 All right, why don't we go ahead and get started? So, thanks for joining us. This is an opportunity to have a little more conversation with our plenary speaker, Dan Reed. And I'm very grateful to him for making this extra time. He's shared with us a very, very rich overview of many things. And there's lots more to talk about. I have a short list of maybe 30 questions that we could explore. And I know some of you probably have some questions too, and I want to make some time for that. And we've got a half hour. So, I thought we'd just get started in about 20 minutes and I'll open it up for you all. So, I think the place I'd like to start a little bit is with the very compelling argument that you made that a lot of the locus of research is shifting away from government and towards private industry and particularly the control of the technical resources and infrastructure to drive that research. I find myself pulled in multiple directions there because on the one hand you can see the kind of investments that the federal research organizations have made in things like exascale computing, which are really, you know, after a decade just now turning into tangible reality. I know that when they do the supercomputer ratings, for example, a number of the commercial players don't even bother to submit anymore. So, I'm struggling a little bit with how to square those investments with the investments that the tech folks are making. I also am wondering a little bit about where you see, you know, the future of national computational resources writ large as they are funded and made available as genuinely national research resources. So, I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about that. Well, that's a whole multi-hour talk and it's own right. So, I mean, I have mixed emotions about that locus shift as well. And in part, I view it not so much that the private sector is stealing the show maybe more that the government and academia is leaving its candy on the ground. And I say that because, well, first let me address the narrow issue about scientific computing. And I realize there's a bit far afield for this audience, so I won't belabor the point. But the model that the U.S. has had about procuring supercomputers is failing. In fact, I was just part of a national academy study that was chaired by Cathy Yellock from Berkeley that said, what we're doing ain't working anymore, folks. It's going to take a different model. And the Office of Science at DOE, I'm part of another committee that's grappling with that right now. The first study was looking at computing for the nuclear weapons lab. So how to do, assure the nuclear weapons stockpile. But the issues are the same, both places. And they spill over into NSF and the other federal agencies as well. But it's related to the core issue, which is if you think about buying these days a leading-edge supercomputer that would be used for computational science, round numbers, those things cost $300 to $600 million, depending on the day of the week and what you're after. If you only buy one of those every three to five years, you don't have much influence in the marketplace anymore because the folks who are building the AI infrastructure with the hyperscalers, they're spending more than that every quarter as opposed to every five years. And so that's one issue, just financial influence. The other is that the control of the ecosystem is also moving. So if you're a Google or a Microsoft or a Facebook or an Amazon, yes, you buy hardware from the computer vendors, but you're increasingly building your own because you actually have more money and influence than the computer vendors do, and that hardware is captive. You can buy services atop it, but you can't actually buy the hardware. And so the whole question, and this is broadly true about AI infrastructure as well, is what kind of public-private partnership will be appropriate going forward. And my guess is that it will have to be sold if we want to have that true partnership at a higher level than a federal agency engagement because money alone won't do the deal. It will have to be done based on an argument that it's in the country's interest as a different kind of partnership. But there are issues there, but the broader issue, so that's sort of the end of the scientific computing field. Let me go back to your core issue, which is, you know, if I look at the locus of influence as one of the questioners rightly asked when I was talking, we need academia and the government at the table because they do some things that the private sector cannot. After all, academia is, in many cases, arguably most cases, maybe all, its most valuable product is people. We train a new generation of talent that goes into the workforce. So that's really important that it be educated in techniques that match what industry wants. But academia, other than a small number of companies in every domain, not just computing, is the fount of basic research. It's true in biomedicine. It's true in engineering. It's true in science writ large. We need those people driven by curiosity, not just by the narrow or focus of what will drive business outcomes, right? Because, and that's both our strengths and our weakness because at least a business, every day, if you're a public company, every day the market tells you how you're doing and is a very clear answer. And whereas in academia, we have a much more diverse set of reward metrics, frankly some of which are cross-purposes to one another at times, which is our own set of issues. But we do some longer-term thinking that companies can't afford to do. And it's that basic research that turns out sometimes 10, 20, 30 years later to be the secret sauce. And we can't afford to sacrifice that. So my worry in some sense in why I was earlier talking about the National Defense and Education Act is, that's a story that isn't 500 million or a billion here. That's a number that is in large multiples of billions, maybe even upwards of a trillion over a period of years. And how we have that conversation about the appropriate level of investment is difficult. And I'll just say this last thing and then I'll stop. If you look at what happened as part of the too many buses that were passed to finally get us a federal budget, those were all in the end in outgrowth of the negotiation that happened between President Biden, among President Biden, Senator Schumer and Representative McCarthy back last summer. And pretty much every federal research agency is either flat or was cut as part of that budget