 We're looking forward to this conversation, Alan, and you know, I won't do any lengthy introductions because I think the, as you're talking about your work, you know, that will give us what we need in terms of your background to and your interests. But for those of you who are online and here in the room. Alan you're the director right of the new directorate. No, that's not the title. I am a senior advisor so Erwin John Chandani is the director. The assistant director, or excuse me, he's the assistant director, and then the deputy assistant director is Gracie Narcho, both longtime NSF employees. Yeah, so I'm whenever you're ready I can I can jump in and tell you about tip and answer any questions you might have. That would be great we are definitely in get work done mode this morning so looking forward to this go ahead go right ahead. Thank you. Yeah, thanks so. Again my name is Alan Walker senior advisor minute NSF about five months now so I'm certainly not a NSF expert, many of you probably have worked more closely with NSF throughout your career but I am a tip expert. So I'm, I'm excited to share what we're doing prior to NSF. I was in the army, and I just retired after 26 years my last assignment was at DARPA was special assistant to the DARPA director, which really got me interested in science and technology and brought me to tip. So I'm going to share my screen and please let me know if you can see it. Okay. Okay, great. So, I guess before I get into it I'm going to just give you the bottom line up front. And that is, if you could mute your microphones. I'm getting some echo. Thank you. Working. Thank you. And I would say right up front is that we are about a year and I don't know four or five months into into existence, and we are absolutely still in startup mode. Which I think means that we are still rounding our out rounding out our portfolio, and we are looking for new ideas, we're looking for new partners. And I think importantly, we in tip are really trying to take a sort of unconventional you know look for unconventional programs that that may be typically NSF is not frequently done but but we're trying to, I don't know, you know for lack of a better expression we're trying to break glass and try, try new program ideas so much on two dear colleague letters that we have published in the last month or so a little later but but we really are serious about new partners and new programs. The other thing I just wanted to mention right up front is really our three pillars and I'll get into those in more detail but I think just it might help set the stage if you understand our three focus areas. The first is to accelerate diverse innovation ecosystems, and we think of innovation ecosystems. And really in two ways the first would be sort of geographic innovation ecosystems and if you're familiar with the NSF regional innovation engines that's an example where we're trying to really promote innovation across the country. The way we think about it is, I would say sort of topically. And so we have a program called the convergence accelerator which is really trying to bring multi disciplinary teams together to solve societal problems through through new technology. Our second thrust area is technology translation and technology development so translation of course is lab to market although we sort of say lab to society because there are other ways that new discoveries I think can take shape, rather than just industry. And then the other is the development part of it. You're probably familiar with the chips and sciences act that was passed last year in there there. It articulates 10 key technology areas. And so, while tip is technology agnostic we are focused on those 10 key technology areas, and trying to accelerate those. That's really broad and none of them would surprise you if you're not familiar AI quantum advanced materials, things like that. And then our final thrust area is workforce development. And that's primarily workforce development to to get folks into high tech careers stem based high tech careers. So, those are at a high level are three focus areas. And I think that might help as I go through you can kind of keep in mind those. Okay, so, so why tip. Let me just take a step back if I could for a moment. So, the National Science Board, which of course is the governing body for NSF several years ago, published a study called vision 2030. And in it it lays out three challenges, as you can see listed here in it. And it really, it really identifies that we are in a defining moment, where these three challenges. We hope that NSF can address those. So the first of course is global competition, primarily maintaining technological leadership, as we have in over many, many decades through organizations like NSF academia and others. But of course we see some of those areas slipping in terms of our leadership and so we want to accelerate that. And the second is that what what the National Science Board calls the missing millions. And this does this is not just tip this is of course NSF these are NSF sort of goals here, but the missing millions is really the town is everywhere across our nation, but opportunity certainly is not so how can we provide that opportunity so that we can, we can evaluate innovation across the entire US. And then third are the pressing social, socio economic challenges that we have, and let me let me briefly talk about those. So, from climate change to equitable access to education broadband connectivity to improving us infrastructure, really there, you know there was momentous challenges that we face. Additionally, America's research and innovation enterprise is