 Apart from her technical achievements going back throughout her civil service career of 38 years in the Department of the Navy and her leadership at multiple levels in the organization, the other thing that's notable to me is her continued sideline work to encourage and mentor in advance the civil service and the engineering workforce in particular so very grateful for that additional duty that she takes so seriously in helping the continued development of the engineering workforce in particular. She's going to lead a conversation with a panel to represent some of the perspectives that we've been raised of some of the audiences that we want to try to convince that S&T is valuable and so look forward to this conversation. Thanks. Thank you good morning everyone. As a technologist myself, I often get mesmerized by the by the beauty of the science and technology that has been developed by our workforce. They do fabulous things and bring fabulous things to the forefront, but it's often a disappointment when others are not equally amazed and enthusiastic about the wonderful things that we've done. So to get the discussion started today, as Marin pointed out, we put together a distinguished panel of folks to hopefully have a conversation with you and they represent communities that we don't traditionally think of as scientists and technologists when it comes to understanding how to move our product through the transition that I've heard some call it the Valley of Death, I prefer to call it the Valley of Life, but move through that transition into engineering development. They each have a role in that world and have influence that can dramatically shape how a particular science or technology opportunity is perceived and indeed how successful its transition is. It's wonderful to see such a broad spectrum of participants here today. Herschley, you all will ask us some tough questions as we have this conversation with you. First, I'd like to turn it over to Dr. Hicks, Capitalism Policy. She has had tremendous influence in shaping the Department of Defense thinking over the last five, six years, particularly as she led the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review. She currently, as you can see in her bio, she currently serves as the Henry Kissinger Chair here at CSIS. Kathleen, if you could share with us some of the perspectives you've gained over the years. Sure, thanks very much to Marin and to Marin for pulling this great group of people together. I feel slightly offered being identified as a non-technologist among technologists, so I hope, when Marin said you have hard questions, obviously the hard questions should go to Mary and the easy policy ones you can send to me. Let me first explain a little bit about how S&T was an issue set that I dealt with. As Mary said, I was one of the people during my time in the Pentagon and I finished up there in, I think it was July of 2013, responsible for aligning strategy and program in a broad sense, but also in very specific ways. So S&T was clearly an area that I looked at in terms of developing what are the priorities for S&T working with AT&L and others. What are the right S&T funding levels for the Department of Defense overall, even with those priorities in mind specific areas. And then in specific issue areas, I was very invested in terms of what is the S&T pipeline look like. So for instance, counter A2AD capabilities or something of that sort that's very important to the strategy. Cyber capabilities, what is in the pipeline, what are we developing, how does it provide a comparative advantage to the United States. So how was information best communicated to me, probably ideal for someone who communicated it to me to tell you that, but my mind at least, what always worked for me was that when information was framed in terms of what the technology possibilities were in terms of provision to the decision maker or the work fighter. So that could come across in terms of decision time gained, information, ability to give information of the potential for de-escalation, the survivability advantages. In other words, all the attributes the decision maker is trying to think through is they develop the long-term strategy and then think about how to operate day-to-day. Those were the things that the S&T community could, if they could translate the technology into what the potential was for delivery, that could make a tremendous difference. Personally, I'm a person who learns best through words. I'm a leader. Other decision makers are often visual, so I think it's always important to understand how to, literally, how to communicate the information. Is it rural? Is it, again, a picture orientation? Understanding how the decision maker consumes that information, particularly when there's such a bridge in a case like this between a technology community and a policy community, just being able to have the information flowing away that's well-received, I think, can make a big difference. Let me just leave off with one final point. There's really, I think, an ever-present hunger for new solutions. So you have a receptive audience in the policy community. The problem there is the warning that that provides, which it's really incumbent on the technology community to help be very clear about the problems that can exist between the concept or the idea of the technology and going through the valley of life to get it into delivery. What is the timeline like? What are the technical challenges? What are the industry challenges that might be associated with that? What are the budget and political challenges? The more information you can provide to set those expectations fairly at the beginning will help you keep that program alive when patience wears thin later on. Thank you. Next, we have Dan Adams. He is the Minority Counsel for the Senate Armed Services Committee, and his portfolio includes science and technology, where I've had the pleasure of humanist interactions with him. He's a great supporter of ours. Dan, I'd like to ask you to share with us some of your experiences that you've had. Absolutely. At least a little background. I also come from not having a technical background. I'll lose half of you when I say I'm a lawyer. It never goes over too well because then people are afraid to talk in front of me. But the reason that we have this thing today and appreciate CSIS putting this on, definitely appreciate Ms. Lacy being able to moderate this. It's very important to be able to very clearly communicate technology. Now what I look for when I say communicate the technology are two things. That is because I work for the Senate Armed Services Committee and I make my recommendations to the members of that committee. The two things that I look for, one, can you actually very clearly put the science, put the technology, put the research into everyday English? A lot of people that I work for are very smart. They do not have technical backgrounds. They don't speak in the same language of megajoules and kilowatts and rather than play a cast in some of the different things that went on the medical research every single day. But if you're able to put it into capability and everything that Kathleen just said is a very good place to start, then that is a very, very good thing that for us to be able to handle. The second part is how it does relate to national security. We need to be able to justify having a Department of Defense spend money on the research. The main reason for that is we've got kind of a confined budget situation right now. So there's always going to be this competition between current readiness and modernization. Research is going for the modernization. If you're not able to explain this modernization part, it's very, very easy to cut it. People definitely understand I need an extra tank for the soldier. I need some barracks to put these people in any new surveillance to go down to South County to be able to help out in the drug trade that keeps coming up here. On the other side, kind of the end of the weed science part is a lot more difficult to explain. Inherently, we know science is very important. We know research is very important. But if you're not able to explain the little part, then we're not going to be able to make our decisions very well. And more about money is going to be going to the readiness. The reason that this is very important, you've heard Secretary Kendall, Frank Kendall talk about it quite a bit. Secretary Hagel has talked about it. The technological superiority enjoyed by the United States for decades is eroding a little bit. We've still got a lot of the best scientists. I would still put my money on the Navy and the services of many people. However, the United States is not actually driving the conversation and a lot of the technological and a lot of the science fields these days. Part of that is some of the conference issues. Part of that is budget cuts. Part of it is because it's very difficult to communicate what's going on. So those are the two big things that I look for. One, just put it into everyday English so that smart people with the correct decision-making levels can make their decisions. And two, actually connect that to national security. Because just as good government, we can't just be pumping money into something. There is a good thing there, but if we can't explain it, then I can't justify actually having to keep it in a budget. Thank you. And Paul joins us from the fourth state. So fourth state to fourth state. Paul is the Pentagon reporter for Defense News and his beat focuses on policy, doctrine, politics and those sorts of things. So you have conversations with technologists all the time. I'm sure you find that very enlightening. Yeah, I mean I think the challenge in my job is that I need to try to bridge the gap on some level between the technological community and the more general purpose audience. Most of our audience is DOD, the hill think tank. So I mean, there's a certain knowledge there to be to start with. But there's a challenge in taking, as you said, the new offset strategy, whatever it's going to be and trying to describe that what that is. It hasn't really been defined by the DOD. So while you had just that, others are catching up the United States, state actors, non-state actors. So what does the United States need to do in order to try to leap ahead to the next generation technology that they did in the 70s and things like that? And where I come in, speaking to the technical community to try to, engineers and scientists aren't always the best at explaining what they do. They kind of come in and say, well, here is this capability we have, it does this, this, this, and you use very complicated language and kind of don't understand when you understand it. So to try to take that, put it in more layman's terms, add a policy element to it, is really kind of the challenge of what we're doing. A few years ago, it was a very different landscape and you had the rapid flipping floors, you had joint flipping initiatives, you had lots of gear being developed and growing directly in Afghanistan. So there was a lot happening. It's pretty well-defined, people knew what the capability gaps were and everyone was working together to meet them. Now it's much less defined, I think. The threats are so diffuse, there's, you know, I still using small drones that they brought, you know, online, on amazon.com, you know, do you need to defend against that? How you defend against that? What are the capability gaps there? What do you need to develop? What's the policy issue, etc. Thank you. I know you and I talked last week, one of the things that I have, as a technologist, that I've always been curious about is, what causes a story to go from a story to an op-ed piece? That is something that we technologists often are very concerned about, that there's going to be some public judgment about our technology, as an example, as something going from a story to an op-ed piece. Well, I think those are two very different things, right. I mean, if I tried to write an op-ed piece, I think it wouldn't ever seem to light a day. So, you know, op-ed pieces are written, obviously, by policy makers and folks on the Hill. In the story, it's just generally conveying some information. I mean, you do some digging and you, by speaking to policy makers, you find the capability gaps you and then you go to industry or whoever and try to, you know, ascertain what's out there to fill these gaps. I mean, it's kind of a long process. But, I mean, an op-ed piece would be much different than what we do. Thank you. So, we have some microphones, I believe, that are available for folks who I'm sure there are some questions. Hi, JD McCrary from Georgia Tech Research Institute. So, it sounds like we have a panel here that's mostly focused on policy and public communication about technology. So, how do we communicate parts and pieces of the problem? Like you said, we understand how to sell a tank. We may not necessarily understand how to sell a component of that tank, because we haven't figured out that it's the key component. And so, if we look at one particular topic, you mentioned drones, there's a lot of research that's being funded outside of DOD, right? R&D in the commercial world eclipses the entire DOD budget. So, if we look at autonomy, as an example, and you look at the Google driverless car, how do we ensure that we're advancing disruptive technology, disruptive innovation without necessarily knowing where the final product is going to be? And how do we start influencing policy at the national