 If you are watching via the live stream, please use the chat box for any questions that you might have for the moderator and or the panelists. The chat box is being monitored and questions will be asked on a first comes first served basis. Thank you. And for our panel session, the moderator will be AJ Malsha. He is the R. Eugene and Susie E. Goodson Distinguished Professor in the School of Mechanical Engineering at Purdue. He has over 25 years, actually over 27 years of academic scholarship in areas including human centric convergent manufacturing, bio-inspired designs, multifunctional materials, and system integration with applications in heavy duty machines, heterogeneous micro-electronics, smart food manufacturing for equity and in-space manufacturing. And I know that he's going to try to bug me later about technology involvement. He says that it's enough. I need to tell you that he's a member of the National Academy of Engineering, fellow of the American Society of Materials and the American Society of Mechanical Engineering. And then I'll stop and introduce our moderator. Thank you. Thank you, Barrett. Welcome all in this beautiful atrium. If you compare this place with any other place, you remember we have a capsule here, so we are different. Everybody's smiling and cheerful. I don't know whether it is because the end of the semester or the panel is going to be so exciting. I think it is about the panel. So thank you again for that. I have a very exciting opportunity to talk to my colleagues, very distinguished set of colleagues, and especially our guest here. So with that, I would like to start the introductions. I'm going to be flipping pages here to go across, so if you hear a little bit of noise, forgive me for that. But our chief guest today is, I'm going to pronounce your name right. I must tell you because names are important and I would like to pronounce it right. So Latin is it, right? Close enough. Clown is it. Thank you. So our chief guest is one of the world experts in corrosion science. And he has extensive accomplishment that Dr. Barrett would extensively introduce him later before his discussion and talk. But in the interest of time, I would like to point out some of his accomplishments at MIT. He was at the MIT for quite extensive amount of time as the director of holding corrosion laboratory in the department of material science and engineering. Corrosion is one of the areas that touches literally every material. So his field touches everything between every machine that we can imagine. So it has a very deep footprint. He led the school of engineering of materials processing centered MIT as his director from 1985 to 91. He's now an emeritus professor of MIT. He's a member of National Academy of Engineering and a fellow of American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He's also the fellow of ASM, American Society for Materials International and of NACHE International. He is also founder of ALTRAN, Materials Engineering Corporation. I'm going to hold some information behind in the interest of my colleagues so he can introduce you. Our second panelist is Dr. Barrett Caldwell. He's a professor of industrial engineering and astronautics and aeronautics by Perzi at Purdue. His PhD from University of California, Davis in 1990 is in social psychology and bachelor of science degree in aeronautics and astronautics and humanities at MIT in 1985. His areas of interest and expertise to him and his team are examines and improves how people get share and use information as well in settings including aviation, critical incident response, health care and space flight operations. He has over 200 scientific publications in journals and confidence publications. He's extensively involved in the relation to the academies of sciences, engineering and medicine, including one of the very organizational and leadership role and frontiers of engineering, which is some very key events that NAC looks forward for that. Also, from 2016 to 2017, he was the Jefferson Science Fellow at the U.S. Department of State, and also he's the director and principal investigator of NASA-funded Indiana Space Grand Consortium. He's a Fellow of Human Factors and Organomics Society and Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineering. He has been involved and Purdue has tremendously benefited from his leadership on the task force for equity and equal opportunity for all students of all identities. Thank you very much for your service. In addition to our distinguished colleagues that I introduced, we had two other colleagues. Professor Sang, he is a Ellenfield Head and Distinguished Professor of Chemical Engineering at Purdue, where he's engaged in a rational computer-aided drug discovery research. He earned simultaneously a Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degrees in Chemical Engineering from Caltech, and his PhD from Princeton started his career at University of Wisconsin-Madison, rising to the rank of Wisconsin Distinguished Professor in eight years. In 1997, Dr. Kim left academia for a big pharma as Vice President of R&D IT, first for Werner, Lambert, and then Eli Lilly. He returned to academia six years later as Distinguished Professor at Purdue and to serve from 2004-2005 at NSF as Division Director of Cyber Infrastructure. Dr. Kim is a fellow of two engineering societies, EICHE and AIMBE, and was inducted into the National Academy of Engineering in 2001. Welcome, Dr. Kim. And then, last but not the least important, we have Sasha Bultaseva. She is Ron Darty-Garvin Tungent Professor at Electrical and Computer Engineering with Curtsy Appointment in Materials Engineering at Purdue. She received her Doctorary Degree in Electrical Engineering at Technical University, Denmark, DTU in 2004. Sasha specializes in nanophotonics, quantum photonics, nanofabrication, and optical materials. She's received in 2013 Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers IEEE, Photonic Society Young Investigator Award 2013 MRS, that is Materials Research Society's Outstanding Young Investigator Award, and 2011 MIT Technology Review Top Young Investigator Award called TR35. 