undergoing historic changes really the pace of discovery has accelerated. And I would argue a lot of that is, of course, just the reliance and the, the robustness of the data that we produce and technologies like AI ML they can then synthesize that that data. Additionally, I think stem researchers and students of course, are much more passionate about channeling their work into addressing problems that we face in our community so students researchers, they want to have an impact. And, and they are much more interested for you know doing research that impacts society than just doing research for researchers sake. Our stem talent is really highly distributed. And we need new partnership models that can blend expertise and resources across the entire US. And so we think that we can, we can meet this moment, but it's going to take use inspired and translational research to really accelerate the discovery into practice. So that leads us to tip, which are our sort of key elements are translational research and use inspired research. Now, you, I think you can see here the, the topical focused NSF directorates there, of course, are seven that have been doing really curiosity driven research for the last 70 plus years. And by no means does NSF want to move away from that core work that we've been doing that have led to some really astounding discoveries. But what we do recognize is that it can take a long time for for discoveries to make their way into having societal impact. And that's where we see tip coming in is being able to be technology agnostic and focus on technologies that are promising for translation, then bring both the researchers and the end users together to sort of develop the problem statements and work on the research together to create solutions that are useful. So that's tip first first new directorate and NSF for 30 plus years and so we're excited about the opportunity to really meet this moment momentous challenge. So, our mission, I will not read it, but it really is about addressing the pivotal pivotal challenges and enhancing the fundamental research that NSF has been doing. Now on the. So I'm not going to I will not go through this but you can see at the end that it really is about keeping our leadership our technological leadership, but ultimately, growing the US economy, and the chips and sciences act is pretty clear about that of course the you know the end state is accelerated. Okay, so the valley of death you many many people, I think, and do we certainly talked about the valley of death when I was in the army. And there are different, I think there are different meetings but I think the, the, the common element to all how different communities use the valley of death is really when you know how do we bridge between researchers and private funding. And that's, that's one of the key aspects that we're trying to do and tip. On the bottom. You can see sort of the different. I hate to use the word phases because that implies that it's linear and that it isn't always linear when you go from a good idea to societal impact. But the bottom is really about our lab to market platform at all address and I'm sure many of you are familiar with some of those programs such as I core and sit or and pfi. But we have a variety of programs to really address and help researchers bring their, their good idea to the market or to society. And that we can really alleviate the valley of death now that's much harder than it sounds as you know. But we have, we have a whole host of programs that are aimed at trying to assist us and we have more on the way that that we're excited about. So, we're trying to bridge the valley. And I hope you can see us doing that through our, our portfolio that I'll get to in a second. One more note I mentioned NSF, sort of traditional NSF has really been focused on curiosity driven research that's really been, you know, investigator driven through academic teams primarily. And we think of that as more of a technology push. So you have these researchers come up with fabulous ideas. And they're trying to sort of push their ideas into the market, which can take a long, long time as we know. What we're trying to do in tip is really bring bring the users and the researchers together to to really before the research begins in earnest to really chart the way forward to really create to so that they can fashion the end state together. We hope that this is done through multi sector teams so multi discipline teams and multi sector teams from nonprofits, academia, industry, etc. And we see this as a poll because the users are involved in this. I just want to reiterate one more time on the left side is what NSF is traditionally been known for and we are in no way downsizing that in fact we are continuing to invest more on sort of the curiosity driven research, but with the chips and in fact, NSF received a fair funding plus up to create so that it is not in competition with the existing NSF portfolio. So as I mentioned tip is really about integrating with the NSF's existing directorates fostering new partnerships with industry nonprofits, academia, state and local governments, etc. To bring use inspired research and innovation to the entire country. So, as I mentioned I went through these three focus areas, but here they are again, so diverse innovation ecosystems. That's really creating that use inspired research across the country. The second is our, our lab to market platform and focusing on those 10 key technology areas so accelerating development in those. And finally, our workforce development, which is really about reaching those missing millions. Okay, so that's the