level to include things like autonomy when we start thinking about machines making decisions for us? Okay, jump on that first. So, you fit my favorite buzzword, autonomy. Part of the issue with some of these big research areas, whether we don't have a defined meaning behind some of these terms. You mentioned the word autonomy. Now, I've said through countless briefs this year from the Air Force, from the Navy, from industry, and every single time they use the word autonomous or autonomy, I make them stop and I say, explain to me what you mean. You will get a different definition almost every single time. So, basically, all can have this innate no feeling that autonomy means sort of an intelligent space capability or decision-making capability where an operator does not have to make the decision for the machine right then. If it's a ship that has sense and avoid it means it goes out and you don't have to tell it to turn right, it just sees that there's something in front of it and it starts going around there. So, that's the easy definition of autonomy. Most of the industry guys actually have that. Not everybody in government will. So, they get frustrated when I say what do you mean by autonomy and they'll say, well, autonomous. Now, the reason that this is a concern for me is that we've got it as a focus area. It's in the Reliance 21, it's one of those interest groups. So, somebody will come up to me and give me a brief and say you need to fund this because it's autonomous and it's this great thing and I will say what do you mean by autonomy? They'll say, well, what do you mean? What do I mean? It's this important focus area that I've got, you need to just fund me. So, it makes me a little more skeptical. So, I mean, my advice on that just to be have, and this isn't as much your fault, it's just kind of a community issue but when you come in and say autonomy and you're saying machine's making the decisions and kind of go down from there, give just the one step below of what do you actually mean. And from there, you're talking about kind of the components of the tank, that sort of thing. At least for me, start a big picture and say, well, here's a tank, we understand the relevance and the value of having this thing here. However, if I put this extra part in here, then it's going to be able to go this much farther. It's going to protect the soldier this much better. It's going to have a gun that's going to be able to kill those many more people or hopefully not have to because it's a tearing that many people. So, hopefully that answers the question a little bit, but number one is we need to have kind of a different meeting behind some of these big issues. I would just add, I think it's helpful to have the technology community part of the course to step back and help policymakers understand the changing nature of defense technology and that it is so much commercialized and internationalized so much more than previously and that many of the innovations will be emerging on the commercial sector that may have defense applications. So just helping folks understand that some things may be emerging through the DODS and T pipeline sure and then there are a lot of other applications that are, as you say, sort of less than platform, whether they be sensors, again on the information side cyber and other areas and certainly in the area of the autonomous systems where increasingly you're going to see the innovation on the commercial side and it's really about how does that feed into the U.S. defense opposition system and how do we marry operational concepts that are militarily relevant with those technologies that are coming from outside? I think there's an issue too. If the commercial industry wants to come to DOD and DOD has to come to the commercial side because I mean just the margins are less and DOD you've heard by less will have lots of hoops to jump through with a lot of red tape so if guys like Richard Branson or Jeff Bezos or some of the small sat makers or robot makers want to come to DOD and do this. I mean a few years ago the Army would still have it the network integration evaluation down at Fort Bliss where they build it as they're going to have, they build it as all these small, they want all these small industries and companies to come to them with their innovative solutions for technologies for most of communications. It didn't really work out like that because the small companies couldn't afford to send, you know, pride robots and 10 technical experts down to Fort Bliss for three weeks, you know, in order to take part in this whereas Lockheed, Martin, Lehtion could do it but the, you know, small amount of power place couldn't really afford its land but mostly dropping out the Army tried to institute some programs to help fund them but there's a big gap there between what the DOD wants and what the commercial industry can or wants to bring to them. Secretary Kendall has recognized that that is a structural problem within the Department of Defense in capitalizing on the commercially available technology. So it's part of better buying power 3.0. He is honing the attention of the senior acquisition force to deal with that issue. We are missing because we have many commercial players that either don't want to deal with the DOD or we haven't figured out how to have that conversation with them in a way that we can capitalize on the technology and the investments that they've made. So great question. Thank you very much. Who's got the mic? I can't see who has the mic. So my name is Scott Badnoch and I have a small business in the Detroit area but I also ran a skunk work within General Motors for a number of years and introduced electronic stability control and as I as I move from one of my roles is to advise private equity venture capitalists investment bankers about how to evaluate the ideas that come before them and if they were having the discussion they would be talking exclusively about the people. And what we talk about is the process, the idea and really it's my question for the lawyer here. How much is our evaluation driven by the legal process of acquisition and it has to be fair and open competition and therefore we've sanitized the people. There's no Edison's, there's no Nash's, there's no Einstein's. It's the idea. Can you speak to how our legal process addresses that? I mean at least from a Hill perspective once we get into the acquisition there's I mean a lot of that is actually regulation driven. As far as the other part I mean just from my theory part we'd like to have the extra competition. Generally speaking you're going to get a better product. So it's kind of weird that from that end of it we're going to have it's just an econ based thing that's just sort of how it goes and that's the reasoning behind why we like to have the extra competition as more people are going to go into it. I know that means there's going to be a little bit more red tape sometimes because people have to reach certain milestones as far as the people part but to go to the science and technology portfolio at the beginning of the year I thought it was very interesting that over half my time is actually based off of infrastructure and based off of hiring practices in order to try and be able to have smart scientists be able to come in and actually do some work for us. For the other part of that and as I didn't articulate as well earlier somebody's trying to explain to me the value of a certain idea or the value of a certain program. The process isn't the part I'm as concerned about. I want the big part, those are the details that we get into a little bit later. From the beginning of it as I said I don't want to know the component of the tank, the science part of it. I want to know how it's going to protect the guy inside the tank first. So if you come to me with that first then I'll say okay let's start getting into the process and how we're actually going to get there in the best way. I mean from the actual acquisition part I'm not an acquisition guy so I couldn't get you any of the specifics of it. Am I getting sorted to the question or I don't want to understand it. I agree we need good people. I don't know if that's the... I'm Cynthia Cook. I direct the Acquisition and Technology Policy Program with Rank Corporation, we've met before. I hear a couple of threads. When we heard Mr. Riley this morning who was talking about the difficulties of pushing technology, you know prototyping and other sorts of strategies to get this done and from this panel I hear things like how the technologists communicate better with you, how they get involved in your processes to help you understand what they have. So it is a very sort of consumer orientation which is appropriate to this panel. The question though is what can policy makers do to give stronger or more focused signals to the technologists so that they can push the better technologies? Do you have any case studies or insights into successful cases where you've provided a signal that people have been able to meet? I'll answer that. First of all I think there's a huge onus on the policy maker. I'm going to go a little beyond what you asked because that's something I wanted to talk about but as you said it was not exactly the topic of the panel. Policy makers have to educate themselves on asking the right questions, having an ability to be an educated consumer is often how I'll talk to people about it. We can't become technologists if we're not technologists and maybe there's some people who love to get popular mechanics or something but you know that other than sort of a cocktail party version of being a technologist we really do have to accept that we're not the experts but that we have to be educated consumers. So I think there's a lot that policy makers can do and again it comes down to sometimes to experience of what are the right questions to ask what has not been put forward that you need to pull. Okay to your question about how can a policy maker help the S&T community it's clearly through guidance and prioritization so for instance we do things like try to put out the S&T priorities and that's something that's worked across DOD now granted that back to the issue of commercialization that tends to happen in a relatively closed environment process that doesn't involve doesn't take account of the seismic shifts happening underneath what will be the S&T base for DOD so there there can be ways to improve that process and in general the extent to which we are reaching out and understanding what's happened beyond the edges of DOD and defense industry proper. The next thing I think is to as we run through our decision-making processes for the laughable phrase of it and we're looking at solution areas you know whether it's a rail gun or it's you know an unmanned aerial system solution for ISR whatever the way we're going in the capability area and then the solution the capability the solution link is I think it's very important for the policy makers to lay out through that process what they're looking for that gets back to the kind of the list I gave his examples before are we looking for survivability what's most important to the decision-maker is it having time and space for the national command authority to be able to make decisions okay what provides that time and space and this will vary depending on what kind of technology you're talking about is it to be able to create greater gradations in the escalation potential and how do you do that is it to find non-kinetic solutions to the problem set how do you do that so it is a dialogue it can't be sort of a you know a five pound document that kept strapped that has all the answers it inevitably is a back and forth where both sides are learning from the other because the information the technology community can provide the policy community can shift have a policy community thinks about what it needs and vice versa so it has to just be a process that's fostered and is continuing my name is Patrick Garry I'm a senior associate here at CSIS thanks for the panel to kind of pile on to that and what cap maybe from your from your background where do you how do you think we're doing it that that providing that sort of that demand signal or whatever it says you know driving the driving the solution how are we doing how's the building doing at that previous panelist said you know really described several situations where it sounds like it's 99 opponents to every one of proponent of change particularly in the technology area thanks we do well at a macro level in terms of looking at broad areas of investment and seeing how they align to the strategic players the strategies the priorities so you know when you're going through the process of developing the budget you know at the end game program in the budget there really is a scrub to say okay we say these are our priorities in very broad capability areas is that do our investments follow that so I think we do okay at that I think when you go down into those capability areas though that's where the policy community starts to lose its visibility and a fluency with how to that's where we really start to rely on in many cases the services and our program managers the S&T community to be telling us how to position investments within those capability areas very high profile things MDAP obviously those would float up but again much of what we're talking about particularly in the future are not MDAP like things and that's where our processes all across from the budgeting side to the acquisition side are not well-seated to a highly