2009 Young Research Award in Advanced Optical Technologies and from the University of Erlangen, Nuremberg, Germany. And the Young Elite Research Award from Danish Council of Independent Research. So she's one of the global colleagues that we have that one can imagine. Among her multiple accomplishments, she is the Fellow of National Academy of Inventors of National Fellow of MRS, IEEE, Optica, which used to be called OSA, Optical Society of America, and International Society for Optical Engineering, SPIE. She served on the MRS Board of Directors and also, she's one of the most highly cited researchers in the web of science in 2020 and 2021. So you can imagine that we have between world-class nanotechnologies and optical engineer, a chemical engineer with a tremendous expertise in IT, your field touches literally every discipline, and then you can continue all the way to the space. You can just imagine that how much breadth and depth of scholarship we have. So on the screen that you will find out that I had just made a really humble attempt to set up some stage for this conversation. But really I would like to invite my colleagues here to think about, before we look what would be the next 50 years, it is always important that we stand on the shoulders of giant. We look at what was accomplished in the last 50 years. And there are a lot accomplished that we can feel excited about as engineers, scientists, thinkers, socially conscious colleagues. But if you look at these accomplishments, this is not my list. I must admit that quickly this is from popular mechanics. This is by the people vote. You would find out there are many things that has transformed our life. But if I see where we stand today in 2020, I see very interesting picture. If you see in the hindsight, if we look at the Maslow's pyramid of human needs, really the first part or so far our inventions touched how we can make human life better. But it was more inspired, driven all the way from ideation, invention, innovation and implementation as human. Now we just came to the point in history that human brain is just not enough for ideation. We need to take the benefit of digital life forms of ours. It's sometimes called out hours. It can be used as AI. But now we are at a very important point in our own history that we will have our partners in the digital world to ideate, invent, innovate and implement. This is very exciting, but a very scary time. I must see that. And that might reflect how old I am. But with that intent, I have a list of questions that I will be going through. But I will just keep those to myself for time being not to bias you. So with that intent, my first question to all my colleagues here is I will kick off by saying one of out of all these range of inventions that I was thinking that what is one invention that connects many other inventions and innovation. And the word that quickly came to my mind is semiconductors. Semiconductor powers everything from wireless to worldwide web and avatars that I just talked about to AI. So semiconductors and silicon are the two words that connects at least 25% what was in those invention and that is pretty powerful for the last 50 years. So my first question really goes to all of you and I'll take my seat in the course of conversation. And I will start with our main guest and the order that we will pursue in the future after the first round is really we'll start with our colleague who is my reflection on the other side but much better, smarter and otherwise than me. But we'll start with you and we'll come back here. Does it make sense? Or otherwise? Perfect. If you do like to chime in between, feel free to do that as colleagues. But first question I would like to start with you. That how do you see in the next 50 years do you think we will either evolve, revolutionize or disrupt the word semiconductor? Question one and part two of that question will silicon be still material of now or there will be truly a material of future? Go ahead, Ron. Well, those are interesting questions. Let me just take a step back and I will answer them or give you my thoughts on that. The first thing I want to do is thank everyone for being here. I'm particularly happy to be here myself. You know that this is actually the third attempt at holding this meeting and of course COVID inflicted delays have made it just about impossible. But I'm always reminded of the baseball phrase that three strikes and you're out. So I figured if I didn't show up this time I probably would not be invited back. So I am distinctly honored to be here today. And I'm especially pleased to be surrounded by this panel of distinguished scholars and researchers and an audience of smiling faces. How can you get any better than that? Now before I answer your question I think it's a very relevant question but I just want to tell you how we came to the thought of having a discussion around the question of where will engineering be in 50 years? What is engineering 2070 going to look like? Will there be silicon semiconductors? Will there