background and sort of the high level what tip is about. I'm going to go into our portfolio now. I'm really sort of as broken down by these three quarries before I before I just keep talking. I'm going to pause to see if there are any questions since this I think this is sort of a smaller group. Thank you Alan. I do have a couple of questions but maybe others do too. Maybe we've been using the hand function. Maybe I'll just ask my clarifying questions quick. You just mentioned that there is a funding plus up can you refresh our memories as to what the funding plus up is for specifically tip. I'm going to get some of the numbers wrong, but, but the chips and sciences act increased the NSF budget by about a billion dollars of that billion about 800 million or so was for tip. So existing NSF. Plus up of, I mean, again my numbers are a little off here but about 300 million, and then tip for at least 20 fiscal year 23 is about 880 million. Okay, fiscal year 23. Got it. Thank you. And then you mentioned, you know use inspired research, translational research versus curiosity driven research. So basic research though that we're talking about is that correct use inspired basic research or translational basic research. Yes. That is a, that is a very good question and I would say we're, it is basic research but I think we're probably maybe expanding the definition of basic research. You know traditionally you think of basic research applied research, and then we're calling translational research use inspired research somewhere in the middle. We're trying to be, I would say, on purpose we're not defining what where it is in that continuum. Because, as you'll hear about in our portfolio we're, some of our programs are creating proof of concepts and experiments and prototypes, and that traditionally has not been the realm of basic research, I think. But, but to us that is very important in that translational research aspect is we you know we want to accelerate getting to applied or, or even higher so we, we have straight away from the traditional technology readiness level to our level that at least we use very frequently in DoD, and we've been exploring other sort of ways of defining this. So, and this all goes to, how do we know that we're, how do we measure that TIP is being successful. And so we're spending a lot of time right now, working through the metrics for these three core areas that I went through. Okay, we'd certainly be interested in that, how that evolves or maybe even provide input as a scientific community. More questions anybody have any clarifying questions so far. My experience with the ocean research community is that many of the research products that they produce, they have the scientists have no clue that they have a potential market for potential could be developed into a potential product and. But if TIP is also going to more aggressively look at some of the basic research that's going on, particularly in a place like ocean science to see if they think it has potential and then try to encourage the, the PI or some group to take that basic research and move it in other words a little different than starting out with use inspired research is to look at the basic research and try to decide what might have a real potential for market or societal benefit. Yeah, yeah, no, I couldn't agree more. So, we are so the short answer is, yes, we, we are trying to so some of our programs are, in fact, one of our programs with the biological coordination with the bio NSF directorate is identifying basic research that that is right for moving into translation. Translational research. And we hope that this is a model that we can spread throughout all the, the other topical focused NSF directorates where the program program directors, sort of in the back of their mind are always on the lookout for promising you know, promising basic research. We are, we have planned to have a liaison in tip that that from the other directorates that sit in tip that that really can give us insight into what the other directorates are working on and and help us identify those technologies. Now as you know that you know NSF makes about 11,000 awards a year and so that, you know, we're absolutely going to miss some, but, but we are trying to put a structure in place that will help identify those promising areas. And I think universities at least for their part are also doing some work to see, you know, to encourage faculty but we can talk about that a little bit more to I have a related question but Jason another clarifying question and then we'll have Alan continue. It's not a clarifying question, it can wait maybe until he goes through his portfolio to make more sense. Okay, let's wait. Cool, Alan, we want to make sure we get through all the materials. Thank you. So, so I'll start on diverse innovation ecosystems. So our first program that predates to actually this convergence accelerator started in 2019. But the conversions accelerator is the idea is to bring together multidisciplinary teams that really so NSF picks a topic area with community input. We then, it's almost a competition in some ways where we'll have teams provide sort of proposals based on the general topic area that we have. If they are selected for phase one, they get $750,000 for nine months to to mature their idea. And then they compete for phase two funding, which as you can see is $5 million over 24 months. At the end of that 24 months, they are. They compete for prototypes, proof of concepts, experiment so something tangible that can come out of it that is right for commercialization or societal challenges or or whatever. As you can see on the right, this