commercialized rapid turn especially in the IT field set of capabilities that do needs to leverage thank you the I would like to just explore that a little bit more along with the comment that a lot of the hill focus was how to meet the S&T workforce requirements workforce flexibilities hiring policies and so on and so forth it what is your perspective or reaction to developing cadres within the defense department that is specifically well trained to look at commercial developments and farm them more efficiently and effectively given that the defense department will never have the S&T books necessary to do all that yeah so in the science and technology world we actually are in a better position to do that than we are as you mature into the acquisition cycle because we are a little less constrained by by some of the acquisition regulations that come to the table so we have a rich sharing of ideas that happens with the scientists and technology level so that conversation happens I wish some of the restrictions we've had over the past couple years when conferences didn't inhibit it so much but it still happens believe me when you get two scientists together you cannot keep them from talking and sharing technical ideas information and opportunities some of the workforce flexibilities that have been introduced in the last few years are helpful but are not so compelling that we see a robust movement between the private sector particularly in the IT world and the government sector I wish we had more I wish we had a few more incentives that were appropriate for for that workforce but we seem to get these authorities that allow us to do things but they're not very enticing to the people that we want to attract to take advantage of them so we're we're struggling we are struggling with that but from a people point of view it can be done and and we can get that conversation going between the commercial sector science and technologists and the government scientists and technologists but then we we run into that barrier of the of the acquisition the introduction of the acquisition regulations which are are not as friendly to that conversation I'm I think there's an issue there in the requirements process too I mean if you look at things like future combat systems or the EFV or the Comanche or you know the army trying to buy a new scout helicopter since the 80s um you know DOD knows what technologies are out there and they know what they want but then the problem becomes gold plating I think in a lot of ways right I mean you have to you know there's certain weight requirements and protection requirements you can't fit all these technologies onto these platforms when they try to do it then they get cost overruns and and schedule slippages and the program becomes too heavy or becomes too expensive and and they kind of they end up falling off um I think it's um a matter of quantity I mean DOD wants to buy a lot and then if you develop these very expensive platforms they can't buy as many and then if they scale that it will buy less than each each unit becomes more expensive than the program runs at the trouble we've seen time again so I think there is recognition of the commercial technologies out there but just bringing them into the government system and and getting them on platforms is a pretty big task. Paul makes an excellent point on the the introduction of exquisite technology and requirements that that over the years we have fallen victim to in the Department of Defense. I can only speak for the Department of Navy but in the last couple years we have emphasized additional rigor in the front end of the requirements process so we understand the technical cost trade space in a far more robust way than we did for example in the 80s and 90s so we are making progress there I'm pleased to say in the Department of the Navy doesn't mean as much as I would like but at least we are informing our requirements with more fact-based information so that they can they can set the bar where it needs to be you know as we often know that last two percent of capability is often 80 percent of the cost driver and we don't need to be in that space all the time but our occasions when we do we've been over on this side perhaps we could I've got from Venigapal and I'm at the State Department and so I wanted to take this maybe up a level in terms of R&D policy messaging and you know there's different types of research that have different purposes basic research versus translational versus like a more development side of it. What has the DOD done successfully to message that to Congress or to the public and how can our other science agencies maybe learn from that and adopt some of those practices because DOD has a huge research budget? Some of our research budget has gone down half a billion dollars this year. I think there's some other research agencies within the government that I mean almost triple the entire DOD research budget. Some of the things that haven't successful just somewhere in the past enable you people realize there's good research that's done at colleges so basic research a lot of it's done at universities people just think about these abstract things there somehow that caught on. We'll say it's basic research it's something that we'll have an application someday I will always ask why did you start the research and that will be why we need to continue funding it even if it doesn't have an application now there's a reason you started it. The person that's able to tell me this is the reason I started this research they've got a much better shot than the person saying I want to be able to do this interesting thing so why do you want to do this interesting thing well because it's interesting and maybe it'll have an application someday that's not a very good answer. There is the answer of from a mission-driven agency like DOD so we've got a need for something let's back it up a little bit and maybe this will work it out. Now from there there definitely needs to be the conversation of the fact that it will take a while. We were just discussing a Navy project that's going on right now it's a firefighting robot now they took me over to NRL and they showed me this thing and they said this is a few years away and there were even some growing pains right in front of me and where it kind of broke down in the middle of it but then they got to show me what it was doing and it was discriminating where a certain fire was in order to be able to do it and be able to integrate it with a firefighting team. I've now seen that I now can actually conceptualize what this thing is going to do I know that it's going to take a few years so that part of the conversation needs to be had a little bit more because honestly if I go up to an industry person they're going to say look concept of fielding I took this you know I was able to make this thing in six months now the 20 years of research that happened before that for the basic research and quite research and anything like that that they were able to leverage in order to get the six months of it that part of the story is never going to be told ever it's not as good for a bottom line however that is an important part because there was 20 years of research beforehand and we need to be able to leverage that so the so I guess back to the original question the person that could tell me this is the reason I started this research because although it might not get there because that's those are the growing pains of the research process process at the end of the day this is going to be able to help the same way those are the people that are able to make it make it successful thank you all for being here I would like to ask a little bit of the doctor and the member of the senate arms arm services committee I whether or not it might be helpful if the policy personnel and also the staff members of the senate arms committee might not have a little bit of how shall we say exposure to technology and also a little exposure to really what goes on at the bottom level of the arms services and I'll give you an example I've got a private in the army and I know exactly what privates do I later on I was a little higher than that but is this is that do you all know of anyone for instance the gentleman at the uh at the senate arms service committee that that has any background of that nature having been in the military or yeah having been in the military and also been uh let's say an engineer about half our staff on the minority side is retired military some of the former military basically what you're telling me is that the only member of the arms services committee that has that kind of background is jack reid I would say the institutional knowledge there pardon I would say the institutional knowledge is there I mean I know senator inhofe was in was in the army for a couple years as well senator you'd obviously was there's a West Point grad yeah that's me okay outstanding I mean I will say at least from the staff level some of the things that we definitely try to do from the SMT part by trying it out to you know the labs I'll try and meet with people um it's like I said the demos are I mean our crisis that we're actually able to conceptualize something what we try to do when we go to installations as well um at least what our staff does every single time is at least as part of the day that we're going to be there you say give me some of the junior grade officers and give me somebody unless the guys and we kick leadership out of the room so that they can speak to us very openly and on the policy side for the doctor um what what is the what is the bottom line what is the most important thing that we need to do uh policy-wise on on on the on the individual level but the common soldier I'm sorry I don't think I understand what do you mean it's the most important thing in the common soldier well I would think what's the skill set that they need or what is the I don't know what your question is I think the most important thing is oh wasn't a question go ahead what is I think the most important thing is for them for us to develop weapons that make their lives uh less susceptible to the enemy and uh I don't see that being done um although there is something that will do that in other words urban warfare has as the policy people ever addressed urban warfare and how that affects the soldiers so yeah there's a lot to know let me walk back way up to the question of the workforce um yes it's very important to have a workforce that understands through its own experience and other acquired knowledge what it is the work fighter needs um and how technology among many other things the budget process etc how the system of the department of defense needs to function so having that diversity of experiences in the workforce is very important like the comment from Dan we have in the policy community in DOD quite a lot of retired military but we also have I would just say prior service military people have done a few years of service and come out and are now um career civil servants and I myself was a career civil servant for a long period of time um so break break your next question I think is about how do we think about do we I think if I were to interpret your question do we have the empathy and knowledge to understand how the individual warfighter is looking at what they need and the answer to that is hopefully yes um and I mentioned I ticked off some issues before I think certainly survivability and I think Dan also hit on this the idea about you know what is that additional increment of cost or technology going to gain you in terms of protecting the individual soldier is a sailor or airman ring is always critical to the decision maker at the highest policy levels they're always looking for ways to um you know take down um risk and the most um evident example of that in recent years is Bob Gates and his push on MRAPS so that is a perfect example of where the system really wasn't responsive and it did take an individual in this case the secretary of defense to put his own pressure on the system even many had to go outside the existing system to make it happen so there are lots of barriers there are a lot of weaknesses and certainly people at every echelon are in perfect um but there are cases where uh decision makers at the highest level do take very much that into account as they uh as they look to how to invest their dollars thank you thank you I'm Paul Cudero from the University of Toronto I'm with the monk school of global affairs in the center for global engineering so I find this a fascinating subject I want to go back to the comment that all three of the panelists made about um focusing on the national security impact of the cool stuff that comes and I think I shared Dr. Hicks uh skepticism over decision by powerpoint particularly on areas as complicated as national security so I would be interested in and there was a long history of shall we say foreign foreign uh national defense issues being a little exaggerated you know going back to the missile gap the war in vietnam and wmds etc so the powerpoint might sort of exaggerate why a particular thing was in the national security interest I'd be interested in all the panelists comment on the extent to which there is a sophisticated presentation of national security interests on particular things that allows a decision maker and I'll say the congress to make a tradeoff between an mrap and a better way of building hospitals in Liberia and then ultimately a better way of building hospitals in Liberia versus building improving