 Our next speaker is Dr. Arthi Prabhakar, Director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Since each of you has a summary of her biographical information in your program, I'd like to use this time to give you a little bit of background on her agency, which you might not be as familiar with and its relationship to energy. DARPA was created in response to the U.S. government's surprise when the Soviets launched Sputnik, the world's first satellite. DARPA was established with the mission to prevent and to create technological surprise. Since its beginnings in 1958, the agency has supported innovations that have changed our world, including many that are especially relevant to Silicon Valley. These include ARPANet, a precursor to the Internet, computing, graphics, integrated circuit design, and client server architecture. DARPA's successful track record has launched a host of new ARPAs designed to apply DARPA's successful model to other agencies. These include HS ARPA for Homeland Security, IARPA for Intelligence, and as we heard referenced by Stephen Chiu this morning, RPE for Energy. Arthi's connections to energy include chairing the Efficiency and Renewables Advisory Committee for the U.S. Department of Energy, and working with entrepreneurs in energy efficiency and technologies while a partner at U.S. Venture Partners. She received her degree in electrical engineering from Texas Tech University and her Ph.D. in applied physics from California Institute of Technology. I first heard Arthi speak when she spoke at ARPA's very first Energy Innovation Summit in 2010 as part of a panel exploring what is transformation and how do you identify game changers. Out of all of the excitement at that first Energy Summit, I distinctly remember her panel and writing down her name and thinking this is a person with something to say. I hope that you share that experience with me today. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Arthi Prabhakar. Thank you so much Barb, and thanks for the chance to be here with this terrific group. I was so pleased to have the opportunity to come talk with everybody today. And I, unfortunately, I wasn't here for the morning, so I wanted to start by finding out who's in the room. Who's at a university, faculty or student or staff? Great. Who's in business or in the investment community? And who's involved in policy? How about not for profits? We've got a really great mix here. It's going to take all of these pieces. That's terrific. You've been able to assemble a tremendous group of people for the meeting. I want to talk today about the role of breakthrough technology in creating dramatic and significant change in complex systems. That's an enterprise that all of you are engaged in, in the work that you're doing in energy. It's very much the work that we do at DARPA in the context of national security. I'm not actually, I should warn you, I'm not going to talk about energy very much today. All of you include a number of experts in this area. And I know you've been hearing from a lot of great leaders in the field. What I really wanted to do was to explore the parallels that I see between the national security enterprise and our energy challenges as a society. To talk a little bit about the role of technology in meeting those challenges. And in particular to explore one piece of the technology landscape, which is the ARPA model, the Advanced Research Projects Agency model that we have at DARPA, but of course is also underway with ARPA-E at the Department of Energy. And you've heard today from some of the authors of ARPA-E. Steve Chu and Jeff Bingerman were two people who played really significant roles in getting ARPA-E off the ground. Are there people here who are involved with ARPA-E who are working on or have worked with ARPA-E on projects? Okay, good. So that's terrific to see. So I know many of you have perspectives on that. What I want to do is add my perspective about that, both for two reasons. One is to really highlight how important it is that ARPA-E has gotten off on the right footing in what it's doing. And then secondly, to really ask for your work to make sure that we give ARPA-E the time and the leash to really run long enough to create foundational change in the energy arena. But before I do all of that, let me just back up and start by telling you where I'm coming from so that you'll know the lens through which I'm looking at this whole situation. And that really starts with the DARPA story. Who here has worked with DARPA? Fantastic. Excellent. Great. I hope there are many more of you in the future as well. As Barb said, DARPA is an agency that was started in the late 50s immediately on the heels of the surprise that we experienced when the Soviets launched Sputnik. And then as now we understood as a nation that technology is a cornerstone of our national security. We didn't like being surprised by something as significant as the first satellite being launched. And DARPA was created as a direct consequence of that surprise. So our mission from the beginning has been to prevent that kind of technological surprise. For 55 years we've been doing that, delivering on that mission by creating some surprises of our own. And today if you look in many different realms you can see the impact that DARPA technologies have made. So if you look today in our military and you consider how our Air Force used stealth technology and precision guidance and navigation to completely decisively defeat the Iraqi air capabilities in Desert Storm and then again in Operation Iraqi Freedom, that's one example of how technology led to a decisive transformative change. If you look today at how our soldiers and SEALs own the night, they prefer to do their business in the night because infrared night vision has given them a part of the spectrum that their adversary simply can't operate in and it gives them a kind of dominance that is unparalleled. And so those are some military examples but of course in our everyday lives it's really hard to overstate the number of ways in which the internet and GPS technologies, advanced materials like composites, advanced semiconductors like RF and MEMS devices, all of