Transcript: A - Z of Tech Episode 17: O is for Open Data
Louise Taggart:
Hello and welcome to the A-Z of Tech Podcast with myself Louise, and my co-host Shreya. On this episode, we're going to be exploring ‘O’ for open data, and some of the many uses that it has. Personally when I think about open data, I would tend to associate it with open source intelligence, for example, given my day job in Threat Intelligence, but maybe that's something we can come back to later in the episode, after we've heard from our guests.
Shreya Gopal:
Thanks Louise. You're right, open data does cover a lot of things, and can be interpreted in different ways. For me, it often means the open source coding languages like Python. I am really curious to hear what our guests have to say about this.
Louise:
Without further ado, I am delighted to say that we're joined on this episode of the podcast by three guests. Rob Freeman, Roger Thornton and Haydn Jones, who are going to be shedding a little bit of light on some of the different uses and applications of open data. So, over to you Shreya to introduce our first guest.
Shreya:
Thanks Louise. Our first guest today is Rob Freeman, who is a freelance technology journalist and lecturer, welcome back to the A to Z of Tech, Rob.
Rob Freeman:
Thanks Shreya, thanks Louise.
Shreya:
Let's begin with definitions. What does open data mean to you?
Rob:
I see this in a number of ways, it depends on what hat I am wearing at any one time. As a general internet user, open data is important and interesting, because it's adding to the sum total of what we know and what we can access on the web, particularly the media name that comes to mind when anyone says open data to me is probably Wikipedia. Now Wikipedia is, what some would describe as an open source encyclopaedia, and it over years and years and years has become a huge repository for information about stuff and all those articles have been made by, use the term, ‘normal people,’ but they're normal people with specialist knowledge, and they are giving their time and their attention completely freely for this huge altruistic endeavour.
Shreya:
Thanks Rob, that's a really interesting way to put it. What interests you about open data, what are some of the applications that excite you?
Rob:
This is about having access to a plethora of information from all over the world. Journalists are increasingly looking at how they can find more data to either stand up stories, or to put more meat on the bones of the stories to prove them. There's a really interesting case from a few years ago, where you've got a murder that happened on the border of Mali and Cameroon. There was proof that the murder happened, but it wasn't entirely sure where it was and the Cameroonian government said pretty explicitly this was not us, these were not our soldiers that were involved and tried to blame Mali on the other side. A group of researchers using the technique that actually Louise has mentioned to you already open source intelligence, were sifting the internet for data that already exists to try and prove where this murder happened. This includes things like being able to work out the angle of the shadows, so they could determine not just the time of day, but the time of year. One of the key things that proved in the end that the action was committed by Cameroonian soldiers was the ability to track the outline of the mountains that appeared in some of the stills in a very brief video. Now this was probably well over five years ago, but already in terms of open data, it is much better if you were going to do this investigation again, there are much better and faster ways of doing it. There is an app called PeakFinder for example, the idea for this came from walkers. They were sick of sitting on top of the mountain that they just had a great climb up to, and then pointing to various pieces and arguing about, is that Oxenhope stoop hill or is that Coombe hill, and they invented an app that scans topographic data, and then using GPS you could point it at the outline of the mountain, it'll tell you exactly where you are. Very similar to the kinds of apps you get for stargazing. You can point your phone screen up at the sky and it'll tell you whether you're looking at the Plough, or the Big Dipper, I always get those two confused.
My other favourite one at the moment just because in Britain in the last few weeks we've had some significant flooding, is an app called GaugeMap. The Environment Agency in the UK have huge amounts of equipment that's just pinging out river levels all the time, and a company called Shoothill put all this stuff together and you can go to GaugeMap and you can look very precisely at river levels, right across the United Kingdom, a really fascinating use of open data.
Louise:
Brilliant, thank you Rob. that was a really useful contextual overview of some of the uses and applications of this type of data. With those in mind, our next guest is Roger Thornton, who is a principal hardware engineer from Raspberry Pi, which in itself, hopefully we will explore, is a brilliant example of some of the early development of open data. Roger, thank you very much for joining us. Could you tell us a little bit more about what your role is with the Raspberry Pi?