infrastructure in rural areas of the united states so is is this in that ecology of a decision making about a weapon system or defense acquisition sophisticated enough to get all those tradeoffs in there somewhere and if it is who's responsible for bringing that sophistication to the decision makers at each point I guess if I understand it correctly are you saying is there a way to put all of that into a presentation or are you saying what is the best way to present that to the both of those are fine but you know it's a matter of you know how genuine are the pearls and how real are the swine okay so yes uh generally speaking how the process of five dollars president's budget comes over um the congressional staff uh members will look at it we'll get it from the very broad you know program by program um you know breakdown of the actual budget uh we'll go back we'll kind of say could this money be used here could this money be better utilized over here so there's kind of your tradeoffs um so we'll we try and get it down and give our best recommendations to the members uh I mean at that point we have been asked many times um you know I mean if the president comes out with a particular announcement he says I want to use you know two billion dollars over here um I mean I've had the senators ask me many times what else can you use ten two billion dollars for and then you'll end up hearing it in their talking points somewhere somewhere later the best way in order to do that I would agree PowerPoint is not ever the best way to actually put these things together PowerPoint is definitely fine for a large presentation if we've got this here most of the briefs I get during the PowerPoint I'm sitting across the table from somebody and I'm having to flip through and and this is how we do it um now the way that I will give the information to the actual senators and the way that most of us will give the information to the senators is to write it instances um we might have a graph showing actual or a chart showing actual uh you know numbers but for the most part we're writing it down at a both point saying here here's the bottom line this is what this money is going for this is what this money is going for here the possible tradeoffs because we could be putting this money elsewhere um we're going into ready necessary we're going into ISR assets something like that uh it's I mean with a close to 600 billion dollars better yes it's very difficult to actually get it down to to the nitty gritty um but I would say the best way of doing that is just bottom line statements here they are the human eye can pick up a lot on a piece of paper um and if we don't have to flip through 60 slides in order to get what honestly you could get on one piece of paper that that's excellent and that's the best presentation you can give I would just add on your point about um sort of a sophisticated what you might call sophisticated approach I I think I think the reality is that the national security system relies so much on professional judgment just does that um there isn't an algorithm there isn't a decision-making tool that we have come to rely upon to fundamentally enable if you were the dialogue that happens throughout the system I think that's where maybe we differ a bit from industry I'm not saying that's okay or that's good but it's true so you put in those you substitute masks there's a lot of work hours spent um in groups at ever higher echelons trying to figure out you know did we make the right decisions are these the right trade-offs all the way up through the president through the interaction between DOD and OMB to present the budget and then the same thing my guess is with with less mass happens um on the hillside so um it's it's I would say there's a lot of emphasis put on um prioritization and how well are you making trade-offs between one area and another but I don't think it would be fair to say it's sophisticated I mean the defense the money that goes to the defense budget man I guess to get back to your point of kind of I guess public works projects versus defense I mean that money just doesn't get eaten by the defense department it goes back to factories and workers in the United States who pay taxes and buy goods and services so there are trade-offs but I mean those that that money stays essentially in house I guess right um Steve Merrill with the Duke Center for Innovation Policy I was intrigued by Mr. Riley's suggestion that one of the most important future areas of S&T to defense is human performance enhancement and I'm wondering if you could comment on what you see as the responsibilities of policy makers the hill and the press in dealing with and addressing an area that is um further out probably more speculative in its utility and application and but especially that is further removed from quite far removed from the existing capabilities of the S&T workforce both in the in the defense department and in the contractor community and from the from the hill perspective what we generally try to do is just I mean give the authority to be able to do something that's going to help work I mean when we can do form uh it's human performance enhancement and I'm gonna know at least a number of the labs are trying to do that so at least at least from the legislative side it's to give the authority but allow enough flexibility that the smart people working there are able to do their research um and then of course we'll continue the conversation and say what kind of funding needs to go in here but for the most part I would say just offer enough flexibility that that they're able to do their do their job from my point of view and I apologize I was not able to hear Ben um it is an area where there's a tremendous amount of research that I believe is necessary for us to fully understand the implications of human performance augmentation um things like feeding the troops better uh really does make a difference in terms of their ability to perform over extended period of times in stressful situations and things like that fortunately the policy in the United States is currently fairly well defined in terms of the limits from the science and technology point of view of what we can do in in the research arena as well as the experimentation arena and uh so we are informed by the current regulation and policy as we explore the options of uh the human performance equation so I'm sure as time goes on um we will be bumping up against the envelope of the uh the currently the the current policy hasn't instantiated as well as the intersection of science uh Steve ryan north of common corporation so at these forums we talk a lot about disconnect between commercial and the and the small s and t world and so I'm going to ask a leading question that relates to working for one of the major defense contractors because no one ever does that at these forums so my question is what role do you see for the major prime contractors in facilitating both the conversation about changing science and technology priorities as well as the actual acquisition and movement of these items into the defense acquisition chain and do you see that changing over time uh let me let me take that on I um uh a prime role I hope you like the pun I think they take on a prime role um we are we are facing in the midst of you pick how you want to define um where we are in the process of our shift in downsizing um and the primes are affected hugely by that um the areas of innovation that are most important to the strategy that doesn't mean all the areas that are most important strategy but the areas of innovation that are most important strategy many of them lie outside the primes um uh areas of specialty so I think it's important for the primes to be thinking about okay as we downsize this is going to look different than it did in the 90s or the 70s because again we're very commercialized we're very internationalized value chain the supply chain is internationalized um so the the proposition on how to survive that and thrive in it is going to be different and part of it is how to get those small innovators into the system and if the primes don't like the way it's going to happen they will crush them and then we won't have innovation so it's very important to have a dialogue from DOD with industry to include very importantly the primes um the top five in particular to make sure we're thinking through where we want to be on our defense industrial base you know five ten years down the road because if we don't start having those conversations now and I don't think we are having them enough now um those decisions are just going to be made and we're going to end up with the system we end up with and you know in on the positive side you know the commercial sector is out there but you know I think we'll lose a lot of advantage over those five to ten years and there's some areas where the commercial sector is not going to be able to substitute for a strong threat of defense and it's to prevent specific innovation I think we have time for one more question and I'm getting a high five sign here so gentlemen over here in the back I'm Bob Hershey I'm a consultant what can be done to get companies through this valley of life in terms of getting together people to do the funding of it and uh getting consensus on what are the criteria and their weights and maybe bringing the internet in I think that's a million dollar question honestly we've been trying to take her with different ways to either more rapidly field something and get better transfer technology or just try and cut some of the red tape so the acquisition community is able to just pull from what's going on there I mean that that's a continuing conversation I'm sorry I don't have the answer for it it is a continuing conversation um Dan and it is one where we are continuing folks seem to be searching for the solution there is not a single solution the transition path an opportunity for a science and technology investment is different by sector by by the maturity of the development and and the operational need so as was mentioned earlier in our discussion today the people are the ones that seem to be the part of the equation that is critical technology generally in my experience over the last 35-40 years don't transition people transition technology and if we shift our thinking to the the people carrying forward the idea and bringing it through that valley of life we tend to be much more successful excellent question thank you very much I appreciate the panel here this morning I think we had an interesting conversation which was set the stage for the activities that you are going to engage in later in the day research and technology issues you must be named Mary but you could draw that inference from the lineup today Mary Miller also is a career civil servant and the technical people in our mix of technical and non-technical folks today electro optics is for specialty as an electrical engineer she also joined a civil service and progressively advanced to various positions throughout that enterprise to include recently serving as the deputy of program of executive office for soldier systems and equipment and she currently in her current position overseas all of the labs and research development engineering centers in the army enterprise so she spent her life talking to talking about technology to various audiences and as have all of our panelists in various capacities and from a bunch of different perspectives so Mary thanks for agreeing to moderate this panel and you very much look forward to all of your insights thank you Mary I'm excited to moderate this panel because it means that I get to moderate I don't have to answer the questions and that's a novelty for me so that's good news and I'm going to keep my comments brief because I think the world genesis of this is to be able to do the question and answer those given that technology is embedded within our lives and it's really important that we understand how to best communicate this as a technology provider this is critical for all of us but as the leader of this army science technology investment and an engineer myself I see the struggles that we have I often depict my role as the big translator between the folks that actually do technology and I don't consider myself one these days because I'm in the Pentagon I'm those that actually have to understand what we're doing and understand the rationale for it but I am an engineer we're not really known for communicating very well and in fact we're not really known for being very um extroverted how we do outreach so communications is always a challenge a friend of mine came up and and they told me unless it's a joke but they told me this and it was kind of revealing they said how do you determine an introvert introverted engineer from an extroverted engineer and I said okay I don't know how extroverted engineer will be looking at your shoes right so it kind of just goes to the larger problem we have we don't communicate all that well but I've learned a few fundamentals all the way through my career and one is when you are trying to communicate you really need to first understand the audience that you're going to be talking to and I'll give you an example of how this matters in my office I get a lot of support personnel that are donated scientists and engineers from the larger science and technology enterprise our research laboratories our research development engineering centers and one of the things that always surprises them when they come to the Pentagon is they have these great