 Well, good afternoon, everyone. This is the journey ever since Dean of College of Engineering at Purdue. My sincere apology that I wasn't a good enough engineer to work out how to join the event at 115. And I'm glad to be able to say a few words to welcome all of you to the panel portion of today's incredibly exciting. Distinguished engineering lecturer here at college. As you know that Purdue engineering, now the largest top 10 engineering college in the country strives towards the pinnacle of excellence at scale as part of that. We started three years ago to invite about eight most incredibly outstanding and distinguished lectures to speak here in person used to be and now online virtually. And today we welcome Dr. Mark Lewis. Now, you may have already heard of the introduction by Bill Crosley about Mark Lewis. I'll try to be brief, but I can't not really refrain my enthusiasm. Just because what an incredible national treasure Dr. Lewis has been, what an outstanding colleague he has also been, I'll simply highlight without reading his entire biography here, three particular dimensions. One is that he is one of us in academia and served on Maryland's faculty for 25 years, including as the chair of the department of aero astro engineering. And furthermore, he was the longest serving chief scientist at the United States Air Force and had an indelible mark and very positive impact to anything that flies and deep knowledge about national defense and emerging technology, the subject of today's lecture. And thirdly, last year, he was also the deputy undersecretary of defense in charge of all the modernization, all the research and development of multiple agencies that were very familiar with and an incredible job as a leader in our national defense ecosystem. And I had the chance to know Dr. Lewis even prior to that, when he was the keynote at the hypersonics summit in July 2019 and got to work with him on a few different things last year. It is such a great pleasure to welcome him to the Purdue ecosystem in ways more than one. And today, fantastic privilege and the honor to get to introduce now that I can work WebEx at 3 o'clock today to introduce Dr. Mark Lewis to all of you. And looking forward to the panel discussion here, and I think I should turn it now to Dan, who is moderating this panel with Dr. Lewis. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. This is Dan. One of the very proud college of engineering professors who work in aerospace systems and in hypersonics and areas that Dr. Lewis talked about. So eloquently, I also direct our Purdue Institute of global security and defense innovation in which we've been able to work together with mark and others to try to advance a whole front. National security efforts. So very gratified by this, this day, day and a half that Dr. Lewis is spending with us. And my most important role here today is to actually introduce a more effective moderator for the panel than myself. And that is Liz Benitez. Liz is a PhD student in aero astro researching hypersonic instabilities related to boundary layer separation. Given that, it will be no surprise that she studies under professor Steve Schneider and Joe, prior to starting her PhD studies at Purdue. She worked as a research engineer at GTRI. And also earned a master's in aerospace engineering from Georgia Tech. And she's currently, as many of us are working remotely and finishing her PhD. In her case from Ohio with her wonderful family. So. Liz, would you take us to the introduction of the panel? Yes, thanks. Professor does. So, I'm going to introduce the, the 4 professors that we have here today for the panel. So, 1st, a professor, Jonathan, he received his bachelor of science and mechanical engineering from the university of Rhode Island in 1988. He earned his master's in PhD degrees in mechanical and aerospace engineering from Princeton University. After graduating from Princeton in 1995, he joined the Air Force research laboratory where he worked as a research engineer until 2015. He's currently a professor in the school of aeronautics and astronaut except Purdue. Dr. has a very broad research experience with publications in the experimental theoretical and computational aspects of fluid dynamics and plasma physics. His work has been supported financially by FOSR, O and R, and AFRL, and by grants of super computer time under the DOE insight award and a DOD frontier project. He's an AFME fellow and an AA associate fellow. Next up is a professor with Carol Handwerker. She's a Reinhardt Schumann, junior professor of materials engineering and environmental and ecological engineering at Purdue. Before joining Purdue in 2005, she served as the chair of the NIST metallurgy division where she started her career as an NRC postdoctoral fellow, following her PhD in materials science and engineering from MIT. And I didn't mention, I also am an MIT alum from my bachelor's, so it's neat to see so many alum here from there too. Her research areas include developing innovative technologies for next generation microelectronics and solar cells, improving the reliability of lead-free soldering, and trying to connect particularly for high performance military and aerospace electronic applications, among several other topics. Professor Handwerker is a member of the DOE critical materials institute leadership, focused on accelerating technology transfer of CMI R&D and recycling reuse and remanufacturing. She is also a co-PI of a major DOD program and is leading, recently announced, $40 million five-year DOD program and facilitating the transition to lead-free electronics and defense system. Next up, we have Professor Jennifer Neville. She is the Samuel D. Kant Professor of Computer Science and Statistics at Purdue. She received her PhD from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2006 and was PC chair of the SIAAM International Conference on Data Mining in 2019 and the ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data in 2016. From 2015 to 2018, she was an elected member of the AAI Executive Council. And in 2012, she was awarded an NSF Career Award. In 2008, she was chosen by IEEE as one of AI's 10 to watch and in 2007 was selected as a member of the DARPA Computer Science Study Group. In her work, which includes 130 peer-reviewed publications with 10,000 citations, it focuses on developing machine learning and data mining techniques for complex relational and network domains, including social, informational, physical and biological networks. And finally, we have Professor Stephen Hister, who is the Rise Back Distinguished Professor in the Departments of Aeronautics and Astronautics and Mechanical Engineering at Purdue. Professor Hister earned his bachelor's and master's degrees in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Michigan and he received his PhD in