Roger Thornton:
Of course, I work as a hardware design engineer primarily. I help design and take through testing, manufacturing compliance of the products that we sell. Small credit card sized computers. I've been with the company for about six years now. In fact, the history of Pi goes back almost 10 years now, and the hypothesis when people of that generation just hadn't had an easily accessible computer to learn on. There was a group of people who grew up with things like using micro and spectrum and things like that, where you spend a lot of time working on the insides of the computer. Whereas, there was a generation that grew up with Windows PCs and you should never be interrupted on a lower scale with the PC. The hypothesis went, what if we created a small cheap open data that people could develop and learn on, and that's where Raspberry Pi was born.
Shreya:
Would it be fair to say then the Raspberry Pi even in its early days was something of a game changer really?
Roger:
Yes. No one had ever sold a computer of this power for that price that we sell. These days we sell a desktop PC replacement for $35, so it's an order of magnitude cheaper than the cheapest desktop PC, but similar levels of power and performance.
Shreya:
Really exciting, could we explore a little bit more about the role of open data in your company's philosophy and any examples of new products that may be using open source hardware or software?
Roger:
Absolutely, we've always tried to make a product that is open to people to use. We try not to lock anything down. There is division and actually the hardware is quite closed in the sense that we don't give away the schematics, the layout part; you don't give out the ingredients for someone to go and make their own, but everything else, the software side is as open as we can make it. That closed part of the hardware is really just to protect the business. We need to have some level of protection so that we can continue selling these things and funding the work that the charity does, but we have recently, on January 21st, we launched our first chip-based product. It's a microcontroller that we've developed in house, and that's been placed on a product called Raspberry Pi Pico. Pico is a fully open source piece of hardware. We've given away the design files for doing that, and that's all around the idea that people can go away and design their own product around RP2040, which is a low-cost microcontroller. We are slowly making other bits of our business open as well, with the hope that it inspires and fastens this growth and people picking up the product to use it.
Louise:
You mentioned that briefly, the foundation and the charitable organisation associated with Raspberry Pi, could you tell us a bit more about the role that plays as well?
Roger:
There is a charity called Raspberry Pi Foundation, and that owns the single operating share in a company called Raspberry Pi Trading, and that's the tech company. Now, I work for the tech company. When you buy a Raspberry Pi computer, you are buying it from the trading company, but we are a fairly unique tech company in the sense that we are a non-profit. Every time any profit that the tech company makes, it gets donated to the charity to help fund its mission, which is to help get people into computer science.
Louise:
Brilliant, with that feature and view in mind, turning back to open data specifically, what do you see as being the future for open data, would that be new products or new sources of information?
Roger:
Well, one of the things that Raspberry Pi has done quite well is increase the amount of open data that's collected around the world. A lot of these projects that you see, I believe, Rob was mentioning that the river gauge project, a lot of those level sensors are connected to Raspberry Pi. Through this piece of hardware that we are able to make for market beating prices, it’s opened up a huge number of open source projects, where people can easily deploy an instrument or something that they wouldn’t typically be able to do. I could see that with our generations of the main computer, and also now this microcontroller product that we've started selling, the opportunities for generating open source data have greatly increased. We’ve equally remained committed in the company to try and make the software as open source as possible, and wherever financially viable, we will try and make bits of hardware open source so that other people can build or develop on further.
Rob:
Can I jump in there, Roger, first of all, can I say how brilliant and privileged I feel to be on the podcast with someone from Raspberry Pi, it’s an organisation that I’ve held in esteem for years. I am one of those people who were brought up on those BBC microcomputers, digging into things and working out how coding was. Yes, I absolutely agree with your point about the ability for something that costs a few pounds, a handful of dollars that can sit there and ping out the passage of trains, or how the flow of a river level happens to be, that's got huge capability. You wouldn't be able to do it without hardware like the Pi, because it's so cheap and what amazes me when I hold it in my hand is how capable it is as well as being cheap. Yes, there was way more capacity here with hardware like the Pi, and the capacity to create interesting applications using open data, it is just the creativity of the people who happen to be holding that massively capable, really cheap hardware.
Louise:
Absolutely, thank you, Rob and thank you Roger for what was really insightful view from Raspberry Pi.
Next, I am delighted to say, we're also joined by Haydn Jones, who is a director here at PwC as a senior blockchain market specialist. He is both an engineer and a lawyer by background, and also with a broad experience of financial services, and is also the author of An Executive Guide to Blockchain. Haydn with that introduction, could you tell us a little bit about your career pathway to date and how you’ve ended up in the space of open data and blockchain?
