes muddled with how we think
about it but yeah this is a really good
framing if the virus was a lot more
deadly
you want to create a system that has a
set of incentives that
it quickly expresses a population where
everybody is using it
and is contributing in a positive way to
the system
exactly and actually that point you just
made i don't take credit for that
observation there was another person i
talked to who pointed out that
it's very interesting that this feedback
loop is even more effective
when the disease is worse and that's
actually
not a bad characteristic to have in your
feedback loop if you're trying to help
civilization keep running yeah it's a
really
it's in this dynamic like people
figure out they dynamically figure out
how bad the disease is
the more it spreads and the deadlier it
is as the people observe
it as long as the spread of information
like uh semantic information natural
language information
is closely aligned with the reality of
the disease which is a whole nother
conversation right
we that's we might maybe we'll chat
about that how we sort of
make sure there's not misinformation
while there's accurate information but
that aside okay so this is a really nice
property
right and and just going on on that
actually just talking more about what
that could do and why we're so excited
about
it it's that not only would people want
to install it
what would they do if you start to see
that this disease is getting closer and
closer we we surveyed informally
people but they said as we saw getting
closer we would
hide we would try to not have contacts
but now you notice what this has just
achieved the whole goal
on on this whole exercise was you got
the people who might be sick
and you got everyone else set a and set
b set a is the people who might be six
that b is everyone else
and for the entirety of the past uh
contact tracing approaches
you try to get set a to do things that
might not be
to their liking or their will because
that's removing them from society
yes we found out that there's two ways
to separate set a from set b
you can also let the people at set b at
the fringe of set a
attempt to remove themselves from this
interface it's just it's the symmetry of
a and b separation
everyone was looking at a we look at b
and suddenly b
is in their incentive to do so beautiful
so there's a virus that jumps from human
to human
so there's a network sometimes called
graph
of the spread of a virus it hops from
person to person to person to person
and each one of us individuals are
sitting
or plop plopped into that network we
have
close friends and relations and so on
it's kind of fascinating to actually
think about this network and we can
maybe talk about the shapes of this kind
of network
because i was i was trying to think
exactly this like how many people do i
was i'm kind of an introvert not kind of
i'm very much an introvert
but so can i be explicit about the kind
of people i
meet in regular life say when it was
completely opened up there's no pandemic
there is a kind of network of cl and
there's maybe
um in the graph theoretic sense there's
some weights
or something about how
close that relationship is in terms of
the frequency visits
the duration of business and all those
kinds of things so you're saying
we might want to be to create
on top of that network a spread of
information
to let you know as the virus travels
through this network how close is it
getting to you
and the number of hops away it is on
that network
is really powerful information that
creates a positive uh feedback loop
where you can act essentially
anonymously
uh and on your own like
nobody's telling you what to do which is
really important is decentralized
and uh and not yeah whatever the
opposite of authoritarian is
but you get to sort of the american way
you get to choose to do it yourself you
have the freedom to do it
yourself and you're incentivized to do
it and you're most likely going to do it
to to uh
to protect yourself against um
against you getting the disease as the
the closer it gets to you based on the
information that you have
but uh can you maybe elaborate uh first
of all brilliant
uh whenever i saw the thing you're
working on so forget for covid
this is of course really relevant for
covid
but it's also probably relevant for
future diseases as well so this
uh that was the thing i'm nervous about
like if this whole
if our society shut down because of
covid
like what the heck is gonna happen
when there's a much deadlier disease
like this
this is disappointing the whole time
2020 the whole time i'm just sitting
like this
like is the incompetence of
everybody except the people developing
vaccines
uh the biologists are the only ones that
got their stuff together
but in terms of institutions and all
that kind of stuff oh it's just been
it's just been terrible
but this is exactly the power of
information
and the power of information that
doesn't limit personal freedom
so your idea is brilliant okay
mathematically can you maybe elaborate
what are we talking about like how do
you actually make that work
what's involved sure first i'm going to
reply to something you said about
the freedom inside this because actually
that was the idea the idea
is this is game theory right and
effectively what we did is analogous to
free market economy as opposed to
central planning
yeah if you just line up the set of
incentives correctly
so that people have in their purely
selfish behavior
are contributing to the optimization of
the global function
yes that's it and the the point of what
we do i guess in mathematics is we try
to explore the search space
to go and find out as many possibilities