Aerospace Engineering from UCLA in 1988. He has worked experience at Lockheed California Company and the Aerospace Corporation, where he spent the bulk of the 1980s. He's also spent time at TRW and Blue Origin as part of sabbatical visits. Professor Hister's published extensively in the areas of chemical rocket and air-breathing combustion, atomization, fuel propellant injection, injection dynamics, and system level studies of aerospace vehicle concepts, including detonation bias propulsion. Since 2014, Professor Hister's group has focused on development of rotating detonation engine combustors with current AFOSR and DOE sponsored efforts along these lines. So that's just a little background. All of these professors have, it seems like extensive work in defense-related projects in addition to open-source material. And just to kind of get everyone started talking, I wanted to just go down the line of everyone here and just kind of ask, in your field, what do you think is going to be the next game-changing technology in terms of defense? So Professor Projie, if you want to start. Sure. Well, I'm a big fan of plasma-based flow control as maybe a game-changing, a possible game-changing technology. So the advantages of that kind of technology is that you can do flow control actuation at electronic time scales rather than mechanical time scales. So instead of say millisecond level actuation, you can get to nanosecond level actuation. And that would let us do things like perhaps manipulate laminar turbulent transition at hypersonic speeds. So that's the short answer of my game-changer. Awesome. Thanks about Professor Handberg. So my game-changer is heterogeneous integration and advanced packaging. What's happening is we don't have just monolithic chips where you put all the information, all of the functionality into the chips. We need much more flexibility. So there are these things called chiplets that are being developed, and they have to be integrated in new ways that demand new materials, new performance, and new designs. So heterogeneous integration and advanced packaging. The Department of Defense is investing in this area. That's my technology. Awesome. Thanks. I think that Professor Neville. Yeah. I think my game-changing technology is already happening and was mentioned by Mark Lewis earlier that I think machine learning and AI systems are going to become more and more pervasive in, I think, the limitations that prevent these systems from becoming larger game changes are really issues that we have in combining together the systems into larger components where multiple AI systems are used together in robust ways that are not only robust to adversaries, but also robust to unexpected data and events. And so I think once we have the technology that can allow our methods to be more flexible across new domains that haven't been seen before, we'll really start to see the game-changing aspects of AI and machine learning. Awesome. Thanks. And last but not least, Professor Huster. Well, I'm one who burns things. And in the propulsion propulsion area, today's engines, we burn with what we call deflagration, which is a low velocity combustion, essentially a constant pressure conditions. The community is growing interest in detonation based propulsion, and that's been an area I've been working, as you mentioned, with the promise of not only increased thrust but greatly reduced combustor size. Both of these things have a large intersection with aerospace, and in particular with the hypersonic propulsion aspects. Awesome. And Dr. Lewis, I know you mentioned like four key technologies in your lecture earlier, and maybe in case if anyone has joined who might have missed the lecture, if you want to mention them. Sure. So I'm going to be your difficult panel member today. I worry about the term game-changer. It gets used a little bit too often. You know, there truly are some revolutions in technology, and then there are evolutions in technology. I happen to think that the field of hypersonics overall is as close to a game-changer as you can get, just as I happen to think artificial intelligence is truly a game-changer. Hypersonics, why is that important? Well, because it introduces speed, maneuverability, it really changes the way you use technologies in the battlefield. If I've got a hypersonic system, suddenly I've got a capability that has tactical applications with strategic input. Now, how do you do that? I think Jonathan and Steve correctly alluded to elements of that, right, propulsion advances, flow control advances, right? This is a very challenging regime in which to operate. I'd also say that the whole design aspects of a hypersonic vehicle, being able to integrate the engine with the airframe, handling temperature loads on very sharp leading edges that are also extremely efficient aerodynamic configurations, that enables these systems, then that creates this opportunity. Okay, thank you all. So I guess I haven't seen any questions yet from the audience. So for people who have questions for any of the panel members, including Dr. Lewis, you can ask those in the Q&A box down here, but I do have some questions to kind of get the discussions going between all of the panelists. So I have one for Dr. Lewis and Professor Pajee. So Dr. Lewis, you mentioned, you called out ground test facilities at Wind Tunnel specifically during your lecture, which I was very happy to hear since I currently work in Wind Tunnel. And I know there are other industries, for example, I think I've read about Formula One, are transitioning exclusively to computational fluid dynamics and modeling simulation and away from ground testing. And I was happy to hear you see that ground testing has a role in defense in the future anyway. So I was wondering Professor Pajee, I know you work in modeling and simulation, working together with experimentalists as well. So if the two of you might want to elaborate on how computational fluid dynamics and ground testing can support each other in the field of defense. Jonathan, you want to go first? Sure. Well, I think we should approach prediction with humility. And especially today, which is the 10th anniversary of the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster, you know, we should reflect on that that we don't always know what's going to happen in a complicated system. And so I really think that there has to be an integrated approach to prediction. So as a former experimentalist, you know, in early my career, I did Wind Tunnel experiments. I have some perspective on that. And I'm very skeptical of both experiment and computation now having done both. So I think what we get from in this in this new situation is that if experiments are very expensive like flight tests, we can't skip doing them. But by doing simulation beforehand, we can make very good