be others? We'll come back to that. The basis of this conversation is related to a publication of the National Academy of Engineering which I edit. So this is a plug for the academy I guess. But it's called the bridge. It turns out that the bridge began publication 50 years ago. So I thought it would be very interesting to have 50 members of the academy write essays given their specialties on where they saw their field 50 years forward. So 2070. And one of the interesting recurring themes in this issue and I think you have an electronic copy which is available. I think that's correct. Have you guys seen this? No. Yes? Some have. I can guarantee you that Maria somewhere has an electronic copy which I think is available. But one of the recurring themes in all the writing in this issue is the concept that the evolution of new engineering systems whatever will emerge in the next 50 years the evolution of those systems involve risk, right? There are technical risks, there are economic risks and there are social risks. In a technical sense, you know you may be developing a technology in your laboratory. It works perfectly well. But there's always the question of whether or not you can scale it up to industrial size whether that means for an individual consumer or for a manufacturer or whatever it happens to be. So there's always a technical risk. Can you scale it up to be useful? And then of course there's an economic risk. What are the costs? Will it be affordable by either individuals or by companies? Will investors emerge who are interested in providing the resources to develop the technology so they become marketable? Those are risks. You know if the answer is no, you're in trouble. But it is the third risk that is I think most underappreciated and probably least practiced in the technology world and that is the societal question, the societal risk. I'll give you an example of what I mean by that. If you think about the internet and the worldwide web I don't think when Tim Berners-Lee developed the web his idea was that it would be a platform that would provide technology and information all over the planet, all over the globe. And frankly the web does a beautiful job of that. I would imagine everybody in this room has interfaced with the internet and the web today multiple times and it's just part of our lives. So it performs what Tim Berners-Lee intended beautifully but there is another dimension. The web has begun to serve as a source of disinformation. It has served as a means for cyber attacks of one nation against other nations. It has served as a vehicle for recruiting malcontents who wish to create harm all over the world. I know that Tim Berners-Lee never intended that. But I think it's a demonstration of the fact that the internet and particularly social media which is a consequence it operates without regulation. And I think that's the case either because the people who are developing these technologies see a marketable product and revenues which are significant. Very wealthy people who have been beneficiaries of these. But the fact of the matter is they are not serving a useful social purpose. And so I think one of the things that we must do, we collectively, technologists, is that we must start thinking more deeply about the kinds of controls and filters we put on the technology that we develop and that we introduce into the marketplace. That's not easy but I think it's incumbent on us as the developers of the technology to accept responsibility and accountability and act. And we don't do that very well. Now, one final comment. The bridge, I look at this as not just a volume, it's a bridge to public engagement. Because of the nature of the articles in here, the public can read this and understand it. This is not intended to be a document meant only for the experts in the field. This is a document that is readable. And I think it's important because it'll give context to the general public that is very much needed in terms of the way we respond to the introduction of new technological systems into our lives. We have a right and actually a responsibility to act on these things. And so my hope is that this volume will serve that purpose. I'll tell you that in Winchester, Massachusetts, which is where I live, I've used this volume as a guide to discussions that we have a technology forum that we've established in town. And there are doctors and lawyers and retread MIT engineers and plumbers and people who are not scientists but are interested in technology and concerned about it, who get together twice a month and we have, I think, a very welcoming discussion. Seriously, it's exhilarating because the community is talking about science and technology in ways that I find really, really exciting. So this is a bridge to technology and public involvement, which I think is really quite important. Now, to semiconductors. Can I just say a word about semiconductors? You want to go through the panel. I've taken too much. No, I appreciate actually you introduced the bridge but the socially responsible engineering is going to be one of the founding stones of the next 50 years. It has to be for just the survival of the humanity. So I'm glad you kicked this conversation with that message. But please, I would love to hear your thought process whether we will call it a semiconductor or this would be something else. Well, you know, folks, some of you folks may have heard of what's called a material genome initiative. It's an initiative that was begun during the Obama presidency. The Office of Science and Technology Policy rolled out a program called