compromise. And if you talk to the appropriators who had to do that, they did not want to do that. But the roll-down of allocations in DC speak, the 302A and the 302B budget allocations, they were given not enough money to satisfy multiple pressing needs. In the case of NSF, for example, NSF's budget is set by the so-called Commerce, Justice and Science Committee, CJS, and about the House and the Senate. They had to make difficult choices between local policing, weather forecasting, the FBI and science funding. Those are all kind of important to us, folks. But there wasn't enough money to go around. While we're on the topic of money, let me shift to a slightly different area that I worry a lot about. If you look at the way we fund, the way we structure costs for people for research in academia, it's had a pretty extractive quality to it, especially for junior researchers. And we've seen quite a lot of pushback on that in very recent times, the unionization of graduate researchers and postdocs, general calls, I think, for living wages for postdocs and entry researchers. That all makes sense, but the net effect of it is it runs up the costs pretty substantially of doing research. You can buy less research per dollar, if you will. How do you see that playing out? Well, it's a real issue. Look, all of us who went to graduate school knew we took a vow of genteel poverty, right? That was, you know, at some level was always part of the deal. But when I see graduate students having to go to the food bank because they don't have enough money to buy food or they can't afford housing and there's housing insecurity, those are real equity issues. So I'm very sympathetic to that reality. And so some equilibration is entirely equitable and ethically appropriate. But Cliff, you're absolutely right. The consequence of that in a budget envelope that is arguably not keeping pace with inflation, what that means is there are fewer graduate students and postdocs. And I had a version of this conversation with the Executive Committee research officers of the AAU just a few weeks ago. There isn't any way out of that box unless we find more money. Now, I will say that I think there is another issue that we also need to own up to. And there have been multiple academy studies that looked at this over the years. In too many cases, I think we have unfortunately not lived up to our own principles. We have treated graduate students as inexpensive labor to advance the career of the faculty member as opposed to recognizing that our role is mentors and supporters of people who are building their own career. And that power dynamic affects the working conditions as well. That's a non-monetary issue, but it's a very real one. And there are a variety of ways we could think about changing that, but all would require us to embrace a bit of culture shift. And I'll float an example. In a net zero model, one could move more money out of research grants and more of it into graduate fellowships. Because then that lets the graduate students be more free agents in terms of seeking an advisor relationship and might well affect some of those power dynamics. That's just one possibility. And I know that has its own downsides as well. Every change, it's like joey in the tree, something is always gonna drive change. But the root of the issue is, I would say more broadly, our societal disinvestment. If you look at pretty much every public higher education institution, and there are sources of funding, which are tuition, state funding, philanthropy, the first order, and yes, research. And research loses money, right? We should also be honest about that. We don't do it to make money. But in every one of those public institutions, pretty much in every state, the budgets are an X curve, which is to say that tuition became a larger source of revenue than state funding did in almost every case. And that has its own set of social negatives that affect equity and access. But it does speak to how do we make that case that higher education is a societal investment in the future as opposed to a tax to be paid? Because I think that's another issue. I will tell one anecdote. I had a conversation once with a state legislator, and I said, you know, what we do is really important. And they said, I agree, it is really important. You are our number four priority. Our number, well, bear me out. Number one priority is mandatory social service spending. Number two is prisons. And number three is K-12. You're right after that as number four. And I said, well, you know, let me sort of put the dollars on the bottom line. If you think about what happens in prison, you build a social network, you learn some skills, matter which may not be particularly valuable in society, and it's really expensive to house prisoners. In higher education, we give people a social network, we give them skills, we do so much more cheaply. And all of those things are more valuable in society. And the legislator looked at me and said, yeah, that's all true, you're number four. How do you beat that? I wish I knew. I also went out and talked to a local legislator and showed all the ways that federal tax dollars from research were being spent in their district, you know, buying services from companies and, you know, to support the research enterprise and all of this. And I'm like, look at what's happening because we're doing research. And the person who was a small government, rural legislator said, how do I stop this? And I thought, I got nothing. I got nothing to respond to that. Let me bounce over to a rather different area for what perhaps will be the last of questions for me that we have time for. Cyber security. We should get some. Yeah, somehow it feels like we're losing this battle in a lot of ways. It's an area where it's much harder to play defense than offense, just by its nature. Do you think it's gonna get better? Are you optimistic? How do you think the landscape there is gonna change? I'm not sure. Honestly, I have a whole lot of insight. You're right, it is a symmetric warfare. And if you're playing defense, you only need to lose once, right, before you've been penetrated. And so much of these issues are related to human behavior and social dynamics. Yeah, there are technology issues, but we are the primary cause of cybersecurity problems. I wish I knew the answer to that. I mean, because obviously it affects everything from the security of personal data, PII, government records, and also some pretty serious national security issues because state actors are at play in