aspirations of being able to communicate the great technology work that they're doing in all of its details and they believe that the general officers and senior executive service school that they're going to be talking to you would get it and that's really frankly not true I'll give you an example we had a very enthusiastic developer of armor that was writing an information paper for the then vice chief staff of the army about some great breakthroughs that we had in armor development and the information paper goes on to say that we learned from an aerial density for armor of 120 pounds per square foot to an aerial density of 90 pounds per square foot and he's like see and I'm like you know so that's really good technically that is the scientific message but the vice chief doesn't get that so what you need to do is to translate that into weight savings on a platform because that's an operational impact that a soldier will understand so he does some math and he comes back and he said well on the emma that we were talking about that change in aerial density saves me 12,000 pounds and because of that I have all of my equipment on that platform doesn't break down because of the added weight my fuel efficiency is better and he goes on the list all of these positive attributes and I said that's the kind of translation to the audience vice chief of staff the army that you need to have it's one of those managed expectations kind of deals you heard on the last panel from Dan Adams he is a staffer on the helm this is another challenge we have when we talk to staffers sometimes we find people that have a technical background often we find people that don't but they really need to know is not that you're smart they assume you're smarter you wouldn't be where you are they need to know what's the silhouette of this investment in technology you're making how do we make sure that it has an impact for in my case the army and that goes back to basic principles using simple language to understand we as scientists and engineers often get caught up in our techno jargon for a lack of a better term we think we're pretty cool we have a little community we all talk the same technical language that's something that we need to work on and I'm going to tell you as a person who works for the military we make it even worse because we add to that these things called acronyms acronyms are horrible for communication I'll tell you just a quick example we were talking to my boss the army acquisition executive and it was actually we were talking about our cyber investments that technology packed forward and the team talking to her was talking about our work in deco and oco and it took on to chart 13 of the briefing before she finally has this eureka moment that oco that they were talking about wasn't overseas contingency operations which is a type of funding that we utilize but it was really offensive cyber operations so now 13 pages into the briefing she finally gets that wait she's been kind of tracking something a little bit differently that wasn't her short bar she's very broad she's a systems engineer for me it's been actually refreshing to have somebody understand this technology in my leadership chain but it was a lack of communication and the lack of knowledge that we were miscommunicating and that's something that we all are struggling with so those are you know key things that are important to us how we better communicate what i'm going to do now is introduce the rest of the panel and they're going to tell us some of their ways that they've found to communicate effectively and i will tell you that as somebody who has to communicate for a living what technology is doing i look forward to some of their good ideas so first on my left is miss jessica tozer she is from the department of defense science if not she is a department of defense science and technology writer who currently serves as the content manager and editor in chief through the end with science the official department of defense science and technology blog she is a lifelong science fiction fan when we did our prep session we talked about that and a published science fiction and fantasy author next to her is mr rick weiss director of strategic communications at the defense advanced research projects agency doorbell mr weiss is a science and technology policy advisor to the doorbell director and honed his skills while in the same role as the white after white house office of science technology policy mr weiss also spent 15 years as a science and medical writer for the washington post now i'm really intrigued to hear what he has to say because from my perspective doorbells got the best communication strategy out there with them the department of defense next to rick is miss tiffani low water director of meetings and public engagement american association for the advancement of science triple as miss low waters responsible for the triple as annual meeting and the center for public engagement with science and technology miss low waters work encourages scientists to take a more personal and proactive interest in public engagement i'll go back to many of us are introverts that's a challenge and finally wrapping up the panel dr kevin cordy global director of technology from dupont dr cordy leads a global technology organization that develops advanced materials in the area of high-strike and high-temperature fibers technical nonlabens including nanofiber nonlabens and new applications across a spectrum of angie's markets dr cordy has led research and development in several dupont businesses including some that may be familiar to this audience such as marlo tyla and kevlar so thank you to the panel now i will give the opening comments well hello i'm jessica tozer i am a department of defense contractor and i run armchair science the department of defense science and technology blog which in my opinion is one of the coolest jobs you can have in the department of defense because i get to talk about all the most amazing science and technology research and development that happens within the spectrum of the department of defense and military which is really big we have a lot of stuff that we have a chance to do but i have a very unique position because i have to take what i would call techno battle and have it make sense to both internal and external audiences so i reach both um civilians who would probably never have even heard about what those certain things are or they don't know the difference between a rail gun and a laser and there is a difference um or they and i also have internal audiences people who are in the military people who work within the research labs who want to know more about these types of projects so i sort of have to mirror the techno battle um which can be sort of very complicated sometimes extremely complicated and have it translate to something that makes sense to everyone and i actually use a method that i call the star trek method to do this and if any of you have watched star trek and i hope that at least somebody here has besides me uh you'll know that they have this habit of using complicated phrases and then summing it up in a really easy to understand metaphor so they'll say something like well we found these decadent field particles and data's positronic subnet here like what and then jordie will say well if i was going to send a message to data through subspace that's how i would do it and you're like oh well that's what i did but of course i'd by the positronic net whatever and so that's kind of how i do that i i so i'll say something that's very complicated so we'll talk about nanoparticles or um photonics and these kinds of things and i'll say and this is why it matters this is why science matters to you because the silicon nanowire of the porous electrode is neat but it's also something that can detect chemicals like a tricorder so i find ways of like mirroring the real science with what would make sense to uh generalized audiences because in my opinion science fiction is the aperture for science future a lot of these people who created these things they started because they said when i grew up i watched this i watched balastar graph i watched star trek i watched dr who and i thought wouldn't it be cool if this technology existed in real life and then they grew up to develop these technologies to understand what could be the applicable science behind it and they create these devices but the problem is um like mary said a lot of the the the technologists the engineers the scientists of this community understand their role very well they understand the science and the technology very well which is great you should work that but it doesn't always translate in generalized terms when i try to explain it i'll get this 35 page white paper and i'll go oh god there's so much this it doesn't make sense and then i read it like 50 times and then i find a way to make it make sense so it's sort of like i am in some ways like a techno translator um i can see something and say okay so here's this technology well what do you want it to do what do you hope this will achieve okay well we hope that it will achieve the ability to detect chemicals in the environment okay and how big is it going to be well it's going to be about the size of the computer chip okay can it go on anything well it can go on your phone okay so you basically put a tripod or chip you can put on your phone well that's sort of like what you know that the science isn't going to be exact we aren't actually creating transporters at least not successfully yet um and those kinds of things but the ideas that we're pushing forward the science and technology that we're pushing forward has roots in things that people understand because they were once just imaginary things everything that has existed came about because somebody dreamed that it would be possible and that's where i use the focus to write my stories and i also use um social media so i also run the like facebook and the twitter page and stuff like that and i think when it comes to communication and science and technology that social media is imperative at this point in our eyes people get more information from facebook when events happen in their lives that there's an earthquake if there's a shooting people go to facebook before they go anywhere else and so you have this audience that exists in this realm so if you can grasp that and speak in the right terms then you can embrace it be part of the conversation and in some cases even drive your own conversation so you can actually control how people are saying things about the things that you want them to talk about which is why science and technology in general can do really well in social media and dark is actually a good example of this and i'll let you talk about that but dark is great with social media they post a picture of a robot walking and they get like 700 thousand retweets i mean but that's what people want to see they want to see what this stuff is and why it should matter to them so i created a slogan for under science says science matters and to me that translates in many different ways science matters in so many different avenues and if you can use the right tools and speak the right language i think the communication will go so far in helping people to understand why it's cool why it's important why it's imperative to the social progression of our society and i think that in that regard that's not only the best part but it's how we succeed as communicators thank you well i think i have a cool job actually but you know you might be a close like i hope everyone feels like they have the coolest job because you spend so much of your life doing it you might as well think it's cool um so dark as i think most people know is is an agency in a do d that invests in particular in sort of breakthrough technologies not the ordinary stuff um to my mind uh and i propose this as our model but it hasn't really gotten any traction in official them but it uh when i go in there and talk to people about what they're up to in dark every day the phrase that keeps coming to mind for me is one that my teenage daughter is always saying which is wait what because there's just so many surprises uh under development all the time that you didn't really think we're possible but that are being actually made possible by uh scientists and engineers so it's it's great fun and i think part of our challenge is to convey how much fun and how interesting it is but of course to keep in mind the larger purpose and the larger purpose and the mission for DARPA is to bring technologies to bear for national security and that's the thing that we try to keep in mind all the time in our work and what we try to keep conveying in our communications that this is all about ultimately national security that's our first responsibility many times of course things spin off in various directions and become great commercial hits and become important to people in their day to day lives i hope we all use the internet every day we all use majorize gps every day uh so these are great spin offs but national security is our game and that's what we focus on um i thought i would just take a couple minutes to talk about some challenges and some of the uh approaches we take to overcoming those challenges in the communication sphere and then mostly leave it up to questions to get into any specifics i think there are two levels of challenges that we face in communications at DARPA and one of them is generic and it's one that uh jessica mentioned which is just first of all it's a