the Material Genome Initiative. And the whole idea is to say as we evolve, if we need materials that don't exist today that have certain properties that are needed in order for a new technology to be introduced, let's develop a computationally derived design and implementation strategy to develop those materials. It will be quicker, cost effective, and it will be immediately deployable. It has all the right attributes. And so I have this dream that someday a president of the United States will walk up to a microphone and say, I am committing this country and I'll come to semiconductors. I'm committing this country, let's say, to a hydrogen economy. And in order for that to take place, we need to have semiconductor photo electrodes that will split water using sunlight as a source of energy. And I call on the Materials Genome Initiative to develop that material. And I will also point out, this is the president speaking, that sunlight and water are both free today. They know no geopolitical boundaries. They're available to the legacy nations and to the non-legacy nations. The whole planet will benefit. But we need a durable, cheap semiconductor photo electrode. Can you help me, MGI, in developing it? And I then hope that a representative of the Materials Genome Initiative will step up to a microphone and say, Madam President, we will find that material. I hope you caught that because I said that for all, but I have four granddaughters. And I really mean that, though. I really hope that somewhere we will both make use of this Materials Genome Initiative, but also that we'll have a woman president before too long. That's personal politics, but we can leave it at that. Well, thank you very much. I think let's start with Materials Genome Project. There's a great start. Thank you, Ron. Sasha, go ahead. We're happy to share with the nano-photonics expert your thoughts. Well, first of all, I'm very privileged and honored to be here and to be part of this panel. And I just want to set the stage for what I'm going to say and announce that I am a believer. I am a believer in good in human nature. And I'm a believer in much better future for everyone. And I think, as you pointed out already, that that's going to be a cornerstone to develop conscious engineering with a better well-being for everyone and the planet in mind. And now going back to semiconductors. And obviously, I'm doing photonics and I'm doing quantum photonics. And I might be biased, but I don't think it's a bias. It's a future. I do believe that it's not a coincidence that we started with the bridge because I believe in bridging together multiple disciplines, people, scientists and public and everything. And I do believe that what we are witnessing today and namely major technology and science revolutions and quantum and big data and AI, we have to bridge them and merge them together in order to develop something which would be very disruptive. The future, in my view, is going to be hybrid that will be integrating many pieces together. We already see that on in our supercomputer. We already have optical links that are much faster, as we know. And one of my colleagues and my dear husband, he used to say, you know, the best electronics is photonics because it's faster and you're never going to beat the speed of light. And in the information technologies, we are here leveraging the fact that nanoscale electronics and optical fibers that are bigger size are working together. And that's going to be the future. We have optical links and optical detectors already in our supercomputers. And the next stage is going to be quantum. We are reaching the limit. We are reaching the size of a single atom. We are utilizing the quantum effects. Whether it's going to be a single platform, I don't think so. And frankly, I don't think that we have to stick to the well-established semiconductor foundry because we will not be able to continue the disruptive growth. And it's well accepted now among all the companies doing quantum and you wouldn't believe it, but it's like a couple of hundreds of companies in this country only that position themselves as doing quantum. And you would think of a giant like IBM and Microsoft, but there are tons of companies you wouldn't think are doing quantum that are really investing in R&D and quantum science. And they are betting on the very different platforms because it will be so that for specific applications you are going to use and leverage different technologies. If it's a sensor with unprecedented sensitivity, the platform would be quantum optics. They will be using this entangled photons coupled together that due to quantum correlation actually provide you with unprecedented sensibility. And for other things like supercomputing we are going to use a different platform, maybe new topological quantum materials, for example. So I do believe that it's going to be hybrid and we will have to work very hard in bridging different disciplines together and different platforms. And with that, I will pass it on. Thank you. Well, in the interest of full disclosure I should mention that in my abbreviated biosketch I left out the fact that almost 40 years ago I actually worked for Intel. And at the time Intel was still very much in the mode and the culture of a startup company because it was barely a decade after the company had been, a decade and a half after the company had been founded. Very different from the world of semiconductors today. And so I still have a lot of ideas and insights and thoughts that were planted from that experience in the 1980s. But I also wanted to touch