is open to a variety of different sectors. So I'll just go to, well, before I go on so generally we run this three or four times a year with different topic areas and you'll see the topic areas on the next slide. Phase one is typically about 20 teams or so. And then we down select and phase two to about five teams. So our portfolio since 2019. You can see here, we we've made it to track and I don't know what happens when we get past track Z. What we do but you can see the variety of topics that we have really I think sort of very diverse. And most recently you can see track K L and M. So equitable water solutions, chemical sensing and bio inspired design. We are excited to partner with other organizations to help sponsor these tracks. So just as an example, track G, which is 5G. We've partnered with Department of Defense. They had some specific 5G use cases let's say that they were interested in and so that's track G. Track. I is we partnered with Australia there. I forgive me for my get there, but it's basically they're one of their science organizations that has a great interest in sustainable materials. And then we just recently announced that we're partnering with Sweden on track L for real world chemical sensing applications. And so, most of those are, you know, when they're all basically government agencies, some us some not. Well, we're interested in the next sort of the next phase is can we partner with industry on on sponsoring any of these tracks whether it's sharing sharing costs or expertise or use cases, those kinds of things. Our next program is the regional innovation engines we call the engines programs for short. This is our biggest investment sort of our flagship program. The engines is really about encouraging regions throughout the US to go all in on a technology area and really becoming sort of the center of the US that in that technology area. So we're, you know, we're not trying to create silicon valleys throughout the entire US. We want region, you know, Silicon Valley of course is sort of known for its IT but they're pretty broad. We are trying to create areas that regions where and these regions pick an area where they sort of have a, a an advantage already maybe they're already working on this technology area or maybe they already have facilities or infrastructure or the societal problem is really parent in that area so so we want a technology area that makes sense for the region. So a engine is going to require a partnership really amongst all sectors of the region so it needs to have strong academic state, local industry, you know, sort of you name it they all need to come together to really focus on that area. Okay, so there's, there's, there's two phases to this phase one which is that we're calling the development award is $1 million over two years really to help get a region plant you know off the ground I would say to form those partnerships and to do to do the initial work and then they can compete for the phase to the full scale engine which is up to $160 million for up to 10 years. We just last month announced the first batch, the first awards, those were the development awards, I'll show you those on the next slide. Fall-ish we're going to announce our first awardees for the full scale engines. Just, I think it was last week or maybe it was the week before we announced the semifinalist the 34 semifinalists for the, the actual engines. And I encourage you to go to the NSF website. There's an interactive map that you can see there on the left that you can hover over each of those gears and you can see who the organizations are that are partnered you can see their APIs you can see the PIs. And the hope is that because we're making all this information. Easy to find that it doesn't have to be NSF that are encouraging regions and organizations within those regions to partner we want we want this to be grassroots. These are our 44 development awards and you can see on the right the topic areas, really a wide variety. And then if you go on the NSF website you can see the, the 34 finalists as well. A related program to the NSF engines is the epic program. This is a program to help primarily academic institutions to sort of boost their capacity to create partnerships with engines. So this is again this is really a companion program to bring sort of non R1 universities to help them increase their capacity to partner to other related programs with the engines. And the first is you can see on the bottom left is the builder platform. So this is really a human centered. You know platform sort of makes it sound like it's an IT thing. This is much more than that this is training this is mentorship. This is tools and infrastructure to help a region. And become self sustaining. So we, we just so we release the solicitation about you can see in April and the proposals were due proposals were due like last week. I mean so we're going through those right now but, but we see this as key to really making a an engine successful. And then finally we're, we're still in the planning phases for this but we're looking at creating almost like a venture capital fund that that might be able to then provide that that startup funding for small businesses that come out of an engine to create to sort of help them reduce their technical risk and risk and become an actual company. Okay, so that's that's the engines. I'm going to move to tech translation and development. So our lab to market platform consists of several programs. The first is the innovation core or I core. This has been going on for, I want to say it's 2000. I'm going to get the day wrong 2009 or so. It was 2001. I don't