these components and technology capabilities have seeped into our way of living. It's how we connect, it's how we work, in some senses it's shifting our entire society and our behaviors. And what all of these technologies have in common is the role that DARPA played. Now I want to be very clear that nothing I mentioned simply happened because DARPA went and did some R&D. It took an enormous number of participants and players to make these transformations happen. Almost every one of these stories traces back to the role of universities, almost always universities are worth the genesis of these new technology capabilities. And then of course it took companies large and small for the military capabilities that took the science and technology enterprise across the services and ultimately it took our war fighters to take those technologies and to turn them into real capability. And then similarly for the technologies that were commercialized it took entrepreneurs and companies, new companies, old companies finding new markets, investors behind all of that, all of that private capital and investment was completely critical to achieving these phenomenal transformative technologies. But in every one of these cases DARPA's role was to make the pivotal early investments that changed what was possible and that allowed for a big step forward in capabilities. And that's been our mission from the beginning, it's still our mission today. I think it's also worth noting and just to have a little bit of context that DARPA's budget for many many years for decades has been a small but consistent percentage of the investment that we make as a nation in R&D for national security. So today we're about 5% of what the federal government invests in R&D for defense. That R&D investment for defense is about half of federal investment overall in R&D and that federal investment in national security R&D is only about a seventh of what the nation invests public and private together in R&D. So when you think in that context we're a very small piece of this much larger ecosystem. Our resources are adequate for our mission this year even post sequestration we're at about two and a half billion dollars and that steady commitment to this small slice has been essential for us to be able to do our work and our role by mission and by history has always been focused on this business of creating the kinds of new technologies that have the potential for transformational change. So we'll talk a little bit more about that as an essential part of the puzzle but I really wanted to just start by disclosing my biases and sharing with you the lens through which I'm thinking about the issues I want to talk about today and that lens really is this notion that a well-placed investment in breakthrough technologies can end up having nonlinear effects on major societal challenges. So let's talk about a couple of those major societal challenges. I want to start with the big picture of energy and national security and I think they actually share some interesting and in some sense some daunting characteristics. Energy of course you all live this and you're driving it today where are we and where do we need to be? So the good news of course with energy is that it's relatively cheap and abundant there are a few problems that you all are in the process of fixing. Of course the big problem one big problem is that it comes overwhelmingly from fossil fuels of course one of the big problems is that in converting it from source to use the vast majority of that energy is lost. Of course one of the problems is that in the conversion we generate pollution and greenhouse gases with phenomenally important consequences for the long run and of course one of the problems is that as a nation and as an economy we are subject to global forces to the actions of other nations or multinational corporations all of whom have their own agendas around the world and so the meta challenge for energy is to create a future where energy is still cheap and abundant but is also sustainable for the long term does not contribute to the kind of devastating global effects from pollution and greenhouse gases so clean no carbon or low carbon energy highly efficient energy systems and with that ultimately we aspire to a future where we control our energy destiny and we can control our sense of energy security as a society so that's a really tall order and I'm deeply grateful that people like you are going to take care of that I'm counting on you in our world in the national security realm where are we and where do we need to be well actually there's a lot of good news to start with because at this moment in history the United States is a global superpower in some senses the only global superpower but at the same time we're living in a world of complexity and change and this is the environment that we deal with in our work at DARPA so that begins with a recognition that as we think not just about today but the next 10 and 20 and 30 years of national security it seems pretty clear that we will continue to be needing to deal with nation states and possibly the threats that they will pose and in fact we have a national security enterprise that is finally honed to think about nation states to think about how they're changing how we want to interact with them how we want to deal with them when they pose threats to our national security at the same time we're all very aware that national security now also has some other dimensions and one of the things that we see is a set of links sometimes among nation states and terrorist organizations sometimes also linking to international criminal activity and money laundering and drug trafficking now none of that is new because those links have existed for decades if not centuries but what we're seeing today that is different is that instead of one-off transactions we now have because of the fluidity of communications and the flow of capital we now in some senses have this fluid marketplace that creates this set of linkages are able now to operate at scale and at a speed that we really haven't seen before and that creates in a national security context in a sense it's a shape-shifting