upon the theme of the special lecture today which is about the future of energy and future of engineering. So if you kind of step back and look at the big picture and take out the politics and just look at the science and technology question of our energy assets and energy portfolio. The way to look at it is we have this wealth of high density energy which took millions of years in geological time scale to form. And it's ultimately solar energy that was concentrated across these millions of years and now in the flash of a pan and literally on a geological time scale in an instant we are in a situation or we're in a position to utilize all that energy to have this tremendous burst of creativity over a time scale of maybe a couple of hundred years. And so we have to make the most of this opportunity and not blow it. So I would draw the analogy to a young children who left an immense fortune by their parents and grandparents and so on. And the challenge is are you going to do something useful with that legacy or are you going to blow the inheritance? And so I think the role of semiconductors and smart technology is to use the most of this opportunity that we have to come up with scalable solutions on a societal scale and then ultimately transition to other forms of high density energy that are going to meet the societal needs of billions of people. And that is really the overarching challenge that engineers have to be part of the contribution to that solution. And I think the framing of engineering 50 years from now in the 2070s is a great way to think about it because I think this is such an immense challenge that the time scale for solving this problem is actually 50 to 100 years using all the smart technologies that we have today. Excellent. Thank you. Please go ahead. So this has been somewhat imposing. I'm hearing these people talk about these wonderful technologies. And I guess I may take on the role of the Lorax who speaks for some other group. And I'm forced to remember that as an industrial engineer we're always asking what's the objective function? What are you trying to make increase or decrease? And what we also find out when we ask our clients about that is that there's rarely universal agreement on what the objective function is. Since we're talking about semiconductors I've read an interesting story about the history of Purdue that at one point they were, we were, world leaders in developing these sorts of silicon transmission but they had an objective function of minimizing the impurities in the substrate. That unfortunately was the wrong call. That influenced whether or not Intel existed, whether or not Texas Instruments existed in years to come. So trying to understand what is the objective function I think is a really crucial element. I think of myself as a romantic idealist but not necessarily an optimist. And the reason why is civilizations have known structured coordinated irrigation for thousands of years and hundreds of millions of people are still without reliable food, fresh water, and power. We have been able to understand the concept of sharing resources. We have also understood the concept of trying to control resources. It has not been clear that the expectation of all of us in this room let alone all of us in this county believe that sharing resources, especially scarce resources, or resources we believe to be scarce, is the right thing to do. And so we have to ask, what does that mean for the use of these technologies in the future? We have to think about, rather than maintaining a particular solution, how do we design for the widest possible range of solutions? So I read Wired Magazine and they had those six word contests at the end. I was a creative writing minor in college, so I do this. And I was thinking about from some of the semiconductor work and some of the photonics work that our colleague was talking about. And what happens with the headline, serodopa hack, suspected in killings, suicides? In other words, the direct brain interface, the intersection of neurons and photonics allows someone to upset the chemical balance of thousands of people who have relied on that technology to manage bipolar disorder. To say, well, you can't do that, or you wouldn't do that, people have been hacking Fitbits and defibrillators and infusion pumps. Why would you want to do that? That's a question for a different social scientist, I think. But I don't think that we can assume that just more and better engineering will give us a different species of human. Well, thank you. I think this is an exciting topic for the two. Let's take this theme of conversation further along. So if you look at where the discipline of engineering came, somewhere in about 1700, a formal first college of engineering was established in France, and then first came in the United States in West Point. And over the time, the college of engineering progressed. But if you look back, what people call industry 1.0, 2.3, 4.0, mechanization, electrification, then electronicification or computerization, and now datafication, you can literally trace the origin of all the way from agriculture engineering to civil, to mechanical, to electrical, to electronics, and industrial and chemical. Literally, you can progress there. So the growth of engineering, as I see, was driven by how, as a society, we progressed through those modern industrial revolutions, if I may call. But now we are at a point in history that we are solving problems, not just for civil infrastructure, not only for electrification like Edison and others we are doing. We are solving far bigger