use of our time. So we can pick what things we need to measure, you know, what areas have the greatest uncertainty. And we can design experiments to try to tease out those pieces that we need to make the model better. So that that is one aspect of the work. So I really am not an advocate of going to 100% simulation to design anything. And at some point, you have to test. And this is the fundamental basis of science that, you know, the real world is the test that we put our theory against. And we always have to make that test that comparison to keep ourselves honest. So that's that's another aspect of it. The final thing I'd like to say is that even though our models in say, in fluid mechanics are very based very much on physics and chemistry, fundamental science is well known. There are aspects of modeling that are based on rules of thumb, and heuristics and judgment. And so we we make approximations, we make assumptions about what's going on. And there are many of those assumptions are not necessarily correct in all cases. So when we step outside the box that we're comfortable with, we have problems. And when I was at AFRL, I had some association with some flight tests like HDB2 and X51. And if you're familiar with the story of those flight tests, there were significant problems at various stages and very unexpected events. So we have to, you know, we have to consider that that aspect of it. I'll hand it over to Mark. You know, I couldn't have said it better. So so I like to point out, there are deficiencies in both modeling and simulation, and in ground test, right? Let's talk about modeling and simulation. So if I'm if I've got a computer model, let's say I'm solving the fundamental equations fluid motion. What I'm really doing is solving numerical approximations to this fundamental equation. And there are times when those fundamental equations actually fail in some of the regimes that that we deal with, right? Especially in hypersonic flight. The basic equations of fluid motion, the Navier-Stokes equations, have failing. There are regions that they do not apply particularly well in parts of the hypersonic flight machine. So every every numerical simulation is an approximation. Same time, wind tunnels also have deficiencies. Real real real real vehicles flying in the atmosphere don't have walls on either side, right? There are there are effects that we cannot simulate. So we use both of those tools to the best of our ability and use use each of their strengths and weaknesses to get a better understanding. Yeah, I love the example of both X-51 and HTV2. So there's a great story about HTV2. It was a DARPA Air Force project. Originally the plan was to do no wind tunnel testing. It was going to be entirely designed with computation. We had some some brilliant minds at AFRL said just a second, we need to feed a new wind tunnel. And we did. And it was pretty fortunate as we learned from physics in the wind tunnel that we had never predicted in any of the codes. We wound up doing a little bit of redesign. Air Force and DARPA got into a fight over doing more wind tunnel testing. We wound up not doing doing more wind tunnel testing. We flew it. It failed. So so I'm a I'm a big fan of the combination of the chip. So I think we have good agreement on the combination, the appropriate combination of the tools we have. There's the way to go. Yeah, that sounds pretty great to me. And happy to be in this field then and be a more computationalist with doing experiments for a portion of the physics at least. I have a good question here from Professor Crosley. That's a broad question for all the panelists. Can the panelists provide their thoughts about where university research might provide advantages over defense related work conduct or over work conducted at the research lab, for example? What about university research provides additional value? I guess we can start with well, Professor Fadi, I'll bring it back to you just briefly since you did work at both AFRL and as a professor now. Yeah, just one one one quick observation is that DOD research labs are necessarily very focused on particular aspects of you know, the DOD needs and they have trouble working outside the box. Whereas university is very unconstrained and can think about things that maybe are unexpected or unrelated to the mainstream that may prove to be outstanding contributions, but not in the obvious flow of technology development. That makes sense. I know Professor Handwerker, you previously worked at NIST. So would you have any insight in comparing your experience at NIST versus being in academia for defense? Sure, I'd be happy to. So NIST has its goal to use U.S. innovation and industrial competitors or improve that by advancing measurement science standards and technologies in ways that promote economic growth and development. So NIST had the advantage that you could do short-term research in close collaboration with industry and with other parts of the government. In addition, we could also tackle some long-term research. So it was that great combination that I think is, as Jonathan just said, maybe some of the DOD labs don't have that advantage to look at some of the new development or even develop new things themselves. You know, NIST has a world-renowned quantum computing group and from that I think they've won three Nobel prizes. So NIST has that great combination and even in metallurgy and material science, we were able to use that model to make changes to make improvements both now and in the future. So in transitioning to Purdue, it was actually quite natural to be able to do that. First of all, we all live by funding, right? So we worked with the Department of Defense Transportation, Energy, etc. The only agency that we didn't really work with was NSF. And so by going from NIST to Purdue, I found that same, I guess, esprit de corps at Purdue that people really are open to collaboration. They bring their A-game to the table and to try to do something in support of what the research sponsors need, like the Department of Defense. So I think that actually it's an excellent transition to be able to have. Awesome. Professor Huster, I know you do a lot of work with Zucro. Do you want to talk a bit about the facilities there and what advantages they supply for defense research? Oh, well, I guess I wanted to dovetail a little bit off of John's answer there to Professor Crossley's question. Oh yeah, go ahead. The universities do, you know, in my mind, it provides for a diversity of thought. Working with young people that don't have inherent internal biases of a large organization is neat. I'll give you an example. You know, so I spent some time at TRW. TRW invented and developed rocket engines surrounding a specific type of injector, a pintle injector. So if you went to that organization, you asked them for