diffuse hard to pin down kind of threat and we've seen it in this country in some very graphic ways obviously on September 11 but also in some sense with the Boston bombings which in one way of thinking about them perhaps is that they are crowdsourced terrorism where individuals that are foes did not even know to go directly to were inspired by things that they read online and acted on their own in a way that lined up with our adversaries objectives and so I hope that gives you a little bit of a sense of this very broad set of different actors and the linkages among them that we think about in the national security realm let me add to the mix by saying that the other major factor many actors enabled with technology but on the other hand in addition to the communications technology that they have access to our adversaries around the world today have access to a set of global technologies I'm thinking about semiconductor components, networking equipment and also the components for weapons including weapons of mass destruction and for many decades in this country we have counted on the notion that we get to control all of that technology for many decades we drove the creation of many of these leading edge technologies which are so central to the national security business but we're no longer in a world where we get to own and control those technologies so those are the two driving factors many players linked in new ways coupled with globally available component technologies that creates the complex environment in which we strive to create the solutions for national security going forward and I think you'll agree that these are two both energy and national security pose a complexity and scale of challenge that is really something that is society's problem it's not going to get handled by any one of us individually so that's number one number two so what do we actually do about this and how we handle these societal scale challenges I think is actually in some ways it's quite different as you know first and foremost in our country the government owns the business of national security it does not own the business of energy in our market economy we have a market for energy and while the government has some very important roles that it plays in that it doesn't completely own the business of providing for the nations energy needs despite that though I believe that one thing that again these two realms share is the role of technology and technology plays an important role in both of these areas clearly not the only role and when I looked at the agenda today I thought it was a great representation of all the facets that go into energy transformation because technology by itself is not going to get us there but I do believe that technology has the potential to change the game in some important ways and in fact when I consider the scale of our challenges in national security or in energy it's sort of hard to imagine how we're going to move those mountains without some breakthrough thinking in technology so I think that technology's role will be central continuing in the future and I think that these are two areas both in energy and in national security where we're simply not going to get there if it's just the government that does it or just the private sector that does it there are jobs that we're going to need to do together that neither of us can do separately especially in the technology realm and that's a good backdrop to talk a little bit about the ARPA part of the technology system even within the technology realm this isn't as I mentioned in DARPA's case but also in ARPAE's case this component of the technology system is not the largest it's not the overwhelming majority it's a little piece of a much larger ecosystem but it's important because of its ability to change the game and I really want to talk a little bit about how we in ARPAE are approaching that and then try to focus in the end on some of the core elements that will be necessary I think for both us and ARPAE to survive and thrive and meet our missions in the future so now of course ARPAE's mission is around energy but in true ARPA fashion they think in terms of technological surprise they focus on changing what's possible they're looking for those pivotal early areas where they can do something that creates the opportunity for big steps forward all of those are about ARPAE and with that comes the notion that you have to be willing to take risk because actually if anyone has any really big breakthrough high impact ideas with zero risk I'm extremely interested because it's all about impact but pretty soon after you do all of those you still have more work to do and more things that we need to be able to achieve and inevitably that really means the ability to take quite significant risk technical risk in particular so what does that mean? well so if you look today at ARPAE and many of you are closer to it today than I am but when I take a look at what they're investing in they're looking for new ways to think about solar technologies and energy for transportation and the grid and storage and you know I think they've planted some phenomenal seeds meanwhile over in national security land at DARPA if you look at our portfolio we're rethinking what air dominance means for the next generation we're thinking about how we can dramatically change the cost barriers to space which is a domain that's critical for our national security needs we're working on new approaches for electronic warfare for position navigation and timing beyond GPS we're focused on creating a new trajectory for cyber security and beneath all of these mission capabilities we're also thinking and investing in some core enabling technologies ranging from the tools to understand information at scale taking big data to the next chapter the tools to drive synthetic biology from a lab capability and a dream to a functional technology capability we're investing in ways of understanding brain function in ways that we think will unleash the power of the brain and our ability as humans to interact with the complex systems that we make so very different focus in our investments and very different focus in terms of our