problems. We are solving problems that how we are going to feed the growing population that is expected by 2050, somewhere close to 9 billion, there will be a little over 2 billion people, or maybe a little less than 2 billion people now than we will have in that time, how we can get medical care to all of them. So with that kind of, we have different problems now. That gave the birth to the disciplines of engineering and what we call schools or departments today. We build those in the serial processing, but now we are going in serious parallel processing. And I have a question for my panelists that in 2017, do you think this infrastructure that we have built of disciplines, those are verticals, if I may call, somewhat partitioned? The walls are coming down slowly and steadily, but will these institutions, the way they are, will they be or they will look something very marked into something different, proportional to the problems of the magnitude we are solving, because the problems we are now solving and will be solving, those are very different magnitude problems. And I would love to hear your thoughts that how engineering discipline education infrastructure could and may look like by then. With that, Sasha, go ahead, please. Certainly there will be evolution, and if there is no evolution, it's stagnated. It means there is no progress. And we have already witnessed, for example, the formation of electrical and computer engineering, right? So with the rise of semiconductor industry, we already were in a situation where we had to create new programs and train the workforce for never existing industry. That happened already once. Right now, it's happening again. It is happening again with AI and quantum science and technologies. What's interesting about quantum that I am part of and I'm actually also workforce lead for the DOE funded quantum science center, I know that there is a gap. We do not have for workforce for quantum scientists and we will have to create this workforce. And we will have to ask ourselves what other skills that we would need to build the next generation of devices that will have to address a multitude of questions that you mentioned. So training for an engineer that will be designing unhackable, secure quantum systems. They have to keep in mind cyber wars in mind, not just the technical aspect of it. If we are designing a sensor, we have to think about space exploration, we have to think about renewable energy and this will be a motive that will have to reflect in creating a new curricular and new education programs how the future engineering would look like depends on where we are going, where the whole field of engineering is going and obviously renewable energy renewable and sustainable agriculture, clean water food, security those items that are driving us what we will drive the education and workforce development in the future. Thank you. Let me just add to that. I agree with what you've said. I was struck by a comment that Barrett made about social scientists. I don't think there's particularly anything necessarily wrong with the engineering disciplines as we know them except that we do serve a societal purpose. Every product that we deploy should serve a societal purpose. And yet, we never have input from social scientists. We just don't. I was really encouraged in what when President Biden announced his the membership of his Office of Science and Technology Policy, OSTP because the first time in the history of the United States a social scientist, Alondra Nelson, was appointed to OSTP. That is, you know, it got some attention, but not nearly as much attention as it should. That is a landmark decision by a President of the United States. And she is today serving as the director of that office. Now, why is that important? Because we, engineers we take what scientists learn about nature we make it useful and we make it available to the public, to the society in some hopefully useful form. But we never ask society to weigh in on any of this. They just don't. They may weigh in by deciding whether they buy it or not. You know, will you buy this product or not? But would it not be interesting to get a societal view for example, on whether we should be using going forward the next 50 years we should be using fossil fuels for the next 50 years or whether we should look at renewables or hydrogen or some other energy source. Would it not be useful to find out what society thinks about that? Now, you know, people will say, well, they're not engineers they're not scientists. What do they know? The fact is they live on this planet and they should have a right and a voice to some expression of either concern or approval or involvement. And I think, frankly, I think we do a very poor job. Technologists, we collectively we do a poor job of engaging the public. And yet we're serving them. That's our point. That's the whole point of engineering to develop systems that serve a societal purpose. So, I like this I like the social science that comes from this guy. I really do. We had dinner last night. I'll tell you, this is a little bit staged because we did have dinner together last night and I was struck by I didn't realize that this industrial engineer also had a social science background. This is pretty impressive. He's way ahead of his time. Let me tell you. Well, thank you, Ron. Yes, so one thing I always remind myself is if you watch the science fiction movies from the 1950s and what they thought the year 2000 would be like there are two things about those movies that strike us now looking back as kind of humorous. One is