as there are and in this case it's an
apply
in this case it's an applied search
space that's why the inputs from design
user experience design and actual people
are important
but you asked about um i guess that the
tech the mathematical or the technical
things
underpinning it so i think the first
thing i'll say is
we wanted to make this thing not require
your personal information
and so in order to do that what gave me
the confidence
to i guess lead our team to run at the
beginning is we saw that this could be
done without using gps information
so technically what's going on is if two
smartphones
it's a smartphone app if two smartphones
have this thing installed
they just communicate with each other by
bluetooth
to go and find out how far they can they
can detect nearby things by bluetooth
and then they can find out that these
two phones were approximately such and
such distance apart
and that kind of relative proximity
information is enough to construct this
big network
okay so the physical network is
constructed based on proximity
that's through bluetooth and you don't
have to specify
your exact location it's the proximity
i'm not using the pythagorean theorem
basically i mean if i just knew the gps
coordinates we could use the pythagorean
theorem too sorry that's just how i call
it
distance formula whatever you want to
call it
[Laughter]
uh yeah so we're not doing the old
pythagorean
based violation of privacy okay
[Laughter]
but so is that
is that enough to form to give you
enough
information about physical connection to
another human being
is there a time element there is there
so
okay that sounds like a really strong
like low hanging fruit like if you have
that you could probably go really really
far
my natural question is is there extra
information you can add on top of that
like
the duration of the physical proximity
uh so first of all we actually do
estimate the duration
but the way we estimate the duration is
like how a movie is filmed
in the sense that every so often every
few minutes we
check what's nearby it's it's like how a
movie is filmed you take lots of
snapshots
yes so there's no way in a battery
efficient way
to really keep track of that proximity
however fortunately we're using
probability the fact is
the paradigm that we're using is it's
not super important
if you run into that person only for 10
minutes at the grocery store
if that's a stranger that you run into
10 minutes in this grocery store
that's not going to be relevant for our
paradigm because our paradigm is not
telling you who were you around before
and might therefore
have gotten infected by already ours is
about predicting the future
we changed from i mean the standard
paradigm was what already happened
quick damage control ours predict the
future if you run into that person once
in the grocery store today and never see
them again it's irrelevant for
predicting the future
and therefore for ours what really
matters is the many hours
around the other person at which point
if you're scanning every five to eight
minutes
that's going to come out in the problem
like statistically speaking it's going
to come out as a strong relationship and
a person
in the grocery store is going to wash
out that's not an important physical
relationship
i mean this is brilliant what uh
how difficult is it to make work so you
said one there's a mathematical
component
that we just kind of talked about and
then there's the user experience
component
so how difficult is it to go just like
you built the video game
alien attack from zero to
to completion what's involved how
difficult is it
so i'm going to answer that question in
terms of building the product
but then i'm also going to acknowledge
that just having an
app doesn't make it useful because the
the that's actually maybe the easy part
if you know what i mean there's like all
of this stuff about rollout adoption and
awareness
but let's focus on the app part first so
that's again why i said
the team is incredible so we have a
bunch of people
who let's just say that the technology
that we use to make it
is not the standard way you make an app
if you think about a standard
ios app or android app those are a user
interface
that contacts a web server and sends
some information back and forth
we're doing some stuff that has to hook
into the operating system
of saying let's go use bluetooth for
something it wasn't really meant for
right so there's that part and by the
way what is the app called
oh it's called novid covered with an ad
very nice so you have to hook into
bluetooth you're saying you have to do
that
um beyond the permissions that are
like at the very surface level provided
on the phone
well i don't want to call them
permissions i just want to say that's
not what you usually do with bluetooth
gotcha
usually with bluetooth you say do i have
headphones nearby
yes okay i'm done you don't go and say
do i have headphones nearby
or do i have another phone nearby which
is doing something and then keep asking
that system keep
asking the question right so so this is
actually not easy and
i mean there were some parts of it which
actually a lot of people had tried
unsuccessfully
actually it's known that for example the
uk was trying to do something
similar and the problem they ran into
was when you program things on ios
ios is very good at making it hard to do
things in the background
and so there was quite a lot of effort
required to go and make this thing work
so the whole point this thing would run
in the background and
ios i mean most
android probably as well right but yeah
iowa certainly makes it difficult for
something to run in the background