that space as well. I don't know, but I share your fears and I don't have a good answer to that. All I can say is if there's any history of asymmetrical warfare is that eventually something changes, either the sociology or the technology, and there's a rebalancing, but I don't know what that will be. Interesting. Let me follow on to something closely related. One of the things that I've thought about a great deal over the last five or six years, particularly, as we went through the experience with the pandemic is resilience, which is somewhat related to cybersecurity, but also related to our ability to deal with all kinds of other unexpected events and disasters. I wonder what the thinking is about the resilience of our research enterprise. Is there any deliberate thinking going on about that in the circles you operate in? You mean resilience and its sustainability or resilience? Resilience to various kinds of unexpected disasters, attacks, problems, disruptions. I mean, it's clear the continuity of that enterprise is important in some fundamental way, although we don't, I believe, have a great handle on exactly what parts are critical. So the one that worries me most is the diversity of our talent base along multiple axes. So one is, if you look in a lot of our fields, the overwhelming majority of our graduate students are international. Now, I meant what I said earlier. That is one of the country's superpowers that we attract talent from around the world and we have to protect that in the face of the political complexities around immigration policy. I'd like to see our international grad students after appropriate checks get a green card pretty much automatically if they wanna stay in the U.S. And many members of Congress believe that. But here's the two things that worry me. One is, we are critically dependent on that talent flow from a small number of countries. Now, I'm old enough to remember when, and some of you are too, when as a consequence of what happened in Iran, we banned all Iranian graduate students from the country and forced them to leave the country in a very small window. And so the geopolitics with respect to China, I'd invite you to think about what happens if we found ourselves in that situation where there was a ban on Chinese graduate students. The effect on our research enterprise would be catastrophic. So that's a geopolitical worry. The flip side of that is, relates to Cliff, your earlier question about living wages and financial support. How do we increase the numbers and diversity of our domestic research talent base? And I'll just cite a couple of numbers from the recent indicators report. If you wanted to achieve, in terms of equity, numbers equal to the population, we'd roughly have to double the number of women in STEM. And we'd have to quadruple or quintipple the number of people of color in order to achieve population equity. So we're leaving talent on the floor, and that's an issue. But the broader issue is, how do we increase the absolute numbers? Both because there is a shortage of talent and also because of some of these geopolitical risks. That's the one that keeps me awake at night. It's one that the National Science Board is spending a lot of shoe leather on in the hill, talking to people about the risks and the opportunities here, you know, and both what's the right thing to do ethically, but what's the right thing to do from a geopolitical perspective as well. And that's why I said it's not about China in the sense that we don't want those students here. We absolutely do. But it's how we grow the domestic base to go with it. But those two things are intertwined in some complex geopolitical ways. Thank you. I'd like to take the opportunity in the last few minutes to open this up for a couple of questions from the audience. There are some microphones there. Please step up. If you don't, I have my five-hour list. Hello. Thank you. Ximao Wang from Northwestern University. And I'm very pleased you mentioned the topic about China, not only once. Also, particularly in your early speech as well, you used the new format of the Cold War. So my question for you is, is this Cold War avoidable? You did not sound very optimistic about the future of this Cold War. Once I feel particularly frustrating or disappointing of seeing the US take policy towards China is, all the policy appears to be trying to figure out how to slow China down, not how to figure out we can run faster. So let me hear your thoughts about what is the issue you're thinking. You're absolutely right. In the way that you prevail in any global competition is being better at what you're doing than the competition is. You put your finger on what I would describe as the political divide in DC between the two parties about what is the appropriate response to what is currently a rising competition with China. I mean, I will also say in fairness, if you look at what China is doing, they are increasing their percentage of R&D, of GDP invested in R&D, and that's a publicly stated policy. So that does speak to how do you out-compete? It's also a publicly stated policy of China to de-risk dependence on US technology. And I can't blame China at all. I mean, that might be doing exactly the same thing. You want to control your own destiny, but that's what great powers do. That's what rivalries have always been since we've had great nation states. But you're right, the way that you win in this story is you do it better, right? So that people want to be part of what we're trying to do. And so there's also obviously a, as I said, a proxy battle going on for global influence around the world, just as there has always been in different contexts. But you're right, the way you do it is you do the right thing and you do it better. Yep, we can hear you, yep. Hi, Winkol's Princeton. I have a question kind of turning to the domestic for a minute, and I want to ask you about the K-12 question. So the numbers are really disturbing around our achievement. You're talking about investments into the future, and we're already apparently number four behind number three. So it's a small end, but I can say from my own experience in a number of different states with a number of different public school systems, it's not for the lack of trying, right? It is all STEM all the time, especially in middle school and high school. So my question to you is, what do we do differently, right? Do we keep doing the same thing that's not working? Are people thinking about how do we adjust how we teach? Is it more holistic? Is it