challenge for all science writing can you get people interested who might not normally be interested many of you probably read recently about the recent death of ben bradley the former executive editor of the washington post who was a great executive editor at the post but he did have i'd say one weak point and that was he did not have an appreciation of science and in the days that he ran the post science did not have a high profile there in fact he had invented a beat that some of you may have heard about called smirsh and smirsh was the beat that covered those reporters who wrote about science medicine education religion and all that i'll let you fill in the blank for the sh and that's kind of where you were if you were a science reporter at the post luckily i think interest levels have grown over the last couple decades and that's less of a problem now but you still have the second generic problem which is how to explain science to such you know a broad array of people who you're trying to reach which uh jessica also mentioned you know in journalism you've got everyone from you know when we would write medical stories everyone from the scientists at nih and nsf were reading those stories and we're going to ding you if you get the slightest thing wrong but you've also got people who are plucking a quarter in the box and mostly for the sports section and you want to make sure that they can understand what you've written also and it's the same in public affairs at darpa we've got uh scientists who are looking very closely to make sure we've got it exactly accurate and we'll complain if you're wrong and you've got people who are less educated congressmen in some cases and other stakeholders who just don't have the education of the background in science and to whom it's very important we get our message across so those are generic problems that always space science writers i think in darpa in particular there are some particulars we have to deal with one is these misconceptions i'd say about darpa one is the presumption that everything at darpa is secret anyway you know when i told people i was going to take the communications job at darpa people said well that'll be easy because it's all secret you don't even have to tell anyone anything that's not true and we actually have a very busy shop you know we're taking 25 to 40 media inquiries a week pretty much all of which we're quite responsive to so we we tell a lot about what we're doing actually another misconception is that if a reporter could come to darpa they could see all this cool stuff and the the sort of disappointing bottom line is that there is nothing to see at darpa is a bunch of offices mostly with people writing contracts because of course we found work that gets done elsewhere in academia and industry mostly so it's a hugely boring place to come if you're a reporter and and a lot of people don't want to believe us when we tell them there's nothing to see here um we do have a nice nice couple of nights rooms uh and once in a while if you're lucky there's a robot in the lobby for a while but then he goes away another misconception is that we're a policy shop of some kind and you know we should be able to be responsive to questions about well what are we going to do with this kind of technology what's the right policy you know what should we do about you know privacy and autonomy and things like that we address those things in part because the nature of our work is such that we often are the first ones to brush up against some interesting policy areas that are not already addressed and that are going to need to be addressed because suddenly we've got a capability that gets you into a space you weren't in before but it's not our job really to create policy we are a projects agency that's the p in darpa and we're working on projects uh other misconception that some reporters and others get hung up on is that we should be you know into STEM education we should be out there educating the public we do do a lot to educate the public but again it's not our main purpose in life you can't help but attract school kids if you've got robots and we have a lot of robots it's true so um you know we take on that role as as best as we can robots and other technologies actually are a great entree to get kids interested in engineering and science and we try to try to work that but it's not again our main responsibility and maybe the last and not the biggest but sort of the most painful uh misperception about DARPA is that we are responsible for your personal psychiatric problem um there are many many people who seem to think that we have done things to them um can I just tell everyone we're not doing it okay it's not us actually I I once saw a uh an interview with a former DARPA director this goes back to the 70s who related a great solution to this problem back in the days when it was easy to get a phone call into the into the highest offices at DARPA and there was a person one person in particular who was calling uh saying you know please turn off the chip in my brain this is a particularly typical thing to talk about because we actually are putting ships in grains now but not for what they think um and uh kept on back because they had no relief and finally the secretary had a great idea according to this DARPA director and told the person please hold on a minute and put the person on hold for two minutes and then came back on and said we've turned it off and the person never called back so maybe that's the same anyway uh just quickly in terms of the things that we do to try to get our message out and to be effective um we of course have our website which we update all the time in which we try to write interesting features about the new technologies that we're working on and the milestones they hit as as they get hit we do use social media a lot and we try to have some fun with it um you know for better not for better there's no worse here for better we have a little bit of a long leash from sort of you know DOD and the office the secretary they let us do our thing as long as we don't cause trouble and we we have some fun with social media which is the way to make that work uh when the CIA came out with their sort of much ballyhoot first tweet uh last year which was kind of a funny tweet also about uh we cannot confirm or deny that this is really our first tweet um DARPA responded saying if you want to really be that secretive maybe you should try some of our vapor software papers a program where we're making microelectronics that just dissolve into thin air and go away sort of mission impossible style we made notes uh last week that it was coincidentally the 45th anniversary of the birth of the internet first message across the upper net and national cap day and we don't think that's a coincidence given how much the internet has spent with cap pictures and movies or anyway uh we do a lot of media outreach we do media calls we uh we hold sort of uh briefings on the phone to make sure reporters are familiar with the research that we're doing our director and others uh spend a fair amount of time on the road going out and speaking uh to various audiences uh young and old industry and academia um we have our challenges the DARPA challenges which started years ago with the original DARPA challenge to get a driverless car loan which some of you may recall was a total failure on the first round not a single car made it to the finish line you can see where that you know where that has ended up today and most of the people in the google arena and other areas where drivers cars are happening had their start at the DARPA uh initial DARPA challenge challenges are all about getting new communities of researchers together that might not have been together before to take on a challenge that needs a little bit of juice and by setting a goal and putting out a prize purse it's amazing how much energy and uh an investment you can spur oftentimes a bigger investment than the prize purse itself it's just a great way because people want to get bragging rights uh we've got the DARPA robotics challenge that we're in the midst of right now finals will be out in Paloma, California in June which is going to be a spectacular event that we think is going to attract something like eight to ten thousand people per day over a couple of periods to watch these robots effectively dupe it out on a bunch of tasks having to do with humanitarian assistance and disaster relief um we've got a chikungunya challenge going on right now to predict the spread of the disease that's creeping up from latin america up to the united states right now which we think will energize the disease uh an epidemiology modeling community something that's quite important in light of the recent devola outbreak so challenges are a great way of attracting people and getting the word out on new science so that can you move on in one minute and the last thing i mentioned is an open catalog uh where we are publishing on the web all the literature that we uh that our scientists are publishing in the open literature so that we can be part of the open government initiative that the administration's behind i'm sorry to go so long go ahead tiff me hi so um i'm here from triple rf which is the american association for the advancement of science some of you hopefully are familiar with what triple rf does one of the things that we do that i think might be particularly relevant for this group is offer scientists and engineers training and how to communicate about the research and so we have work with government agencies as well as individual academic institutions lots of different groups on how to do that one of the things i always talk to scientists and engineers about is you need to be thinking about who your audience is in your message i'm going to talk a little bit about some of the tips that we use and if anyone's interested in learning more about our workshops we have a website i'll give you at triple rf dot org slash communicating science and we'd be happy to work with you and talk to you about what your needs are but specifically i think about audience and message many scientists and engineers who are very involved in their work are very interested in getting their information to audiences that they're very comfortable with so experts are comfortable in their own expertise and they're comfortable talking to other experts about that expertise i think sometimes when they're looking to talk to public audiences this is when we run into challenges they may not be familiar with what those public audiences know what they care about what's relevant to them and so often i ask scientists to step back from the content for a minute and think about who is your audience who is it you're speaking to what is it that they want to know what is it that they're concerned of concerns are and it's not about you it's about them it's not me it's you it really is about the person that you're talking to and obviously that varies based on the kind of platform you're using for communication if it's online the social media you have a potentially a vast audience if it's a one-on-one conversation with a congressperson or a staffer that's a much different kind of audience so thinking about and getting as much information as you can about your audience is really important secondly we talk a lot about how scientists often have lots of messages lots of information too much information sometimes to enable them to have more of a conversation so instead of doing a data dump really thinking about what are the key things you want the person to walk away from in this conversation or in this communication i know i'm a familiar in military there's this bottom line up front i think that's really important you know the so what other people have talked about so what for them not necessarily your so what you really have to think about it in their in their term um you need to be willing to listen if someone's asking you a question answer the question instead of telling them what you think they should know right a different way of thinking um so if you're asked a question about your work think about how you can actually relate that back to the person the way they can understand they're probably asking because they don't understand what you're talking about so you need to think about how to better explain what those are doing um and i think language we've talked a bit about acronyms and jargon this is a real challenge for most people who are in technical work i don't think scientists engineers and definitely not defensively researchers are the only people who have this problem i like to say that this is an issue of expertise not necessarily science and engineering when you have so much data to and you shorten it you need to think about how do you then project that to people who don't know those short term um and and keep in mind that those i think uh you've made those but that can mean different things to different people jargon's the same way even amongst scientists when you get them in a room you use certain words and they mean things in different fields so you think about so people don't have those expertise how do you relate the information um one of the things i think is important and i think particularly in our in our current political climate how do we interact and communicate in a way that's productive like confrontation can sometimes happen maybe not so useful for the goals that you have for your communication we need to be thinking about how can we have a constructive conversation how can we continue to