mission between us and ARPA-E in time I'm sure there will be times when we connect and overlap we stay in touch with our colleagues at ARPA-E and we just had a great meeting with a group of people from ARPA-E where we were catching up both about programs but also about how we do business and of course in the national security enterprise are some daunting energy challenges DARPA has focused on some of those in the past I think to good effect we're not particularly focused on that area today but as new opportunities arise that might be an area that we would invest again in in the future but that's what we're doing let me shift gears and talk a little bit about the core elements for an ARPA model to succeed DARPA's been doing this for 55 years and so when I came back as director last summer I inherited an agency that had forward momentum and very strong long-term support I want to make sure ARPA-E has the chance to get to that same place so I want to make sure we talk about what it's going to take and let me talk about two different aspects of what really makes the ARPA model work a lot has been written and said on this topic but I'm going to focus on two particular topics one is people and one is time the first part of the people's story begins with the notion that in the ARPA business model we know how to tap a very broad technology community and that's fantastic because it frees you from having to just bake with whatever ingredients happen to be in your own cupboard the fact that we can link with universities, companies of all sizes labs of all types both at DARPA and at ARPA-E that frees us to imagine a host of different futures and the fact that we do our work in those organizations means that the R&D is being done in an environment where it can be carried forward when it's successful I think those are some very critical elements the other half of the people equation has to do with the people inside of our ARPA organizations and as you can imagine this kind of business of focusing on transformative technology investments doesn't happen with sort of average people you really have to go out and recruit a group of people that know how to do this business you have to coach them and then you have to enable them to really go drive their programs so what does that look like well at DARPA we recruit from across all those same domains universities, companies other parts of the government not for profit organizations and so if you came to DARPA today among my 95 program managers you would meet a retired army colonel who was a neuro interventionist medical doctor you would meet a young PhD out of MIT in nanotechnology who spent a couple of years as a congressional fellow and actually working for Senator Bingerman on the energy committee before we recruited her to DARPA you would meet a former VP of engineering from a very successful Silicon Valley startup that went public and has been one of the great semiconductor successes he's doing a tour at DARPA and you would meet people from across DOD and other kinds of government labs as well so a vibrant mix of people they come for a short period of time three to five years is typical and that's it's heartbreaking when a wonderful program manager leaves but it is such an important part of this business of getting fresh ideas and fresh energy on a continuing basis and those are some of the key ingredients that really makes the people part of the equation work it's been great to see DARPA E going down very much the same path rotating program managers and getting people I think of a very high caliber so that's number one the second dimension besides people really has to do with time and again let me break this into two different parts one dimension of time that matters is the short time frame the hours and days and weeks that are part of the urgency with which we drive our programs managers are out finding great ideas and then turning them into programs publishing broad agency announcements getting proposals, standing up their contracts and building their communities reaching out to transition partners all of that is done with a frantic pace and a sense of urgency because we have to get going we've got things we need to get done and technology moves at a pace that doesn't really allow for sort of sitting back and relaxing and enjoying ourselves that's not going to happen that's critical but at the same time we need to keep an eye on the longer term and the reason that is so important is that we are not in the business of incremental change we are the part of the R&D investment that is supposed to be making investments in the technologies that are transformative and if we think back about the big transformations that happen I think it's really important that we recognize how long true transformation takes but do you all remember in the early 90's when it felt like overnight everyone you knew had their email address on their business card and do you remember the first time you saw the blue dot on your iPhone when you were looking at a map and it was tracking you as you were driving along well those things felt like overnight transformations but of course those are two examples of technology capabilities that built on decades of very hard work and many many many incremental steps before the big transformation could happen and similarly I think as we invest today at DARPA and as ARPA E makes its energy investments we want to drive to the core capabilities today we want to drive for transition and to get started with the incremental advances but we're doing that in the context of this longer time frame because ultimately that is our real success as if we today can make those investments that lead to the same kind of generational huge shifts over time so those are sort of two dimensions of time that we try to keep in our heads at the same time why am I talking about this if ARPA E is to have the time for its technologies to grow and to brew and to flourish and ultimately to make transformative change in the energy landscape all of us are going to have to create a way for them to have that kind of time one of the things that is in very short supply and this is something unfortunately that is shared