remember but, but this has been a pretty long standing NSF program which has had a huge number of graduates I would say the innovation core program is really about helping researchers find their, find their market find the problem they're trying to solve. And one of its sort of famous exercises is these teams need to they may need to make 100 phone calls for two potential customers to really try and answer the question like, will someone actually pay money for what I'm, I'm developing here. It is $3 million per team for five $3 million per year for five years. And excuse me, I'm sorry, the teams get $50,000 for seven weeks. And for the last, I would say as several years ago we transition from everything being run out of the NSF headquarters to these NSF hubs which are spread throughout the country can see on the map there. That really allowed us to increase our reach. Another interesting thing about the iCore is, you know, graduates of the iCore program. Many continue to go on and create a startup but I would say many also kind of go back to the lab and rethink what they were developing and like Jesus this wasn't going to work out. And that is a success as well because it helps them really focus what their what their product is going to be. A second program in our lab at market platform is called PFI partnerships for innovation. So PFI is is helping reduce technical risk this is pre startup formation so this is helping reduce technical risk for programs that have NSF lineage so they were funded through other NSF programs really to sort of begin their journey and becoming a startup. There are two different, there are two different ways you can participate the first is focus primarily on technology translation translation. And then there's research partnerships, so they both are all about technology translation. But the research partnership adds the element that it needs to have multi sector teams that are focused on sort of creating as the name implies partnerships. Those partnerships are primarily nonprofits and academia. Okay, as we sort of think about moving through the maturity of a researcher having an idea to starting a startup. SBIR and STTR, which are also known as America's seed fund. This is really designed to be the first funding that a startup receives the first. funding period. So this is, this is designed to help a company reduce their technical risk to make themselves really more. I don't know to make themselves more interesting to private funds. You can see there's three phases you can, you can get up to almost $2 million if you go through all three phases. It's a super fund, it's about 300 or so million million dollars a year. And we've had some pretty. Some, I would say there's been some real successes through this, such as Qualcomm and others that that really have taken off. And I would say sort of, oh, much of their, oh, some of their success to being funded by SBIR initially. I've really focused, I think on pathways that are focused on industry, but another pathway that we see is open source. And so we have created this program called pathways to enable open source ecosystems or pose. And this is the realization that not all ideas need to be commercialized. There are plenty of other ways through open source ecosystems that that we think things can be successful. And so this is a program designed to create self sufficient self sustaining ecosystem open source ecosystems. It doesn't necessarily need to be a sort of I think of like Linux or you know, many it software programs are open source but this this is a little broader does not necessarily need to be it focused. So there's certainly hardware and forming regulations, those kinds of things that we're sort of, we're keeping the definition of open source rather broad here. Another program that has been very, we've gotten a huge amount of interest is accelerating research translation or art. Art is focused on academic institutions that have a strong research capability but don't necessarily have a strong translation capability. So this is a grant to academic institutions to increase their translation infrastructure, really to help those PIs sort of, you know, go through the translational research pipeline to, you know, whether it's starting the startup or selling their, you know, selling their, their technology patents. It was founded by the number of proposals that we got when I think it was several hundred we were just shocked. So we've received all the proposals and now we're going through them which is a tall order to the quantity but but we definitely see that we're getting something just by the amount of interest by the community. So those were about the translation. I'm going to touch on sort of the topical, the topical translation the topical development again those 10 key technology programs that are in the Chips and Sciences Act. So Noble Reach Emerge is a nonprofit that we've partnered with to really accelerate discoveries that have come out of our biological sciences directorate. So we're identifying 10 or so programs out of again out of bio that are right for translation. This will provide both money and resources to help develop the technology so sort of, you know, the science part of it, but also the expertise, the mentorship and sort of the background to help companies or to help researchers start a company. And so this is still relatively new. I think we have three or four PIs that have started in the Emerge program and we're working on several others. So, Alan, I'm keeping my eye on the time I want to make sure there's plenty of time left for discussion and this group is really quick on the uptake so can we