have conversations that maybe um away from of those concerns something to think about um and also it gets back to you before what i'm saying about bottom line of thought start with what you want the person to remember from what you're going to say so i started by saying audiences and messages or good communications that's what i want you to remember for what i'm going to say always be thinking about how do you get people to think what is it that is important to them and how can you communicate that first um i think many scientists and engineers who in the research community are very um familiar communicating with their details at the very beginning and then at the very end of any scientific paper probably the 30 page reports you're talking about here's what we found right most people want to know here's what we found very first and then why should i care and so almost everyone that you interact with will want to know those questions you'd be thinking about practicing how do you how do you do that and that would be other people who's going to say practicing is really important talk to your family and your friends about what it is that you do let them ask you questions try to answer and respond to them i speak to many scientists who are fearful of the person who sits down next to them in an airplane and says so what do you do this is a wonderful opportunity a new person to try to understand what is this that you do because i think that um you know you can better understand through other people's lives what you're working on if they actually ask questions that make you think about what it is that you're doing and that's a valuable skill to have again the website triple f dot org slash communicating science and i'd be happy to talk with anyone afterwards as well thank you i'm the guy from private industry that slipped into the room the question of effectively communicating science and technology is you know equally important in industry as it is and um governmental agencies and you know in many many parallels maybe in some cases there's a even more of a sense of urgency i mean in industry science and technology is an investment choice and and and we have you know we're always challenged to meet the expectations of our investors and quarterly profits and uh business leaders can easily turn around say you know let's just cut the investment and research you know if they're not convinced that it's meaningful for the business it's a very very easy decision for them to make and so you know we constantly have to make sure that they're understanding you know why science and technology is important to the business so um so i think that subject matter is extremely important and uh glad that somebody decided to have this forum so who are our key stakeholders in industry and we have many stakeholders but i think as pertains to science and technology there's two main ones the first one is of course our business leaders because they make the budgetary and policy decisions and then there's our customers ultimately because if we want to introduce some new technology it will take some investment on the airport to commercialize it so those are the really the two key stakeholders i'm thinking about when we're thinking about communicating science and technology so uh what do we do and i'll try and maybe uh propose some tips and examples of how we do things and probably things you've heard already in a lot of cases but i'd like to think that it does start with us in the science community you know we need to recognize it's an important part of the job and it's a part of the job that we don't often like to do uh mary said before a lot of technical people are introverts i find that is another attribute that's really important that that hinders their communication and that's the incredible humility of scientists and engineers i i always have this and feeling that i'm going to go down and say you know what you've been up to lately you know what what how's your work going what have you found and and they'll say well you know less yesterday i discovered cold you had a soft cold fusion and you say holy you know people have been trying to do that for decades do you know what that means and and the next response will be yeah but 99 percent of it was already known and on my part it was only a little part okay and say well okay but you know that that's the mindset of a lot of technical people and it's the humility that comes out because in fact science and technology progresses in increments and the breakthrough only comes when that next increment crosses some thresholds but there what they're seeing is the increment that they did and they don't want to brag about the you know the the totality of the innovation that occurred over a period of time so how do you how do you get past that that factor with them technical people well i think one key point that's come up again and again is try to teach technologists and scientists to communicate about how what they've done meets the needs and interests of their stakeholders communicate the benefits the science will be embedded in and how you communicate that the the benefits ultimately in private industry you know our stakeholders want to know how's this going to increase our market share how's it going to this offering going to improve our competitive position well you pretty soon you start talking about well the offering the performance attributes that you know have addressed tradeoffs in a better way than other materials and then pretty soon you the question will be why does it do that and the science will come out but the hook is always really around the benefits and how you meet the interests and needs of the stakeholders uh let me change tags a little bit i think there's another thing that's important in institutions and that is to make sure there are rituals and forums around technology but our business leaders across the company in dupont every single one they they have a monthly business review i mean they want to know how our sales going you know what our costs look like you know what how are we progressing against the quarterly expectations i make sure that every one of those monthly business meetings there's an agenda topic on technology because ultimately you know our work is projectized and it should be projectized around the needs of the business leaders and there's there are always decisions that need to be made when these things are in flight do we need to accelerate it do we need more money do we need to do we have the opportunity to reduce the spending because maybe they have a need to do it but this brings the the stakeholders into the into the process of technology on a regular basis so it's not a one-off one time a year where all of a sudden they you know they they hear a little bit about technology now speaking of every year i mean we also have an annual technology conference where we invite business leaders from all around the company where you can invite customers to it to read poster sessions and workshops and presentations and this is you know intended to enhance the networking of our technology community around the world but also engage our business leaders in a better way so you schedule this way way in advance so it's a bit of a if you will a deeper dive on technology where they can see a lot more and learn a lot more so our ceo always comes to that and that sets a good tone as soon as the ceo comes for the business leaders automatically sign up you know so it's important the last thing and other people have said this is audience matters for us you know getting to the decision makers for me is very important i talked about our customers if we want to bring a new technology to market often the customers are not really our direct customers we sell a lot of people that distribute our products but the people we need to get to the people like ultimately use the product so we can convince them of what it's doing for them so it's getting multiple steps or at least pass the direct interface to where it really makes a difference and we see feel that in government we're steps down the value chain in and from what the government needs right government usually works with prime contractors we're a material supplier to prime contractors and so how do we get our message to people in government agencies about material innovations so it isn't several steps away and we can't get it to get the message to the right people so getting past the direct interface getting to where the people will really appreciate the innovation and understand the value of it so anyway it's it starts with us i think always focus on the benefits and value that it brings established rituals that trains the technical people as well to make sure that on a regular basis they have to get up and communicate and talk and engage to stakeholders on a regular basis and make sure you're getting to the right people and stakeholders that ultimately make the decisions on whether you're going to have funding to continue to do what you do thank you so now we'll open it for questions when you have a question i'd ask that you introduce yourself and where you're from go ahead i'm Mike McGrath i'm a consultant i'm a DARPA alum and formally had the job that mary lacy has and that is similar to mary millers before they changed the rule that was a big improvement to require that your name be mary um so i i am very much in tune with the the theme that we underachieve on technology communication often but sometimes we overachieve and that leads to Gartner's famous hype curve and and that has real consequences when something gets over hyped i i look at all the press coverage uh lately of 3d printing additive manufacturing which leaves you with the impression that we're going to have the star trek replicator and everybody's going to have one in their garage um and and what happens is um when you reach this trough of disillusionment it becomes very difficult to get funding to do work let's say you you've had an idea for coal fusion good luck getting funding on that so so my question is have you encountered problems where um hype starts to occur and how do you manage expectations what do you do in communications to to manage expectations is that one for me anyone can take it do you want to i have i can i or i have a good example of why uh hype can sometimes be difficult and i think when it comes to communication in general hype is always going to be an issue especially if you're addressing large audiences and it's something that they don't understand very well and i will use the recent example of the vola crisis where uh many like officials were trying to get ahead of the story and it just ran and it became this whole and everyone was convinced it was going to come and kill up millions of americans like last month and then texas was going to be locked down and they had zombie apocalypse references it was a mess um and and unfortunately you sort of anticipate that there's going to be that kind of problem when it comes to things like that and that one was in particular very difficult and at this point now i think a lot of the media has wrangled that back in and been like all right let's just calm down and figure out what we're really dealing with here and when it comes to hype i think that that's really what happens is is um for example i did a story i interviewed general alexander right after the edwards northern thing happened and that became an enormous story and there was a lot of conjecture that happened there was a lot of opinions people were mad people had very polarized opinions on this so hype happened and the best that uh thing that i came up to deal with and my leadership did was let's just stay the course let's use our plan let's talk about the things we're supposed to talk about let's give the nsa their opportunity to say their words and not give our opinions just let the nsa carry their message and eventually that ended up being the best option because we've got up there they're like you don't know what you're talking about we have some other bit you know that wouldn't have done any girl would probably have made things worse so when it comes to hype i figure in my experience that sometimes that does happen but the best thing that you can do is to continue to remain truthful to the concepts to the ideas to whatever it is that you're dealing with because you're not going to be able to control everybody's reaction to things but you can't control how you react to it and so that's sort of in the 3d printing battle it was very cool i've seen a lot of that stuff too so can i ask that answer well i i think one thing in more long lines of individual technology which i think is what you were what you were mentioning so i actually think the the scientists or whoever's communicating that has some responsibilities to maintain at least from their perspective on boundaries you know this is what this did this is what it didn't do this is what still needs to be done there's a timeline for that um and i think um most scientists who are really thinking thoughtfully in advance of how they're going to describe that work or engineers or technology developers can do that in a way that um appreciated by the person that they're speaking to and but i do think that they should be upfront with that information and not just wait for someone to ask the question particularly if it's something that's very early on in the process that then means much more work to be done to it and basic scientists that we work with all the time struggle with this because they want to provide the connections and