a new rocket engine, they immediately show you a pintle injector. And it may not be the right answer for that new rocket engine. So having a diverse thought, having people that don't have internal biases is a way that new ideas come about. One way to generate new ideas. So I thought it was important to dovetail off of this discussion. We can come back if you want, but I'm sure we need to hear from others. Oh yeah, and so we also have Professor Neville if you want to add in. Sure, I don't know how my research compares to everybody else in the panel because a lot of words that have been said I don't understand so far. But in the machine learning space, I think one of the big advantages in academia is that we often look for abstractions of problems that apply to both DOD specific applications but other applications that are more benign that can be talked about in an unclassified setting. And so being able to formulate a problem that's important to DOD in a very generic way on a public data set that a large set of students and faculty can become interested in and do their research on really pushes forward research at a pace that is not possible with many of the more complicated classified problems that DOD labs are working with. And so in my collaboration with labs where I often have students go for internships, I can't usually even hear about some of the problems but we'll talk enough to know that I can frame it as some prediction problem on Twitter with respect to fake news and they'll say yes, okay, that sounds good and then I know that what we're working on is relevant. So I think that's an important aspect as well. That's really interesting. So we have another question from the audience here which I am going to direct to Dr. Lewis from Jacob Green. What is the likelihood of seeing a hybrid aircraft similar to the Boeing Sugarvolt concept aircraft being used in military capacity in the near future? I'm not sure how you define near future. It's always difficult making predictions about the future. I wouldn't say in the foreseeable future but interesting technology is certainly worth pursuing. So by the way, can I jump in on the last conversation? Oh yeah, definitely. So I'll point out that universities make a tremendous contribution because they not only produce top quality research, they also produce students as other people have alluded. That's also one of the products coming out of the University Research Lab and that's not to be underestimated. I mean think about the infusion of talent into the labs, into the rest of academia and industry. That's absolutely critical. So the Department of Defense generally has a formula for basic research. Roughly about 70% of the basic research dollars get spent outside the department, mostly in universities. Only about 30% get spent inside the laboratories. That has some beneficial effects. Frankly, it helps the labs keep their game up. They're kind of competing with the best and the brightest and that's important. It also though, having that much, it becomes a forcing function for academia. I say when a program manager at a place like AFOSR or ONR authors a broad agency announcement announcing what the service is interested in, you get the whole of American academia kind of looking at those problems, look at those issues, think about how they can apply what they're doing to that particular area of interest for the Department of Defense. So it really is a very, very close relationship and important. Awesome. So I have kind of a related question, I guess, to that for you and Professor Neville. So machine learning is like a very big topic right now, particularly in industry in addition to in defense and computer science is in general a field with a variety of career options in the commercial world. So what would you say to a computer science student? Why should they be interested in working or collaborating with the defense industry as opposed to maybe going somewhere like Google or Intel or something like that? I would say that we were actually working pretty closely with across the industry. When I was in the Pentagon, Intel was one of our closest partners. So and Google as well has worked with the defense. So they're not usually exclusive. I think that careers in supporting defense activities can be very satisfying. Artificial intelligence is a great example. There are so many applications in defense that lend themselves to the capabilities that are enabled by artificial intelligence and so many operations that can be enhanced with artificial intelligence. You know, I think the orphan in the room is you've got some folks who ask the question, well, will this technology be used in an ethical manner? Will it be used, you know, appropriately? And the way to make sure that happens is to be part of the conversation, be involved in technology development to make sure it is used. I guess I mark said a lot of the same things that I would say. I think that it's very difficult to convince computer science students, at least in the MLAI space right now, to go work for anyone other than the big internet companies because they pay a lot of money and they have really big systems and really cool problems to work on. But ultimately, the students that go work there are very small cogs in a very big advertising system. And so if you want to have impact on other aspects of life, I think that defense problems are, you know, maybe people would disagree with this statement. And I think this is a way to have your work have some impact for social good. And that maybe dovetails with what Mark just said, right? So of course, there's people who think some of the applications in defense are, you know, not ethical, you know, maybe they will be upset of the use of face recognition for widespread surveillance or use of automated weapons without any kind of oversight. But there's really a unique opportunity to go and contribute to that discussion and create secure, robust, explainable systems that can really support doing this in a very safe and secure way, which at the same time, there's just such a wide complexity of the problems that are there in defense that I would think that it'd be much, you know, less boring than working on a very narrow problem in industry. So I actually have a comment. So it's sort of the converse to that. It's not from the computer science view. What I'm seeing is that there's been a tremendous wave in the last year of my former PhD student, PhD graduates, masters and undergraduates who are going back to get a degree, a master's degree in computer science, particularly for machine learning. And they see that it's essential for, for example, for fabrication, analyzing fabrication in a very large electronics company, that you can't deal with the data anymore in the same way, the same simple ways one did before. So I think we should