maybe just very quickly get through the rest of the slides so we have absolutely hold on to your, hold on to your seats. We're buckled up. Okay, so one thing that I do. So, I think this program is really cool so I'm going to just pause a little bit on this prototype open knowledge networks, just because I think it helps illustrate a point. So, tip was charged with 10 key technology areas, our budgets, let's say it's 800 million. If you do the math, that's 80 million or so per technology area. That's not going to really move the needle on some of these technology areas, say such as artificial intelligence. And so we're doing a lot of thinking about how can we help, you know, move the needle on some of these areas, and for artificial intelligence, our, you know, our answer is this open knowledge networks. So this is, this is really a program to help create the data, sort of smart open knowledge networks are basically databases that have meaningful connections that elements in the database. This is really about creating the data to help researchers then train their machine learning algorithms. So again, we're not necessarily investing in specific AI ML technologies were investing in the infrastructure and we see this as, you know, sort of a model for how we can approach all the 10 technology areas. Okay, we do have a dear colleague letter out asking for input for tips roadmap. So I encourage you to check that out. We really are interested in what the community thinks on what tips future investments should be. Okay, we're near the end, I promise, I'm going to hit workforce development pretty quickly. We have several workforce development programs. This one called excellent is all about experiential learning. How can we provide experiential learning from as we say from Katie Gray. And it just tackles all three of those areas so they're really three tracks the first is sort of K through 12 and that's primarily curriculum development maybe some internships for high school students. The new graduates aspect is how can we provide online or excuse me experiential learning opportunities for new graduates in STEM fields to get them interested. The final is career pivot or so folks that might be an industry. How do we give them experiential opportunities in STEM career fields to help them, you know, pivot to a STEM field so that's excellent. And this is a entrepreneurial fellowship through the activate nonprofit that we partnered with, and this is to help researchers individual researchers to give them both money and infrastructure to complete their, their products, their research, excuse me. And then we also have another dear colleague letter out asking for thoughts on how we can approach the missing millions. We have our three focus areas. You can see them right here. I won't go through them again. We see partnerships as really foundational to all this. So please reach out if you're interested. And I do want to just the final slide here is in, you can, I'll send you the slides you can bruise these later but the chips and sciences act gave tip quite a few things to do, and you can see where we are in the broad list of areas there so you can bruise those later. And then finally, we like to show this because partnerships isn't just with academia. And we want to help those, those different sectors find where, where, you know, they can coordinate and collaborate and partner with NSF. Okay, so I appreciate the prompt to speed up. And I am definitely open to questions. Great super interesting stuff and great overview. Thank you so much for taking the time to do that. I'm sure there will be questions and maybe I'll start out with Jason, and then I'll go to Mona. Thank you Alan. A lot of these products or technology or information data products. I'm wondering if you could speak to if there is room for commodities as a product. You had food security and aspects of bio products and potentially help development and so on and so forth, wondering what room there might be for those types of things and particularly the blue economy. Thank you. Great question. So we did actually have a convergence accelerator track focused on blue to blue economy. And if you're interested, you can, you can see all the funded programs on the convergence accelerator website. I think the convergence accelerator is a, you know, that is, that is going to be a way for us to focus on some of those many things as you, as you mentioned, the other I would say primarily primary way of addressing that is through the regional innovation engines. If you look at the, the different focus areas that the engines have many of them are kind of that hard, hard tech, for lack of a better expression that I think now it's going to take several years I think for the engines to see to see results So my hope is that the engines will get after sort of what you just addressed in your question. Thank you, Mona. Thank you to the thanks Ellen for the great presentation I have a I have two questions actually so I'll speak my first question. As a research administrator I find it's very very difficult to have academics work with industry. And, you know, it's hard enough to work outside your own discipline, partners outside of academia. In your administration of the of the different regional engines or other funding opportunities that come out of the tip directorate have you encountered some of those challenges I wonder if you could reflect on some of the challenges that you have faced as as a tip directorate. And my second question is, I think it's implicit in these regional engines that de I am the idea of engaging and users in the co production of knowledge. I think that