especially when it's to eating up your
battery right
ah well we wanted to make sure we didn't
eat up the battery so that one we can we
actually are very proud of the fact that
ours uses very little battery
uh actually even if compared to apple's
own system
so beautiful so what else is required to
make this thing work
right so the the key was that you had to
do significant amount of work on the
actual mobile app development
which fortunately the team that we
brought was this kind of general
thinkers
where we would dig in deep into the
operating system documentation and the
api libraries
so we got that working but there's
another angle which is you also need the
servers to be able to compute fast
enough
which is tying back to this old school
computer programming competitions and
math olympiads
in fact our team that was working on the
algorithm and back-end side
included several people who had been in
these
competitions from before which i happen
to know because i
i do coach the team for the math yes and
so we were able to bring people
in to build servers a server
infrastructure in
c plus actually so that we could support
significant numbers of people
without needing tons of servers is there
some distributed algorithms
working here or you basically have to
keep
in in the same place the entire graph as
it builds because
especially the more and more people use
it the bigger the bigger the graph gets
i mean this is very difficult uh scaling
problem right
ah so that's actually why uh this
computer algorithm competition stuff was
handy
it's because there are only about
seven to eight giga people in the world
yeah
that's not that many so if you can make
your algorithms linear time or almost
linear time
a computer operates in gigahertz yeah i
only need to do one run
one one recalculation every hour in
terms of telling people how far away
these dangers are
yes so i suddenly have 3600 seconds
and my cpu cores are running in
gigahertz and
at most they're eight giga people well
you're skipping over the fact that uh
there's n squared potential connections
between people
so how do you get around the fact that
uh
you know that we you know the potential
set of relationship any one of us could
have
8 billion so it's 8 billion times uh
squared
that's you that's potential amount of
data you have to be storing
and computing over and constantly
updating so the way we dealt with that
is we actually expect
that the typical network is very sparse
the
the technical term sparse would mean
that the average degree or the average
number of connections that a person has
is going to be at most like 100 strong
connections that you care about
if you if you think of it almost in
terms of the heavy hitters actually
in most people's lives 100 if we just
kept track of their top 100
interactions that's probably most of the
signal
yeah yeah i i i'm saddened to think
that i might not be even in a double
digits but oh
i i was intentionally giving a crazy
number to account for college students
you call oh those are the who you're
calling the heavy hitters the people who
are like the social butterflies
yeah yeah yeah i need to uh um i'd love
to know that information about myself by
the way the
that i do do you uh expose the graph
like how many like about yourself how
many connections you have
we do expose to each person how many
direct connections they have that's
great but for privacy purposes
we don't tell anybody who their
connections like how their connections
are interconnected yes gotcha
but at the same time we do expose also
to everyone an interesting chart that
says
here's how many people you have that
you're connected to directly
here's how many at distance two meaning
via
people and then here's how many at
distance three and the reason we do that
is that actually ends up being a dynamic
that also boosts adoption it drives
another feedback loop
the reason is because we saw actually
when we deployed this in some
universities
that when people see on their app that
they are
indirectly connected to hundreds or
thousands of other people
they get excited and they tell other
people hey let's download this app yeah
but you know we also saw in those
examples especially looking at the
screenshots people gave
that is hit as soon as the typical
person
has two or three other direct
connections on the system
because that means that our app has
reached a virality
are not of two to three the key is we
were making a viral app to fight a virus
spreading on the same network that the
virus spreads out
so you're trying to out virus the virus
that's right
that's exactly right okay great what
have you learned
from this whole experience in terms of
um
let's say for covid but for future
pandemics as well
is it possible to use the power
information here of networked
information
as the virus spreads and travels in
order to basically keep the society
open is it possible for for people to
protect themselves with this information
or do you still have to have most like
in this overarching policy of everybody
should stay at home
all that kind of thing we are trying to
answer that question right now
so the answer is we don't know yet but
that's actually why we're very happy
that now the idea has started to become
become more widely known
and we're already starting to
collaborate with epidemiologists
again i'm just a mathematician right and
a mathematician should not be the person
who is telling everybody
this will definitely work but because of
the potential power
of this approach especially the
potential power of this being an
end game for kovid we have gotten the
interest
of real researchers and we're now
working together