recognize the importance of data analytics, machine learning and AI for all of the engineering graduates, too. Yeah, I think that's a good point. Even going back to what Jonathan was saying earlier about the simulation and modeling, part of the collaboration I do with Lawrence Livermore Lab is that they have a whole machine learning team that tries to understand these very large scale simulations when they break down and fail. And that's really, has become a machine learning problem. I've had to debug the very simulators that you're, you know, I'm not sure you specifically are using them, but a lot of more engineering and scientists are using to study the questions that they want to study. And so machine learning then becomes a tool to do that better and faster with lower costs. Yeah, I can tell you there was so much enthusiasm about artificial intelligence methods and machine learning in the department. So almost about a, almost exactly a year ago, I brought on board a new principal director for artificial intelligence, Dr. Joe Crisman, who was kind of the senior technology lead for artificial intelligence in our office. And the first thing I told her was, all right, give me a, get a site picture, figure out everything the department is doing in artificial intelligence. She showed up in my office about a month later while I'd seen, you know, talked to her in the intervening time, but shows up a month later saying, Tommy, this is impossible. There is so much going on. There are so many programs, so many efforts, we can't get a handle on it. It's such a, such a vast investment across the department. So, so, you know, in those comments, really exciting area to be working in right now. And thanks for all that insight. I didn't realize how widespread it's gotten across all of the different disciplines, not just boxing itself into like generally computer science. Now, by the way, I would also say that's, that's why the department really needs people with top level skill sets because the problem you run into is you have a lot of people who every time they now get a problem, they say, Oh, well, we'll stop it with artificial intelligence. You know, we'll go to the artificial intelligence there. We'll buy a can of artificial intelligence, we'll sprinkle it on whatever isn't working and voila, it'll start to work. So having people who really understand the engineering and the science had to buy its way into, to affect the systems. And that's a critical need for the department right now. That makes sense to me. We have another audience question here from Jake Green again, as space becomes more accessible to other nations, what technologies will be important in developing the United States Space Force into an established presence in orbit? So I think that's for you, Dr. Lewis. Okay, I'm sorry, I don't mean them enough. So no problems. So, look, we got to move in a couple of areas. One, we got to leverage what, what the commercial sector is doing. All right, we had a couple, we have one big push in the department. I think it's still important, an important direction, which is making space less vulnerable. How do you make it less vulnerable? You proliferate. You got lots of small satellites in orbit, instead of big, giant satellites that are in vulnerable orbits, you do lots of smaller satellites, you leverage what the commercial sector is doing. So that's one, getting the cost down. That's something that the commercial sector is showing us how to do. But associated with that, it's not enough to just build it, but also launching it. So, so making launch, getting the cost of launch down, making cost more, making, making launch more accessible are absolutely, absolutely key in this. Awesome. So I, I had a related question to that, actually, since you mentioned a commercial space flight, it's been taking off in the recent years. Has the increase in private rock companies changed the relationship between universities and sponsors and has a privatization influence, fundamental research, for example, by certain companies keeping things proprietary instead of general knowledge? Well, you know, I actually haven't seen that. I've seen the opposite. I've seen a number of the companies reaching out to their university partners. You know, we, the department has a number of programs, for example. So there's the SBIR program, the Small Business Innovation Program, but there's also the STTR, just like the SBIR, but it requires the company partner with the university. We saw some very robust efforts in the space, the space sector. I was going to say a number of the space companies weren't falling in that IP crap, if you will. They're being very open about their, their, their technology. Some of the smaller ones, some of the bigger ones, you know, SpaceX very famously doesn't do patents. So, so I think it's actually, it's a, it's a great picture for universities, great opportunities for the university space sector right now. And I guess I'm going to also bring that question into Professor Huster as well. Let's see on the university side. I'm interested in, and this is obviously broaches my field. It's such an exciting time, you know, so much venture capital flowing into this, so many ideas for constellations and spacecraft and our students are getting tugged in 15 different directions. I think the, you know, we see the, as Dr. Lewis pointed out, you know, the collaborations enhancing with government, but also I think government is becoming less and less of a factor there. If you look at the dollars that are flowing a lot of private investment into the field, the impression of the, of the timelines, you know, the, the development timelines, and we see this across, you know, it's, I think it's, it's for those of us with gray hair, you know, we notice things happening faster and faster and faster, the acceleration of technology. And this is about one example of it in the, in the space sciences area, space launch area. Such things, of course, is added manufacturing, being able to print an entire rocket engine or injector in one piece, literally hours, which would have taken, you know, maybe a month with traditional technologies. The, the entire development process is getting compressed. So it's hard to see. It's, you know, it's hard to keep up with, to be honest. I'm reading the news and seeing press releases each day from another new firm that wants to build a rocket. It's, it's daunting. I don't know how folks in the government keep up with it. There's just a lot happening. Thanks. We have another audience question from Professor Shee. He says, Mark Lewis listed quantum as a future promise, but not an emerging technology priority. Since quantum computing and quantum communication, if realized can make everything that we currently do obsolete, is quantum still too immature to be a factor? He is