in the public and private sectors one of the things that is in short supply is patience and I want to make sure that we don't in our rush to see immediate results and to make sure everything's on track that we don't divert ARPA E from its long term objectives I think we simply have to accept that we really won't know the answer to the experiment about whether ARPA E can create transformation we simply don't get to know in the short term we can do all the things to make sure it's on track in the short term but we really won't know the answer to that for some number of years maybe decades and I think it's a risk very worth taking that time will be will only be given to ARPA E if all of us push for it if we're clear about that in our expectations it's going to that time has to be given to that agency by the Department of Energy and the White House and by Congress on both sides of the aisle and I would ask you to think about that as you engage with all of those organizations because I think that will be something that really is key ultimately for ARPA E to have the impact that it was designed to have so let me just wrap up by sharing a small story and it's a story about an experience I had about a year ago last summer very early in my career I had the chance to go to DARPA as a young program manager I was there from 1986 to 1993 then was off doing things that weren't really in the national security realm for almost two decades last year a little before I returned to DARPA I had the chance to meet with an Army major who was telling a group of us about the technologies that they had used in the field recently and he showed us you know this enormous backpack that they had been carrying he showed us the navigation systems and the communication systems and all of these capabilities that they now had and he told us a story about a day when he was getting ready to go out on patrol and that particular day they knew they were going to face some extraordinary challenges and that day when they packed their backpacks they elected to carry some additional electronics instead of food and water and when he said that in that moment seven years of hard work that I had done at DARPA two decades earlier working on advanced electronics that I hoped would one day help our soldiers all that seven years of work immediately became completely worthwhile because I had gotten to be part of something that he valued more than food and water when he had to go out on a mission and I think about that today and the work that we're doing at DARPA that's very much what I want for the investments that we're making today is that in the future we look back and we realize that yes, some of the things that we invested in really did create that kind of transformational change and that's actually what I really want to see for all of you in the energy world as well I hope that there's a future where you're sitting and talking and we're in a world with sustainable, clean, abundant efficiently used energy and you can look back and reflect on the transformative work that you did through technology and through other activities that put us on that right path so I want to thank you again for what you're doing in energy and I look forward to that clean energy future with you thanks so much and I'm very happy to take questions and comments Thank you, Arthi I've got a few questions that I'll tee things up with and then we'll open it up to the general audience there will be microphones that will circulate and we'll have about 15 minutes of Q&A for that so be thinking of your questions so is this audience knows DARPA spawned a lot of copycats, the HS, ARPA IRPA, ARPA-E trying to copy your model and some of these organizations operate more like DARPA and some less and I just wondered, you talked a lot about ARPA-E have they gotten the model right and what, if anything, do you do to kind of help them make it work? Well, first of all, it's been I think it's very flattering that people have tried to replicate the DARPA model and you're right, different organizations have implemented it in different ways and so some are a little bit closer to how we operate as an ARPA organization ARPA-E in particular I think starting from the point of the legislation and then going through the way it was stood up by the department and Arun Majumdar as the first director of the early people I know Mark Hartney's here, he was one of the first directors, that group of people that helped stand it up really got it off on the right footing and I think they were quite thoughtful about what was different about the energy mission but where the ARPA model had worked and could be adopted so I give them enormous credit for having been so thoughtful in the design we occasionally will have technical conversations when there are areas of overlapping interest but as I mentioned I also recently sat down with the folks at ARPA-E just to talk about how we do business and to compare notes and that was a lot of fun for me I knew ARPA-E because I'd had a chance to work with them over the last few years and just had interacted a little bit with them but a number of my colleagues at DARPA had not seen ARPA-E and not surprisingly a lot of people at DARPA are a little suspicious when someone else tries to go do this ARPA thing and part of the fun for me was to see the excitement in the folks at DARPA when they heard how ARPA-E was doing their business and a lot of people afterwards said that's great they're doing the ARPA model so I think that's a good relationship how do you sustain that? it's one thing to get off on the right foot and it's another to stay innovative over a long period of time and DARPA's managed that how easy will it be for an organization like ARPA-E to continue that well again I think for ARPA-E I think it really comes down to continuing to maintain the confidence of all the people who need to support it in the department, in the administration, in Congress but at the end of the day that really means the whole community because this is the group that has to speak for that to be possible if you have that and you continue to have strong leadership I think ARPA-E has every reason to be able to continue to do