is quite implicit in the work of tip but if you could reflect a little bit on diversity equity inclusion, how tip addresses these, these areas. I'm really greatly appreciated. Thanks. Yes, absolutely. Yeah, we. So, we are. We are, I'm not going to say struggling we're spending a lot of energy, trying to partner with industry. Some of those. I didn't include some of our workforce development programs I'll send them in our larger deck with companies like micron and Intel and Samsung IBM. Your question is, I couldn't agree more. And, and so, you know, NSF we are standing up I would say the first thing is we're standing up a partnerships office that is is really focusing on how we can bring different sectors together. I can imagine that because NSF was struggling with it that that institutions like yours are struggling with it to just because we speak very different languages, I think, and our timelines are very different. So, we certainly don't have the answer but we do know that it is going to take building trust trust based partnerships. Recently, it's been about a month and a half ago we had a industry summit where we brought almost 60 different companies together to to to really talk about the industry academic divide maybe the wrong word but how we can come together so we're still working. Through sort of bringing those industry groups together, but they had some really fabulous ideas on what makes what partnerships, what what a successful partnership looks like to industry. So, please stay tuned to that. The second about the I. So many of our workforce development programs have, I would say, an aspect of that built in. And, you know, just the definition of the missing millions I hope you can see the link to sort of the diversity and inclusion that that we're trying to get after. Several programs I think that we're, we're working through their, they aren't finalized yet but you know that we're hoping can address even more sort of our MSIs that can can at least provide more opportunity to students there so but I would say it's baked into everything we do. And that isn't just for tip that is the NSF directors mandate call. Thank you. Let's go to you. Thank you very much for that presentation. I have two questions but in the interest of time feel free to, you know, keep your responses brief as you do you see fit but so I understand the convergence accelerator model of having a cohort around a team. My first question is, is there a mechanism a kind of on ramp if you will, if an individual or team wants to address a previous theme. That's question one. And then question two is really about broadening participation you know how much is broadening participation baked into tips mission, you know do you have data on the demographics of those engaged in the programs you support. Do they look different than NSF etc. That's it thanks. So the question we don't have a mechanism to go back for previous conversions accelerator topics. And I think we just have so many good ideas that that we're just we're trying to move forward. I think about broadening participation. We, we have lots of data, I think, lots and lots of data NSF has huge amounts of data as you, as you probably know. What I now is finding as we develop the metrics, I think, is what, what data, what data, do we focus on. And we have some ideas, I won't share them now because they're very pre decisional. But, but I would say that one of the, I would say one of the areas we are spending a lot of time on is, how do we know that an engine is successful. And the inclusion aspect is absolutely built into that. You know, we're, we're talking like is, is it patents filed as a jobs created is it, you know, how do we measure the underserved community. You know, sort of their, their ability to participate in an engine and other NSF program so I don't have a great answer for to be honest but it is something that we are thinking pretty hard about. Thank you Alan. Thank you. We have eight minutes and lots of questions still so if we can move through as many as we can that'd be great Ajit. Thanks much. Just curious to get your sense of how you're seeing this issue where technology for societal benefit as you put it in the painting slides with a large market works differently than technology for curiosity driven science, which often fails because of the market size. How does tip sort of think about that challenge and what they might do to make a difference at that. Does that question make sense. I think so. I think translation is, I don't, I don't think I need to tell anyone here translation is really hard. And every path, every good idea takes a very unique path and so. So, I think one of the things that we're trying to do and tip is, we're trying to, you know, how, how can we create an infrastructure I think that that can address all these great ideas that have unique paths to follow. Hey, Alan, I think Ajit's question actually gets a little bit at that success metric issue. One metric of success is, is the technology going to launch and be self sustaining in the marketplace. But maybe another way to measure success is is the technology going to enable data collection that was never possible before, or discoveries that, you know, even if it's never going to be self sustaining in terms of in the marketplace. But it still might be a huge success if tip could enable some amazing breakthrough that would result in us seeing the ocean and for instance in ways that we never did before. Yeah, thanks for the clarification. I agree. I don't have a great answer for you. Shannon. Nope, I think you guys just asked my question. Oh, sweet. Excellent she made. Thank you so