wanting to know. Oh, so no, I didn't, I didn't want to leave that impression. Quantum, quantum science is very much an emerging technology. It was very much one of our priorities. So, from my perspective, quantum is incredibly promising and can play a very important role, especially quantum sensors, you know, quantum clocks, quantum position navigation and timing. I have to admit, I'm less optimistic about quantum communication. And other things, you know, quantum computing, really exciting, but a long way off, right? So you'll read stories that claim that, you know, quantum computers on the verge of completely changing the way, you know, way we do computing. Yeah, not quite yet. All right, my, my, my quantum friends tell me that you need to have the fundamental unit of a quantum computer is a qubit. It's the quantum equivalent of a bit. It's, my friends tell me that for a meaningful quantum computer, we'll have to have about a million qubits in order to start solving any, any worthwhile problem. You have to be at at least 100,000 qubits. Google's quantum computer has 53. We're not there yet. We're, we're moving in the right direction, but it's not coming tomorrow. You know, we've seen some algorithms that have been developed specifically for quantum computers. There's been this neat little trend though. Some will produce an algorithm that works on a quantum computer, and then they'll figure Oh, wait, this also works in a traditional computer as well. So, so the field is kind of helping across the board. Quantum, you know, we, we, we, we, I would, I would, you know, we, we had put, we had pushes for, you know, quantum key, uh, uh, decryption. We had pushes for things like quantum internet, quantum radar. Yeah, that's a little, not, not the low hanging fruit. I, I, the department right now is focusing on sense. That makes sense to me. The economy is going to be a big field. It's also going to have impacts on security and passwords. I'm guessing the DOD is probably also going to be interested in that. Well, you know, it's, it's been, it has been pointed out that QKD, you know, quantum cryptography, it's, it's very, it will be very expensive and doesn't actually solve the main problems. That's why we weren't looking at it as a, as a primary, primary investment area. Maybe at some point in the future. To bring back to hypersonics, I have a question for you and Professor Prodigy again. So hypersonics currently a very big field and it has been big in the past and it's kind of, as Professor Schneider is like to, to mention, had a cyclical history in terms of funding and support. Where do you both see the future of hypersonics in defense? And is this boom in hypersonics going to be different? Another prediction, sorry. Yeah. Oh, Jonathan, you want to take that one first? Sure. Well, yeah, this is, this is very close to home for me because I arrived at the Air Force Research Laboratory. My first day of work, you know, this is sort of circa 1994, 1995. And immediately there was enormous drawdown. I worked for a hypersonics team. And I've seen several cycles of this. And if we had just taken the average of the available resources and provided that as a constant stream, we would be in a better position today. So we can, I think we can expect cycles to come. But we should really plan for a long-term investment in this technology, both in terms of national assets like wind tunnels, but also in human capital and pursue this for a long time. So even if, you know, it goes up and down that we keep a finite level of investment in this area because it will really be important for a long time. And there are other people working on it. So, you know, one thing that makes me optimistic about the future of research in this area is our competitors are really good. And they light the fire under, you know, the government to keep, you know, to keep work going in this area. So I'm relatively optimistic, but I do brace myself for the next downturn in this area. Yeah, so I'll agree. You know, I would get that question off. And so is it different this time? So hypersonics has had about a 15-year cycle. And I also, I finished up as I finished my PhD in 1988. It was the middle of the national aerospace plane program. Money was flowing freely. I show up at the university. I will say this, by the way, university funding, especially the fundamental level is always kind of, it never came to complete stop. And, you know, hats off to there are some folks at NASA, some folks at AFOSR, especially, and can I work with AFRL that kind of kept the universities moving, moving in hypersonic. I do think it's different this time. And Jonathan's got it exactly right. A couple of factors. One is we've got competitors now. We didn't realize we were in a race. We're in a race. And it's a race we can't lose. And to this general recognition that, you know, this is absolutely critical to the future of defense. I mean, I mentioned in my talk earlier, we have done war games where if the United States does not have hypersonic capability, we don't win the war. Simple as that. And so I think that's driving a lot of it. Now, we would be doing this, pursuing this technology, even if others weren't, because I think it's an important technology. But that's certainly a strong motivating factor. Thanks. It's good to hear as well. So kind of a little more specific for Professor Handwerker, since you work in material science, a big issue for hypersonics is high surface heating. Is there any innovations coming in material science that are working to handle that? So, yes, there are innovations with respect to high surface heating, but let's take a step back and look at three other issues. One is it's a high performance, high vibration environment. So you've got high temperature, high mechanical stresses, and lots of vibration. The other thing you have is long term storage. So we also have to look at reliability when these, when some of these systems may be stored, hopefully, I believe for 20 years before they're being called onto the news. So we have to keep all of these different dimensions in mind when we're developing new technologies. So they're, so my field is in microelectronics. So they're new technologies that get away from solder. Solder is a low melting point material. They're new designs that are cropping up. So these kinds of, all of these technologies bring challenges because in many cases they haven't been used in commercial systems yet. So there are many materials challenges. In addition, the whole material sets may change. So it's not just tweaking a solder or tweaking a circuit board somewhere that we may have to have vastly different designs. So those are challenges and opportunities that I think I'm pretty well prepared for. Awesome. Thanks. Yeah, I hadn't considered some of those other aspects of it. I have a question