Haydn Jones:
Of course, Louise, thank you very much indeed for the introduction. I am an engineer. I was brought up with televisions around me. My father used to work for a company called Radio Rentals. We always had new flashy shiny televisions in the house. It was through that interest in electronics that I went through to university, and then I actually worked for a big defence company. I studied cryptography as one of the projects that we did there, so had that as a first foundation in respect to my career. But the curiosity in me took me into law, so, I studied law, which is all about solving people's problems, which actually interestingly is very much centred on open data, because law is about making decisions public so that people can see them. So, judgement, law and obviously legislation that's all about open information, it's a very interesting angle here. Then after law, I ended up in investment banking, so seven years in investment banking dealing with all sorts of tricky problems, such as you'd send $100 million in one direction, you can expect getting shares or debt back in the other, and the trade would fail. There would be a big stewards enquiry with respect to what's happened here because there is a lot of operational risk there. That is the reference point and niggling away at the back of my mind, there must be a better way we can solve this problem. Through into consulting, I worked for big central bank, and that was really one of the final jigsaw pieces in terms of understanding how money works, payments work, how the financial services ecosystem works. So, this sort of law, legal background, this engineering background, financial services central banking with some with some regulations thrown in, all of these ideas and this experiences just stating in the background, and then I started hearing about something called Bitcoin, which I thought was very interesting and never really seen anything quite like it, didn't really understand what it was all about. But I could see there was a big piece of cryptography in there, so previous knowledge of cryptography was very helpful.
Then I started to realise, actually it is very curious what they've done here, or bitcoin has done, because it's based on an open ledger, whereby everybody can read from it and write to it in a way that's completely publicly accessible, globally 24/7, 365 days of the year. It creates this ability to where we can have a debate as to whether we truly believe bitcoin is a store of value or not, because of the volatility piece in that. But for those that believe it is a store of value, it gives you the ability to move a store of value from one which is effectively accountable, what’s described as a public address to another public address, which is very interesting, because this is very counterintuitive to what we experienced in normal organisations, where we have very closed environments, where all of the databases sit behind a firewall, behind that technical perimeter, the hardware perimeter.
Organisations restrict the flow of information across them and between them, and it's interesting because actually in many cases, and this is the big thing we noted in investment banking, was on a largely proportional basis, we are actually all holding the same information, but it's equal and opposite. I will have a position, I would be long that position and somebody will have the opposite position on a general ledger and would be short that position. For me, that was the entry point into open information, open data, and it was a very different way of solving business problems, and that was the principal traction which got me to where I am now. Whereby, we as PwC, we look at how blockchain can be used both, as it relates to financial services, so focused on things like securities and payments authorisation, licensing, but also non-financial services, used cases, things like provenance, identity, credentials and such like.
Shreya:
Thank you, Haydn, that's super exciting to hear you talk through all of that. Will cryptocurrency become a bit more acceptable to the business in the near future and what are some of the opportunities you see from cryptocurrencies?
Haydn:
The point I would flag is the moves of different regulators, the work that the different regulators have got underway because they recognise that it's there, they recognise in some cases the opportunity. If you look at the United Kingdom, we've got the Treasury consultation, that's come out this year with respect to a framework for regulating stable coins, which is very positive. We've got the Europeans with markets and crypto assets, their consultation that came out last year. What that's pointing to are two major regulatory regimes, who are looking towards creating a strong resilient regulatory framework to support these technologies, they recognise the opportunities. You also have the central banks interestingly. Central banks also see the opportunity and they’ve borrowed some of the ideas within this technology and they are in the process of creating their own central bank digital currencies, which is incredibly powerful, because the frictional cost of a payment in an economy does not in itself add value.