to try to actually understand the answer
to that question because you see
there's a theory so what i can share is
the mathematics of
here's why there's some hope that this
would work yeah and that's because
i'm talking about end game now end game
means you have very few cases
but everywhere we're always thinking
once there's few cases then does that
mean we now open up
once you open up in the past then the
cases go up again
until you have to lock down again yeah
and now when we talk about the dynamic
process that makes
it's guaranteeing you always have cases
until you have the great vaccines which
is
you know we both got vaccinated this is
this is good but at the same time why
i'm thinking this is still important is
because we know that
many vaccine makers have said they're
preparing for the next dose next year
and if we have a perpetual thing where
you just always need a new vaccine every
year
it could actually be beneficial to make
sure we have as many other techniques as
possible
for parts of the world that can't afford
for example
that kind of distribution yeah so
actually no matter no matter how deadly
the virus is
no matter how many things whether you
have a vaccine or not
it's still useful to be having this
information yes because
to stay home or not depending on how
risky like
i'm a big fan just like you said of uh
having the freedom
for you to decide how risk-averse you
want to be right
and depending on your own conditions but
also on the state of like what you
just how dangerously you like to live so
i think that actually makes a lot of
sense and i also think that
um since we're when we when you think of
disease spreading
it spreads in aggregate in the sense
that
uh if there are some people who maybe
are more
risk tolerant because of other things in
their life well there might also be
other people who are
less risk tolerance and then those
people decide to
isolate but what matters is in the
aggregate that this are naught of the
infection
uh spreading drops below one and so the
key is if you if you can empower people
with that power to make that decision
you might actually still be able to
drive that are not down below one
yeah and also this is me talking i
yes people get a little bit nervous i
think
with uh information somehow mapping to
privacy violation but
i i first of all in the approach you're
describing
that's respecting anonymity
but i would love to have information
from the very beginning
from march and april of last year
almost like a map of like where
it's risky and where it's not to go
and not map based on sort of the exact
location of people but where people
usually hang out kind of thing
just maybe not necessarily about
actual location but just maybe
activities
like just to have information about what
is
what is good to do or not you know uh in
terms of like safety
is it okay to run outside and not is it
okay to go to a restaurant or not
i just feel like we're operating the
blind and then what you had
is a very imperfect signal which is like
basically politicians
desperately trying to make statements
about what is safe and not they don't
know what the heck they're doing
they have a bunch of smart scientists
telling them stuff and the scientists
themselves
also very important don't always know
what they're doing
epidemiology is not
is as much an art as a science you're
desperately trying to predict the future
which nobody can do
and then you're trying to speak with
some level of authority
i mean if i were to criticize scientists
they spoke with too much authority
it's okay to say i'm not sure but then
they think like if i say i'm not sure
then there's going to be a distrust what
they realize is when you're wrong and
you say i'm sure
it's going to lead to more distrust so
there's this imperfect like
just chaotic messy system of people
trying to figure out with very little
information
and what you're proposing is just a huge
amount of information
and information is power is there um
challenges with adoption that you see in
the future
here so there's uh maybe we could speak
to there's approaches i guess from
google
there's different people that have tried
similar kind of ideas
not in you have a quite a novel idea
actually
but speaking the umbrella idea of
contact tracing
is is there is there something you can
comment about
why their approaches haven't been fully
adopted
is there challenges there is there is
there reasons why novid might be a
better idea moving forward
in general just about adoption yeah so
first of all i want to say i always have
respect for the
methods that other people use and so
it's good to see that other people have
been trying
but what we have noticed is that the
difference between our
value proposition to the user and the
value proposition to the user delivered
by everything that was made before
is that unfortunately the action of
installing
a standard contact tracing app will then
tell you
after you have already been exposed to
the disease
so that you can protect other people
from you and what that does to your
own direct probability of getting sick
if you think about it
suppose you were making the decision
should i or should i not install one of
those apps
yeah what does that do to your own
probability of getting sick
it's close to zero this is uh the sad
thing you're
um you're speaking to not sad i suppose
it's the way the world is
the only incentive there is to just help
other people i suppose but
a much stronger incentive is is anything
that
allows you to help yourself yes so what
i'm saying is that
uh let's just say free market capitalism
was not
based on altruism i think it's based on
if you make a system of incentives so