much. And my question is kind of tangential to Mona and Peter's question about the EI so please feel free to keep it brief but you know getting getting at how these awards are actually drawn out or rolled out and implemented like, do you have an outreach strategy for the partnerships like do you just post it on the website and go or is it kind of like, you know you get the word out in some ways so that you reach specific, you know nonprofits or, you know specific target industry. That's my first question and then the second is, you know, it gets into kind of like, you know what requirements or guidelines have you guys talked about are there for like co development or cool production of knowledge. And specifically nonprofits you know I'm looking at some of those partnerships, so that the partnership is equitable and that they're doing partnerships are doing their due diligence to make sure that you know it's not that it's it's all the eyes are dotted and teaser cross the first your first question I it is very, I would say close to me I resonate with your first question because obviously NSF has incredible reach into the academic community and the relationships we have span decades. And we don't necessarily have the same reach right now for for both industry and nonprofits. And so our first year has been frankly pretty reactive when it comes to, you know, these partnerships so it's been someone approaching us, I think, saying hey I have a great idea let's do something. From year to onward we are trying to be much more proactive and assessing what are the communities that we need to reach, and what are the institutions that represent those communities and then let's, let's go that direction. I would say we're not there yet but we, we understand that it needs to be. It needs to be the other way around right we just can't rely on this reactive nature. Can you repeat your second question I'm sorry. Yeah sorry I was kind of convoluted I was wondering, you know, it follows that second you know you guys reaching out to specific partners. If there's if you guys are talking about specific guidelines in the RFP or whatever that ensures that there's co development happening, you know with the partners. Yeah, absolutely. So many of our programs are requiring partnerships. In fact, I think I'm trying to think. Yes, most of our programs are requiring that of course the engines I mean that's all about partnerships. And so, you know partnerships is in our name right and so that it's really those multi sector teams. And the devil can be in the details I'm like who's doing what. And, and so that's up to the program officers to really dig into that to see whether it's appropriate and equal effort. Thank you. Thank you Alan. There's also a question in the Q amp a that came from the public and it looks like this idea of tip enabling. You know, the technologies that it that help us with our research, even if they are not, you know, necessarily market neutral. You know that is essentially creating a feedback loop, right because the more we can discover about the ocean for example or the earth, the more than that is going to lead to new ideas that will be marketable down the line. And I guess a strong suggestion that that feedback loop may be something that you all could consider. And then I'll add a question in the just a few minutes left that we have. You mentioned that the advancing research translation program received immense interest hundreds, I think you said several hundreds of proposals. That to me is not a surprise from where I sit in an academic institution with very research active faculty. You know our faculty, specifically the faculty who I might think of who could really engage in the space are certainly busy with basic research that they're already doing. And of course are steeped in how to write an NSF core proposal right we've been doing this since, you know, infancy in a sense that when we were grad students. Whereas you know I know writing an SPIR STTR any kind of other proposal that is more connected to industries a whole nother beast that and, and I think faculty do require the time to learn how to think in new ways. And the advancing research translation program was providing that opportunity so my own personal view, you know I encourage you to really think about broadening that program in order to really get us to the point where we have the, the workforce that the, the the PIs who can, who have the time and knowledge and know how to engage in this very important space. And if I could just add to your comment. We have heard from the community that it would be that. It can be challenging to apply to many different NSF programs, sort of serially, as opposed to, you know, could there be a mechanism that might allow a program, or an idea, a PI to sort of move through a process or let's say an infrastructure to help us again implies many already. And I think we are taking a look at, you know how can we make this easier for the PIs as as they, you know, navigate this lab to market platform. We have a lot of ideas. Again still with their infancy but, but we want key to translation is reducing that sort of the barriers to and roadblocks and you know crazy paths that that you might have to take to getting to put in your idea into practice so I agree. Thank you thank you very much for your presentation it really was a great overview and you all are doing an immense amount of work and we are, we are really thrilled that we got to hear from you and thank you also for those who attended this open session. Clearly there's interest from outside of this small committee as well so thank you again. See you later.