the relevance of societal issues and what the impact could be but they realize that their work is so much um further from what in that actually happening so helping them think through how do you talk about those things is really helpful okay hi i'm marin leaton csis um i wanted to ask any of you who would care to address it um i think a number of you deal with both hard and soft sciences um and whether there is um a different set of challenges or whether they are the same in uh sometimes social sciences well i just your perspectives on whether whether you talk about them in the same way are there the same issues in communicating about them um how do the audiences react to talking about some things that are more intuitive to some and less intuitive nice person well we don't think those are real sciences i i actually find it our social science can be very difficult to explain as well and they're not necessarily about our communicator even though you would think so yeah i think that there are challenges between them and i also think sometimes the implications of um of hard sciences really you really need a better understanding of the social sciences sciences which sometimes the hard sciences scientists have a hard time connecting to you because that's not their field so sometimes connecting those individuals together to provide a message can be really compelling here's the hard science here's the social sciences going on here's what we're taking care of to sort of address both of all of these issues um but i i think there are some unique challenges um but among specific disciplines of science but but often similarly ones too always and because i have to defend in the armies world not only the hard sciences which for me is much easier but also the software cognitive social skills that especially right now the army is really looking into this thing that we call human dimension which has all sorts of meanings depending on who you ask right but i'm finding that the the software science is harder to communicate as difficult as technologies to communicate in general the software science you're now talking about individuals and you're talking about things like cognition and their ability to learn based on how they have been educated it's our individual which is kind of anti-army anyway we're kind of grouped think we that sounds bad too but you know we train as a unit we operate as a unit we have squads we have teams all the soldiers you know brought up the same way they're at the discipline and so it's kind of hard to go on this kind of individual software side it has been a challenge every kind of guess it's important but it's hard to communicate the metrics what are we what are we judged against how do we say we're successful what does that look like it's a new way to look at things we're still working our way through how to better address that i have to redeem myself because of my comment i was not only in humor but i have to agree with mary that i think a big challenge it's a more difficult challenge to communicate and and of course the scientific method is is much more difficult and you can't uh you know establishing a control from which to work from it is it's much more difficult right so you know how you approach the scientific approach and and draw specific conclusions typically you have to use a lot of statistical methods and and those types of things so it's it's um it's you know not it doesn't have that same uh ease of communicating cause and effect that you know some of the hard sciences do one area i would mention i think there's an interesting intersection happening of sort of soft and hard sciences you put it as the computational and big data resources that we're getting better and better right now are starting to get applied to the social science arena and in particular in the social media arena that we were talking about earlier so i think social sciences and in particular studies of behavior and predictions of behavior through social media is a very fast growing field and one that's going to make social science much more real to people and i think it's going to make people increasingly uncomfortable because it's getting better and better at figuring out why people are doing things what they're probably going to do how groups form how the groups decide what they believe and and how do you know you know what's true and what's not true and all the information that is flowing around us so i think it's a huge growth area and it will it's already becoming more scientific and probably will be uh increasingly uh difficult for people to feel comfortable about as it gets better you would have uh for deciding when to stay silent not secret but silent versus when to put it out there and i really think you would probably have a good answer for this i think it depends on what it is and what your goals are you know so um it depends there's so many unknowns like i'd have to talk to you specifically about the issue but sometimes things get high there you know i've had people i've had people tell me about what i'm doing and it has nothing to do with what i'm doing right yeah so i think you have to be able to describe what it is that you are doing and what you're not doing um and i think that there's value in doing that um you know we are looking at a range of things here's the thing that i'm focusing on other people may be doing other things that's not what i'm doing um as far as like an issue and making an issue more public or more known um i think we are seeing more and more uh that becomes outside of your control uh because of things like social media uh so i think i actually think being proactively thinking about how to um how to have public conversations about issues regardless of whether or not you want them to be known or not they're probably going to be known at some point um someone could take it and make it a big deal so we need to be prepared for how do we handle those conversations once they come up um one of the things i don't think i got too earlier was you know thinking ahead so um this is what i would like it to this is how i would like things to go this is how it may go this is how i hope it doesn't go and planning for each of those scenarios i think is really important i think we run the most challenges when we when we cut ourself unaware of the conversation that's already happening around her i've actually incurred some uh i'm just gonna read the real quick sorry for in the government there are leadership has gotten better in the last couple years i would say in embracing social media in particular because there was a point and i was in the army i was soldier once uh so i took a lot of orders and they said no we're not going to talk about anything ever and uh so social media is going to happen whether you wanted to be there or not and uh there was leadership in the military uh in the last few years has really embraced that especially the secretary of defense and depending on press secretary they're really good at sort of seizing this and saying okay this is a platform that exists but there was a time when they didn't want to have any social media interaction and i used to argue um to the effect that doing that is to your detriment because then other people are carrying their conversation for you whether you like it or not they're going to tell you what you're doing if you even if you're not doing it so being able to say okay this is a thing that exists and if this is a arena that exists and this is a place this conversations are happening let's be a part of it and i think the best in the recent years of DOD in particular has gotten much much better but we'll have a much stronger social media presence which has been much to their benefit i would think. I am Jennifer Brotsky with Boston University and Rick you alluded to the fact that the work that happened the DARPA funds is not happening in your building it's happening elsewhere and i wondered if maybe you and Jessica could talk about how you engage with your extramural partners at universities or companies if at all and maybe what we could do that would be helpful to you to getting the message out yeah thanks it is it is a complicated communications issue because this we don't own our all of our stuff right so i can't control what we communicate about our stuff that's mostly being done by other people the the policy around communications by partners or performers who are doing DARPA funded work at DARPA is pretty straightforward if you're doing 6.1 or or usually 6.2 work in basic research which we think is just you know you ought to be just freedom to publish and you should go talk about your work that's fine there's you just go ahead and do your own thing put out a press release if you if your scientists make some kind of an advance and and we don't really get in the way we like to communicate with people and be aware of that and sometimes we'll want to amplify a message if there's something interesting going on but we don't try to control that at all for more advanced work where there's practical applications going on it's more important that we coordinate communications and so we do us that performers talk to us when they feel like it's a milestone or a time to talk about their work it's not usually you know an issue or a difference of opinions just a matter of coordinating and making sure that we're both prepared so that we can answer questions and and make sure we our understandings of what just happened are the same and if not why why are they different so we just like to be in touch with people and find out you know what you'd like to talk about and we try to let our performers know and when we feel like it's a good time to advertise and achievement or talk about something or respond or not respond to some misinformation that may be out there and try to try to use our predictive powers to figure out what the best approach is I think to your question about what can you do to carry the conversation I think the best thing is to just have a conversation you know like you see something darkness and use this because you guys have great twitter feed it's awesome and you know you see a really cool vine that they'll have in this room I'm like share it you know like continue the conversation I think that's when it comes to what other people can do write stories about these things explain why it matters to you so the matters to you that it's going to and in some capacity that it will probably matter to other people in the same way so being able to continue to talk about these things making the matter to you and other people I think is a really cool thing so we have time for one last question if I have your hand up there on the back Peter Moroves with EMAPS the dimension that hasn't been covered I think in the two sessions this morning or if you go look at the AT&L science and technology plan they say DOD has 10,000 S&T projects they say we at AT&L can't understand them all so the issue is along with everything that you're saying is how do you go about making it so if someone wants needs to know about something which they obviously can't know about and that project has got a good explanation how is that person got a hope of ever navigating his way to that information well I guess that depends on which project now you're right 10,000 projects is a lot and it'd be hard to cover all that especially from a broad perspective but I guess it depends on what project that they're interested in and because I actually think there are some organizations who do a really good job of getting as much stuff out there as they can because they have a like many of the research labs and the organizations have programs where they say okay so you got this thing you're working on you're going to have to tell people about it and so we're going to write a press release and they go well we're not ready and they'll say okay just tell them that it exists so there are many many many press releases things that you can read that can discuss all manner of things biofuels lasers robots growing things on the moon all that stuff but it exists somewhere online that the thing is really weeding through it and I think that there are many different organizations that they keep to the just the fax man sort of approach to it I'd say like the army research lab the navy research lab the office of naval research the air force research lab and wrinkle war fighting laboratory DARPA they have actually like categories on that where you can go to research for more information and yes it has there's so much information out there we won't be able to cover all 10,000 projects all at once but you'll at least be able to get parts of information on some of those things within the organizations that control them for the most part and I would say on behalf of 18 now they have the defense technology and information center d-tech or as as a service we have to put our information on the particular website and you can search it it's not it's not exactly user friendly I would say but they also have this innovation marketplace that you can go to and that'll give you links to other sources of information like the laboratory in order to have their own website to talk about what they're doing specifically I think we I apologize you maybe you can continue this conversation afterwards but we've got to let these folks go and we've got to let you all have time to get through the lunch line and get back here with your food so that we can keep the force march going thank you very for hosting this thanks to all of you for participating very much appreciate it