that and by the way, that's a challenge for ARPA-E, it's a never-ending challenge for DARPA because that is what I think about for my organization all the time that's the core issue where does DARPA get its ideas? it's one thing to have a system for getting good research done but it's another to actually know what research should be done how do you think about that? we think about we think about getting new ideas from a lot of different sources first of all we think about the work we do as a portfolio and so there isn't any one particular technical area or one particular stage of R&D, I want to make sure I have a balanced and diverse portfolio from basic research to things that might be prototypes for acquisition programs in DOD and across that spectrum, at the end of the day at DARPA, ideas come from program managers and it's a very bottoms up process we talk as a group about some of the things I talked about here today where is national security going what's the context for our work but after that I really rely on my program managers because they are the ones who are out in contact with the world they talk to the technical community they find out what military needs and issues people already can see or worry about for the future and they take all those inputs and great program managers synthesize a vision for a program that it's often it's actually something that even though it's inspired by the technical community more than once when the announcement comes out that same technical community says are you kidding that's impossible because it's something it's a little beyond what everyone currently is seeing but then more than once that same technical community goes and makes it happen and in the process they become a community that's capable of carrying things forward so it's we need to make sure we keep building that an environment where that kind of organic innovation process can flourish our scientists have a word for that we've heard the phrase DARPA hard so when you roll your eyes and say it's impossible but somehow it does happen sometimes DARPA hard is impossible but it's okay if that happens sometimes too so part of what makes DARPA success so spectacular it's not just the quality of the research that it sponsors but the fact that technologies have actually gotten to market and how does that happen because I don't see that as part of DARPA's mission necessarily but yet it's something that has in fact happened right I think this is a great point because some of the things that we have done that have made a huge difference for national security are purely military capability so if you think about stealth technology for aircraft that's probably not a lot of commercial applications for that so that got driven as you might expect by DARPA pushing and ultimately the services adopting and it was really defense contractors by and large who were the participants in taking that forward but conversely so many of the other especially component technologies so if you look at communications and networking or you think about advanced semiconductor components or even some of the materials technologies very often what has happened is DARPA or other federal investment will make an early stage research investment but then those technologies go out into the world through commercial paths so over the years DARPA has invested many many many dollars at Stanford and the great thing about Stanford is great research happens the other great thing that happens is the students graduate and they go out and they go to companies often they start companies and that commercialization path one thing that happens is a huge amount of private investment then starts driving those technologies forward that's really powerful and then the circle closes for us when DOD is able to use those technologies that are often at a state far beyond anything we DOD would ever have paid for but because they're commercially available we get to use them and we get to ride those technology curves for our mission needs and that's a virtuous cycle it has a flip side which has to do with the globalization of technology so you want to be clear-eyed about that but that virtuous cycle is still something that is really critical and some of the enabling technologies that we're investing in today that's exactly how we see them progressing out into the world as well you talked about the role of universities and students and how often they're commercializing these technologies and since we have a lot of students here I just wondered if you had any advice for them as they consider careers in high tech or maybe even energy related areas and I guess I'm also interested in being any different for say the women in this audience than the men in this audience well first and foremost I think students end up driving the areas that they think are the most interesting and I've watched universities over a few decades moving into areas in part because students are showing up with a passion for energy or for bioengineering or other fields over the years so I think the fact that all of you are seeing important challenges and technical opportunities I think you're going to chart a tremendously interesting course and you know I think career wise I don't know those others of you who have white hair like me might agree that I think for any of you who are starting off you're going to try something and it will either work or it won't work but over time I hope you will triangulate yourself to a place where what you do that you love to do is what really makes a difference and when you hit that time that's just tremendously productive and happy usually very happy time in your professional life so happy journeys I think it's going to be good You touched briefly on the idea of energy and national security being tied and that's a theme that's come out of this conference last year we had this former secretary of defense William Perry talking about exactly that issue and I'm sure he's going to again today right I suspect that'll be good and we had had last year Gary Ruff head chief of naval operations talking about renewable energy and energy efficiency in the Navy on but yet I guess I'm wondering you know