here from the chat. So Professor, Dr. Lewis, you were mentioning during your lecture previously about how important it is to build the workforce and to train students, including foreign students as well, and to potentially like look into more of giving them a green card and help them stay. Do you have any comments about ITAR preventing international graduate students from applying to some of the most interesting jobs in aerospace research or doing graduate research in general? Because there are some ITAR projects that go on here at Purdue. And the question from the chat is asking, is ITAR appropriate and relevant today? So I would say there are no simple easy answers. You kind of get two ends of the spectrum. You get the one end that says there should be no ITAR, no limitations, throw the gates wide open. Then there's the school of thought that says lock it all down, don't let anyone who is the U.S. citizen see it, touch it, hear about it. I would argue either of those responses is wrong. There has to be a common middle ground. There has to be a common sentiment. I think I mentioned my talk. One of our great strengths in the United States is that we work with our allies and our partners. So let me throw out some numbers. So coming out of World War II, the Department of Defense accounted for about half of all S&T investment in the United States. United States accounted for about half of all S&T investment around the world. That means that the Pentagon was overseeing that 25% of the total world investment in S&T. Different ways to measure it so those numbers are propped. But that was coming out of World War II. Fast forward to today, 2021. Department of Defense is maybe about 3.5% of total investment. So we have to leverage what other people are doing. Now if you break that down and say, all right, so let's just open the aperture wider. Let's ask how much of the S&T investment across the world is coming to the United States. Not just defense, just everything in the United States. About 27%, 26, 27%. China is really close. China is coming up right behind us. They're about 25, 26%. They say, oh, crap, that's really bad. They're almost where we are. And then their cost of doing business often can be much lower than ours. Except here's the good news. You now look at all the countries below China, the next six countries down the list, they're all U.S. allies. They're the European nations, Germany, France, England, the European Union as a whole, South Korea. You look at the partnerships we have around the world. That's our strength. We have to nourish them. Let me also point out the strength of our scientific ecosystem. So last year the department announced its award winners in something called the Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship. It's the most prestigious faculty fellowship that the Department of Defense gives. It picks select faculty members who work on problems of relevance in the department. In the most recent cohort, the vast majority of the faculty members who got that award were foreign board. So actually looking at their backgrounds, it's hard to tell exactly what someone's background is, but it was pretty obvious that that was across the board. That's the strength of our system. The best and the brightest come to study in the United States. If that ever stops being the case, if students stop wanting to come to study in the United States, want to go elsewhere, that's when we are truly having problems. That would be a warning sign. So again, it's a situation, it's a standard requires balance. We have a related question from the audience as well. So the U.S. has a long history of collaboration with allies abroad and defense researchers you were just talking about. Are there any specific areas in which we should pursue stronger defense partnerships with our international allies in either space hypersonics or otherwise? Well, one would be space, the other would be hypersonics, the other would be otherwise. Yes to all the above. Look, the United States has less than 5% of the world's population. There are smart people all around the world. We have to work with all. And we find that if you look at various nations, even sometimes small countries will have really great expertise in a focused area. Singapore, for example. So Singapore has some of the best modeling of human physiology of any nation in the world. And the U.S. has worked with them in modeling, say, the response of pilots in injector seats, trying to figure out what the physiological response would be to high stress. In hypersonics, Australia is an incredibly valued partner. They bring so much to the table. The development of some of the test facilities that we talked about, well, there's a type of wind tunnel that we use in hypersonics called a stalker tube named for Professor Ray Stalker. He was a professor at University of Queensland. It was his invention. The Australians actually flew arguably the very first hypersonic jet engine, supersonic combustion ramp jet engine. It was a project that was funded out of the University of Queensland called High Shot, which not only shows what a foreign partner can do, it shows what a university can do in advancing technology. So yes to all the above. And frankly, the department has a very robust engagement across the board. I'd also say that's something that the universities can play a big role in, because universities are a melting pot and often will interact with international partners in ways that go above and beyond what, say, the government laboratories do, or even what industry partners can do. That's really neat here. And I actually, just to kind of add a comment on that, I've interacted with a bunch of faculty members from around the world at various conferences and it's always been very interesting hearing what they're working on and their unique facilities that they have in their countries versus ours and how we collaborate. So yeah. Absolutely. Awesome. So we have about five minutes left, it looks like. And so if anyone else has any questions, I don't see any more audience questions. I have a general question that anyone can answer here. So, and this is related to the final question from the lecture earlier today. How can students who are interested in working in defense related jobs start to prepare while they're in college or graduate school before they start applying elsewhere? Just we leave that to the members of the panel. Can we start? How about we start with Professor Prajit? Okay. So the question is how to prepare to get a job in the defense sector or how to prepare for work? Yes. If you're a current undergraduate or graduate student and you want to work in defense, what should you be doing now to sort of optimize your chances of getting such a job? Yeah. I think, for example, if you're in graduate school, you should look