that everybody trying to maximize their
own situation
somehow contributes to the whole that's
a game's theoretic solution to a very
hard problem
and so this is actually basically
mechanism design we've basically come up
with a different mechanism
different set of incentives which
incentivizes the adoption because
actually whenever we've been rolling it
out
usually the first question we ask people
like say in the university is
do you know what nova does and most of
them have read about the other apps and
they say oh no of it will tell you after
you've been around someone so you can
quarantine
and we have to explain to them actually
novad never wants to ask you to
quarantine
yeah that's not the principle our
principle isn't based on that at all
we just want to let you know if
something is coming close
so that you can protect yourself if you
want yeah if you want if you want
and then the the quarantine is like yes
in that case if you're quarantining
it's because you're shutting the door
from the inside if that's exciting yes
exactly exactly i mean this is brilliant
but so
what um do you think the future looks
like for future pandemics what's your
plan
with novid what's your plan with these
set of ideas i
am actually still an academic and a
researcher so the biggest work i'm
working on right now
is to try to build as many
collaborations with other public health
researchers
at other universities to actually work
on
pilot deployments together in various
places that's the goal
that's actually ongoing work right now
and so for example if anyone's watching
this and you happen to be a public
health researcher
and you want to be involved in something
like this i'm just going to say i'm
still incentive thinking
there's something in it for the
researchers too this could open up an
entire new way of controlling disease
that's my hope
i mean it might actually be true and
people who are involved
in figuring out how to make this work
well it could actually be good for their
careers too
i i always have to think like if a
researcher was getting involved what are
they getting out of it
oh so you mean like uh from a research
perspective you can um
like publications and sets of ideas
about how to from a sort of uh
uh network theory perspective understand
how we control the spread of a pandemic
yes and
what i'm doing right now is this is
basically interdisciplinary research
where maybe our side is bringing the
technology and the network theory
and the missing parts are epidemiology
and public health expertise
and if the two things start to join also
because everywhere that you deploy
let's just say that the world is
different in the philippines as it is in
the united states
and just the natures of the of the
locality would mean that
someone like me should not be trying to
figure out how to do that but if we can
work with the researchers who are based
there
now suddenly we might come up with a
solution that will help scale in parts
of the world where they aren't all
getting the modern and fizer vaccines
which cost
like 20 a pop in the u.s so if they want
to participate
who do they reach out to oh that would
just be us i mean the novid.org website
has
nova.org it has it has a feedback reach
out form
and actually we are i mean again this is
the dna of being a researcher
i am actually very excited by the idea
that this could
contribute knowledge that will outlast
all of our generations like
all of our lifetimes there you go reach
out
to novanova.org uh what about individual
people
should they install the app and try it
out or is this really geographically
restricted
oh yeah i didn't come on here to tell
everyone to install the app i did not
come to tell everyone to install the app
because it works best
if your local health authority is
working with us gotcha there's a reason
it's because this is back to the game
theory
if anyone could just say i'm positive
the high school senior prank would be to
say that
we have a massive outbreak on finals
week let's not have final exams
so the way that our system works it
actually borrows some ideas no borrowers
we came up with them independently but
this idea is similar to what
google and apple do which is that if the
local health authority is working with
this
they can for everyone who's positive
gives them a passcode that expires in a
short time
so for ours if you're on the app and
saying i'm positive you can either just
say that
and that's called unverified or you can
enter in one of these codes that you got
from the local health authority
so basically for anyone who's watching
this it's not that you should just go
and download it unless you want to go
and look at it that's cool
but if you on the other hand if you
happen to know anyone at the local
health authority which
is trying to figure out how to handle
kovid well then
i mean we'd be very happy to also work
with you
guys so the the verified there is really
important because you're
you're maintaining anonymity and because
of that you have to have some source of
verification
in order to make sure that it's not uh
possible to manipulate
because uh it's it's ultimately about
trust and information and so it could be
um verification is really important
there so basically individual people
should um
ask their local health authorities to to
just to sign up to contact you
i hope this spreads i hope this spreads
uh for future pandemics because i'm
really
i'm it's the amount the millions of
people
who are hurt by this i think our
response to the virus
economically speaking the number of
people who lost their dream
lost their jobs but also lost their
dream entrepreneurs
you know jobs often give