energies had higher and lower priorities within DARPA you mentioned it's not a high priority now but I'm wondering how it ties to these security and operational concerns and how it's changed in the past and what it might be in the future yeah I don't I can't predict all the future but let me tell you what I do know first I would completely agree about the links I mean first when we think about national security I think climate instability is going to continue to be an important driver of our national security landscape and it's something that you know that and our energy relationships around the world our energy dependencies our facts of life so I think that it's part of the national security landscape on the other end of the spectrum in military operations energy plays such an important role whether it's the weight of the batteries in the backpack I was think I was describing a while ago or the logistics chain for the massive quantities of fuel that we need so these are all huge factors and I think it's really easy to see what the problem is for energy from a national security or defense point of view that that's part of the equation the other part of the equation for DARPA to make an investment is to find the breakthrough opportunities and you know again there have been times in the past where I think DARPA has done some really good work in this area it doesn't happen to be a focus at the moment that will change at the moment when we have a program manager who's interested in that area and comes across some ideas and so the door is open and for people who have interests in that area I'm always happy to hear about that DARPA one of the things that I think is important for us as an agency is there's no area that we are in forever and so you'll see us move in and out of fields all the time this is true in many areas including energy and so we have been there I can imagine that we will be there again I'd like to open it up to questions and it looks like we have one in front here and one in the back do you want to wait a minute we've got a microphone that should be coming and for everybody if you could please state your name and affiliation along with your question I'm Mitzi Wertheim with the Naval Postgraduate School I want to ask about risk my father was a pioneer at Bell Labs and when he left he'd already had 90 patents and I loved the dial phone because my father had the original push button patent for the push button telephone back in 1935 it took me 30 years before I got one but I think the nation doesn't understand that if you're doing really breakthrough stuff and what worries me if you get concerned that Congress is going to go crazy because you went after stuff and it didn't work if you're not trying to reach forward if you're not ever having any mistakes you're not trying hard enough now how do you educate the country on that first of all I agree and if everything we do at DARPA works and we're not doing the right things that's completely clear we've never actually had that problem so I think we're on the right track and you know again DARPA's been around for 55 years and we are blessed with a level of support in the Pentagon and in the White House and both houses of Congress both sides of the aisle and it's because we have now a long history and a track record and we've been in the national security business where I think there's an understanding that the threat is significant and we are going to have to take risks to step up to it so the concern that you're raising is one that I deal with but I don't see it as a huge problem for DARPA I think there's a reasonably good appreciation for that fact I think this is something that we all have to help with ARPA-E because same thing exactly they have to be given the room to try things that don't work and in fact if everything ARPA-E does works then I will be concerned that they're not reaching far enough but I think they're doing all the right things and those in the technical community who understand that issue I think it really falls on all of us to make sure we keep arguing for that room so I'm going to run to over here Hello, testing my name is Edward Beardsworth of Energy Technology Advisors I'm really taken by this idea of breakthrough and transformation look for things which are leaps and non-incremental changes and to find those you sometimes have to go outside the bounds of what is considered known too often a new idea will be simply shut down because it steps outside the bounds of accepted science for example now DARPA and SRI decades ago participated in psychokinesis and distance viewing I was pretty brave NASA did breakthrough propulsion studies to try to figure out how to do interstellar travel with propulsion that nobody could even imagine they actually looked at those things and thought about those things but if I come to anywhere in the establishment with an idea for example that talks about zero point energy or low energy nuclear reactions or any number of other things those do not get the time of day and get even looked at please tell me that DARPA at least still is doing some of that stuff behind the scenes I don't know what we're doing in the technologies that you mentioned but I think it's always a fine line between being open minded and as a friend of mine likes to say not so open minded that your brain falls out so in particular I think it is important to be open to innovative ideas and frequently people are bound by things that they think are about the laws of physics and they're actually not they're just convention so we really do want to make sure we aren't bound at that level on the other hand we are bound by the laws of physics and I think you know we try not to make that kind of mistake of spending taxpayers money on things that that violate the second law or any of a number of other problems that occasionally are in proposals that we see so that's a challenge you know I had dinner a couple of nights ago with one of my program managers who happened to be on a flight out here with me and he's sort of a very technical analytic program manager and I was so charmed to hear him tell me over dinner that when he first got to DARPA he said I was really