for a professor as close contacts with the defense establishment. So for example, we have a lot of ongoing grants and contracts with the Air Force Research Laboratory. And we have a huge number of opportunities to say go visit there for the summer. You know, the same thing with, we've worked with the Army Research Laboratory and they're just very, very eager to get students to come be summer visitors, you know, as soon as COVID is over, they won't be virtual anymore. And so there's a real hunger in the defense establishment to bring in some new talent. And, you know, this brings in this issue of the aging workforce. So for many years, I was the young person in the office at AFRL and they're in that same kind of situation, situation now. And, you know, there's this need to replace the Cold War era generation with a new generation. So just making contact, developing contacts in the establishment is a good place to start. I don't know, Liz, if you wanted us to add to that or, you know, Dr. Pajee has the right answer. Those who are doing work with the Department of Defense have connections there and it's a natural route to establishing contacts, the summer programs, send a number of students to spend the summer in Dayton or various government labs and to gain some experience and, you know, to establish a relationship. And once you spend some time there, people know you and they'll become familiar with you, then they're generally wanting you to become one of the team. Awesome. This is Cal Headworker. I have an example of how we sort of break that mold where it's one-on-one and sends students through our own personal contacts. So Purdue is the lead in a new worker's development program with the Department of Defense. It's called Scalable Asymmetric Life Cycle Engagement Program. And so we're partnering with 14 other universities and with agencies, DOD agencies and the Defense Industrial Bank to provide a curriculum that is microelectronics specific. So they get some things, even in the first year, first year engineering, their core courses, and then take special classes. They do research and the DOD and the Defense Industrial Bank are providing internships for those students and we're tracking that as well with the number of jobs that are available. So the agencies are looking for students with particular skillsets, including radiation hardening. You mentioned that before, Mark, and it's a key issue across the Department of Defense. So radiation hardening, heterogeneous integration, band-acting, system on chips, supply chain, and embedded systems. So this is a different way of doing it. So we have these partnerships for co-teaching classes and it's been well supported both financially and also in terms of engagement with the Department of Defense. Thanks. So Professor Neville, I'll give you a chance to add on to that question and then we have two quick questions for Dr. Lewis before we close up here. Oh, I would just say in the machine learning space, if you're a U.S. citizen and you want to be involved, all you have to do is like hold up your hand and everybody will jump on. But besides the other statements of, you know, talking with people to get internships, I think that's a great way. I would just say for Purdue students, a lot of the DOD lab people I know will show up at our recruiting events, the roundtables on campus. And that's a great way to go and start talking to people and making context yourself. So other than that, I don't have anything to add to what everybody else has already said. Awesome. So Dr. Lewis, the question, the first question we add, since we don't have anyone, any faculty member particularly focused on directed energy research right now, a member of the audience wants to know what areas or focuses are best places to start for finding open research and what locations are best for student research in the, in directed energy. Oh, gosh, you know, they're, look, so first, I actually don't know that's true. You know, I think if you look across the College of Engineering at Purdue, I would be surprised if you didn't actually find some people who are working very heavily in the field. I meant for this panel specifically. Wow. Okay. So, you know, there are so many different areas that you work in direct energy. Optics, obviously, really important. They're engineering aspects of direct energy. You know, I've got friends on the space side who are looking at using direct energy in space. So really lots of things you can do. I actually, you know, I was an aerospace engineer. My first graduate work was in using lasers for flow visualization. So I actually became a laser guy as a master's student. So again, really rich opportunities in any of the top universities and in the top programs, I think. By the way, I didn't want to add, you know, there are financial opportunities for students who want to work in defense. There are fellowships, for example, the NDSEG fellowship, the smart scholarship, which really create financial incentives. I mean, they're really good programs to get people working in the government laboratories. Those students should be looking for those as well. Oh yeah, I should mention I am an NDSEG fellow. So that has been a great opportunity for me for my graduate studies. And final question for you, Dr. Lewis, from the audience is, what's your opinion on F-35? Is it a typical shutdown, a failure, or a success? Oh, man. Let me see. I can tell you how I used to be able to answer, how I couldn't answer that when I was in the Pentagon. So look, you know, the F-35 was an incredibly ambitious program. And when it started, it began as an ambitious, I mean, we knew it was an ambitious program. It's obviously had some fits and starts along the way. You maybe should have anticipated. I've got some of my own frustrations with the program. I personally think there should have been a second engine for the F-35. We had historical examples of what happens when you don't have other propulsion options available for an aircraft. And I'd like to see that one corrected. You know, the program is, I have no doubt the program will eventually get to where it needs to be. It's just been a little bit more painful than it should have been. Awesome. Thanks for that. So that's the last audience question we have now, and it is four o'clock. So I'm going to pass off control here back to Professor Drew Laurentes for some conclusions. And thank you, Dr. Lewis, and all of the panel members for your time and answers here. Well, I just want to add my thanks as well. Mark, you've been very generous with your time and your thoughts, not only, of course, for this session and today, but throughout your service. So I know you're always eager to get back to what you probably love the best, which is the academic setting. So thank you very much to you and to the panelists. Thank you.