more focused on learning into the future? I'm just curious about what might be going on because the numbers are really disheartening. They are, and I don't think obviously there's no single band aid that's gonna fix this problem as you rightly noted. You know, I had a slide in an earlier version of this talk that had an old story from Carl Sagan, and he said, you go talk to first graders and they're just bubbling over with ideas like, why do we have toes? How old is the world? You know, why is the moon round? It's like, these are great questions. And he said, and then you go talk to 12th graders and it's like crickets. And he said, something horrible happened in between and it wasn't just puberty. And so to me, the issue has always been how do you reward the curiosity? Because I think those of us in this room are probably the exceptions to the rule in the sense that we were sufficiently determined that we resisted conformity and we kept asking questions long after people really wanted us to be quiet and just nod. And so how you fuel that spirit of curiosity is a core thing. You know, there's an old quote attributed to a Plutarch who said that a mind is not a vessel to be filled, it's a fire to be lit. You know, and we all know that if someone is inspired, they will move heaven and earth to learn, right? Because it's that curiosity that drives it. But when we squeeze that out of the system, we got a different problem. Now, that's philosophy. What do we do about it? Well, the other thing I would say that's pernicious about the data I showed is there's other data that says those places that have the poorest performing students, they also have the least experienced teachers. And so there's a perpetuation of challenges there. We all know that with local schools disproportionately funded from property taxes that that inequity perpetuates across generations. I mean, the poor and underrepresented are the ones that most need education. If you're from a wealthy, powerful family, you got to work really hard to screw up even if you are a disaffected student. So all of those things, I mean, they're good and bad things about the distributed K-12 education system. French education minister once said to me, it's 10 o'clock on Tuesday. I know what every kid in France is studying right now. But there's no easy fix. I think it's gonna be a whole collection of things. But the reason I went to the NDEA is because, and there were bad things about it. New Math is a whole other sorry story about K-12 education. But we did elevate the conversation and we tried some different things. And I think we're gonna have to do that because we're just leaving way too much talent behind. And that's not much of an answer. It's more of a plea for ideas. Because as I said, the science board's spending a lot of time on this issue. Not because NSF has a lot of money compared to the Department of Education, but because we know we need STEM talent in this country and we got to try something because what we're doing now is not working. Let's take one last question. Quick question, long answer, I'm sure. Scott Walter San Diego State University. So ACRL, sorry, ARL, ARL and CNI are working on these AI scenarios. We're gonna talk about them later today. And in those scenarios, when they talk about education, they talk about skills building and they talk about concrete skills related to AI, stackable credentials I might say and so on. And there's a lot of discussion of skills building and there's a lot of discussion of workforce development and there's a lot of discussion of the impact of AI and workforce. Where in all this, going back to your Plutarch, where in all this is the role of humanistic inquiry and ensuring that there's that room for exploration while people are being exposed to certain technology skills? I think that's one of the great conundrum. The downside is education is one of the most labor intensive industries that we have in terms of number of people invested to output. And if you look at the power of technology in all columns of other domains, it's been automation and increasing productivity. I'm not suggesting that students are widgets to be stamped out, don't misunderstand. But I do think that is part of the opportunity. The other opportunity goes back to what I said in part of a response to the previous question. I think to the extent to which the hope of AI in this context, not about skills, but about passion and curiosity, because that cuts across the arts and the humanities, just as much as it does the sciences, is feeling a personal connection in that sense of dynamic response and interaction might be the opportunity. But I think it is also about, as I said, that sense that the possible is there and that you are encouraged. All of us, I dare say, if we were to take a poll, each of us can name a teacher or two at some point in our lives that was transformative in our world view. And it's that that you need to try to capture and expand because a lot of doing anything is believing that you can. Now, believing doesn't mean you can do anything. Otherwise, I'd be a retired NBA basketball star now. Not all dreams come true. But that notion of encouragement and feeding the passion is what matters. And all of us, I used to tell students who went off to teach, look, by the time you were in graduate school, you have a finely honed sense of who is a good teacher and who's not. You walk into lecture in the first five minutes, you know. This person I would love to listen to, this one is gonna be a slog. But just because you can recognize it doesn't mean you can do it. But that doing it is the part that that mix of human and technology, if we can marry those in the right way, there's opportunity. But we've been struggling with this issue for decades of technology mediated education. And I don't believe that AI is gonna be a panacea. It's not gonna be a secret sauce that cracks this code, but it can help, I think, if applied correctly. It can also do damage if applied incorrectly. And I fear we must leave it there. Dan, we're deeply in your debt for all of this time today and for all that you've shared with us. I hope you won't be a stranger in future. I was delighted to be here and I'll make one final plea. You know, as we struggle to address these challenges in DC, ideas are always welcome. So if you have ideas about things that we can do to drive policy change and affect some of these issues, you know how to find me. Please don't hesitate to reach out. But thanks for the invitation, Cliff. I'm really grateful.