If we can reduce, if you think of all the money that’s spent on payments that comes through a payment, it doesn’t add any value. The idea around central bank digital currency is just that we can create programmable electronic money that’s securely and safely issued by a central bank, and all of that’s pointing towards taking friction out of the economy. What’s the point in spending money on a cost that doesn’t necessarily add value. The regulators are working hard to create a robust framework. The central banks see the opportunity in terms of leveraging this technology. Expectation over the next 10 years is in the same way as the last 20 years we saw this huge wave of adoption as it relates to the internet, which is open information, that’s about moving data from A to B. Over the next 10 years what we will see is this really big adoption of the fact that actually we can send value in such a way that it doesn’t need to go through traditional payments infrastructure, but the way that value is transmitted is that it executes the other leg of the transaction. We go back to where I started, which is that if I send Shreya 100 million dollars, my expectation is that I get back bonds or shares to that same value, because that transaction is recorded on a public ledger, and is executed on a public ledger, everybody can make sure that that transaction happens in a way that’s safe and secure, that it does execute business, any risk associated with the transaction, not settling, then it doesn’t happen, because both sides of the transaction need to be confirmed. Lots of opportunity there to take friction out of different tiers of the economy.
Shreya:
Thank you so much Haydn, that definitely sounds like an exciting space to watch out for in the near future. Perhaps, we change tracks a little bit. Louise, in your experience with threat intelligence and the work we do to protect clients from potential threats, what do you think of open source or open data.
Louise:
Absolutely Shreya, as I mentioned briefly at the top of the podcast, for me, when I think of open source and open data, I will tend to think of open source intelligence. That’s the term that really can cover information that can be obtained from any kind of open source. For example, media coverage that might be newspapers, or radio, or television, it could be information from, for example, professional academic records, or even includes things that are public data, government reports, public hearings, and speeches. Also, interestingly, it not only covers what we call indexed online contents, basically anything you can find through a search engine, but it also covers unindexed content as well. That’s what is more commonly referred to as the deep web, which is still actually public available, it’s just less accessible. This type of information can be used in a variety of different ways. It’s also important to bear in mind it needs to be used in a legal and ethical way to actually make it useful to our clients. Obviously, of course, take into consideration things like data and personal protection rules and legislation.
From an intelligence perspective, the types of uses that we can have for leveraging open source intelligence, include, for example, what we might call digital footprinting. This is working with high profile individuals or chief executives, for example, and identifying information that is available about them publicly that could be used potentially by a determined adversary, so that might be personal data they have in social media platforms, it might be their education and work history, and it could be, as I said, other social media data, and helping them understand what type of information is available out there about them that could then be leveraged for malicious purpose.
Other examples include what we called red teaming. This is actually using open source intelligence and sources to collect the types of data that could be exploited and then helping, for example, by creating a spear phishing campaign that can test employee awareness and demonstrate again how this type of information can be leveraged.
Shreya:
Thanks Louise, this naturally falls into the agenda of personal data, and how we share it, how we can protect it. It is quite illuminating to hear this from you, thank you so much.
On another note, a big thank you to all three of our guests for a really fascinating and slightly surprising discussion. Are there any resources that you think our listeners might find useful if they want to explore more around this topic?
Roger:
If you are interested in finding out more about Raspberry Pi and what we do, raspberrypi.org is our website. That gives you access to two things really. It gives access to all the amazing work that the foundation does, so that’s computer science education for kids from primary school all the way to into sixth form, that’s a great place to start learning, and everything there is free and it is platform agnostic, so you don’t need a Raspberry Pi to start using it.
Shreya:
Thanks.
Haydn, how about you, any resources.
Haydn:
One of the things I did before joining PwC was to set up a company that was dedicated to helping people in business, understand how blockchain digital currencies worked, and we trained I know in excess of probably about 2000 people on and off as far field as Australia. That led to a book, so the Executive Guide to Blockchain by myself and co-author Maria Grazia Vigliotti. The book is designed as a kind of thing that you would gift to your grandmother, or your mother, your father, your friends in business to help them understand. It's actually written in language that we hope people can pick up over the weekend and they can get the heads around what blockchain digital currency is all about.
Shreya:
Thank you both.
Rob, if there is anything recommended from you.
Rob:
What I tend to tell people is that if they’ve benefitted from someone else’s altruism in adding a bit of information publicly and that’s helped you, I always try and get people to think about what it is that you know, that you have, that you could contribute as well. How can you help someone else with just a little bit of knowledge, a little bit of data that in aggregate helps us all become a little bit better. Soppy I know, these are fascinating places and the capacity for us to improve our business lives and our personal lives from open data, it's only upwards from here.
Shreya:
Thanks so much Rob, open data, where does the world go from here, more privacy or less privacy. Our next episode is all about that, P for privacy.
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