good at just telling people why their idea wasn't right because I got you know I understood it from physics and I could just tell him it was wrong but he said over time I realized that every time someone shares an idea with you that it's a vulnerable act and that they're giving you this baby of theirs and you have to give it a little room if there's something there or not and I took that as a sign that he had learned to be a pretty good program manager so we will keep striving on that there is a hand raised over here with the microphone great hi James McKenzie with Director of Center for Excellence in with Swinerton San Francisco earlier I talked about being part of a global network on the positive side but I was kind of struck with your you know you're in a defense business essentially are we in an era that we're not dealing with you know a foreign adversary a country but a you know what I call a dark network you know like a group they're not maybe they're different countries different purposes but is that what we're dealing with now we're dealing with a network of bad guys essentially well I think the part of the complexity in the national security world is that we're dealing with this whole range I believe from nation states to these linked illicit activities if you like so yeah I think it's a very wide spectrum that we're dealing with I'm Terry Clark with Fine Light could you explain to us how you think social science and your hard science research interact specifically I've got Beck behavior energy and climate change and energy change is hard but so much security be if we don't change our behavior so how do you get involved in that understanding you know I think that's such a great question and I don't think I have a great or satisfactory answer to it and I think the reason is that most of us who grew up in you know the hard sciences and engineering don't really know quite how to think about these other areas and yet in your world in terms of how people use energy and in my world in the national security context at the end of the day a lot of what the military every military objective ultimately is about influencing a population and populations now are expressing themselves and are available in online forums where the amount of information that people are showing to the world is sort of phenomenal and might be an important part of addressing this amorphous shape shifting threat that we're dealing with but yet all of those things require different ways of thinking about societal behavior and about social networks and social behaviors, human behaviors so I think we are just barely starting to scratch the surface of that we have a few things that we're doing at DARPA but I don't think we're really fully ramped up it is possible that in the same way that this notion of biology being the basis for hard technology is something that I think we've come to over the last couple of decades I think that moment is I think biology is blossoming as the basis for new technology today it's possible that the next generational shift will be about our understanding about our technology understanding and capability based on social science but I don't even think we know how to talk about it quite yet it's very early from where I sit I want to talk again about the transformative versus incremental research that you were talking about in your remarks you gave wonderful examples about the emails and the blue dot following you on the map and talked about how many decades of work, hard work that was needed prior to that gave me the impression that in the moment it's very hard to know whether technology is going to be transformative or it's going to be incremental and the emphasis that I see in all the BAs that come out of DARPA and ARPA-E on that this research has to be transformative etc. I'm afraid that valuable work in the incremental area and therefore things being that should be developed are getting the short end and we actually hope they're getting the short end from us because that's not our job and we are such a small portion of the R&D investment that's made that if we actually tried to do incremental things I think we would completely fail to do our job which is to make sure we're staying focused on breakthrough opportunities and there are many billions of other dollars that are intended to do incremental things so I actually I'm willing to fail on incremental things because I think we have to preserve our focus on this mission that nobody else really has so I think we need to wrap up our discussion but maybe you'd like to have kind of the last word on just thinking I said everything I had to say so in previous talks you've mentioned how the US is a leader in clean tech technology development it may be a laggard and implementation and I just wondered if you be the queen of the universe and give some ideas on implementation well that's a great topic and actually that's another thing that energy and national security shares as passionate as I am about the transformative capability of technology both of these areas are places where what it takes to implement technology at scale is daunting and often feels like we're not really doing as good a job as we could so on the energy side every day I feel sort of frustrated about it but I think if you take the longer view if you look over a year or over 5 or 10 years you can start to see some important trends and over the last few years I think on the transportation side with mileage standards rising I think that's an example of a step that we've taken in the fullness of time is going to prove to be something that's a big driver and a pull on technology so I certainly don't have any magic solutions for that sometimes when I as a technologist when I'm dispirited about how onerous the acquisition processes and DOD or how hard it'll be to get the services to think in a different way what I remember is the examples from history where technologists simply showed what was possible and you know rather than talking about it or doing PowerPoint if you show it over time people can't ignore it and eventually always slower than you would like but eventually we do make those big changes well thank you so much