flying cars, right? The regular automobiles that everyone saw in the streets in the 50s would be replaced by flying cars. And of course there's interstellar travel and space flight and so on but if you look at the controls of those vehicles there's no sign of semiconductors or digital technologies. It's what they know which is analog controls but obviously on a bigger and flashier screens blinking and so on. And so that basically says your ability to project what's ahead 50 years is limited by what we see and feel are important in the current context. And so I think that aspect of human nature is very hard to overcome. So with that in mind to check my hubris I'll make a few bets which is, you know, one of the bet you can definitely make is the tight correlation between the standard of living and our advancement of our civilization and energy utilization. And it's very clear obviously fossil fuels for example is a depleting resource. And so if we want to have advances in progress we are going to have to find new sources of energy that can meet the needs of the billions of people on this planet. That's one thing. And I don't see that changing unless there's something so unexpected breakthrough in human nature that that correlation between energy usage and civilization is decoupled. If that happens then of course all bets are off but at this point I don't see how that could possibly happen so I think that's something that obviously engineers will be very active in delivering that energy. And I think the second thing is just like the semiconductor revolution caught the science fiction futurist by surprise and there were no flying cars I think the way this these challenges are overcome are going to come from unexpected sources that it's not just a projection of what we know today but possibly unexpected breakthroughs in science and materials engineering and so on that give us new ways to address problems that today we cannot even imagine. So a breakthrough that makes nuclear energy safe for example or a breakthrough in fusion energy were after many many decades of frustration but finally something happens and fusion suddenly becomes feasible it's that kind of transformation that makes the future very different from the science fiction prediction that we have today. I have to make a comment when I was a kid do you ever remember Dick Tracy comic? When I was a kid I remember seeing Dick Tracy in his wrist radio. Do you ever read it? And I was a kid I was thinking man that guy's got an imagination that'll never happen and I have an eye watch that does exactly what Tracy was thinking and many more things. It's the unexpected nature of what we're dealing with some of these things you cannot even imagine and yet in 50 years I think we'll look back some of you will look back and say my god that was where did that come from? How did a guy like who was the cartoonist Chester Gold I think cartoonist who drew Dick Chester Gold how did he imagine a wrist watch? A wrist watch serving as a radio and later on a wrist TV this was in the 40s I think somewhere way back I was a kid in the 40s that was a little earlier but nevertheless these are things you can't even imagine and yet they will happen and we have to respond accordingly but I think you know when I think back to the wrist watch and Dick Tracy it wasn't a technologist who conceived of the idea I think Apple acted on it but it was Diet Smith that's who? Diet Smith no it was the son of Diet Smith in Dick Tracy who invented the wrist radio that tells you something about my cartoon interest but thank you so much for that thanks everyone for bringing that after we hear our colleague we're going to go back to our colleagues in the audience who request some questions so keep thinking but we'll come back to you just in a minute go ahead Barry recognizing that we do have a lot of society here what we're hearing though from your point Ron is that it's not technologists that drive these things they respond to imagination and one of the things that we see is that with all the growth in our information systems the materials genome initiative that you're describing won't work in a text based organizational system you need something else and so being able to imagine beyond the boundaries of what we've come to recognize is really important most engineers are specialists that's why we have the specialties that we do have so do we have a question from the audience go ahead if there is a question before you go I really hope Ron that materials genome can yield a vibranium because I'm looking for the vibranium from Wakanda that can do a lot of magic but we are in a two lighter note here so go ahead please please tell your name which school you come from and your question please my name is Blake I'm an industrial engineer my question is related to what Professor Caldwell said but for everyone and addressing truly global issues not even necessarily a population demands or needs but as a whole how has slash will markets and profit influenced how we do those engineering and what problems we solve any my colleagues would like to address do you have a question for a specific colleague of mine or anybody would like to of course the one I guess most people would point to the easiest top of my head would be the patenting of antibiotics things like this that what makes money and what is viable and what whatever the metric might be and what is objectively good for people are not always lined up and we've used that metric lock step for so long I'm wondering how that relationship will look in the future let me take a crack at that let me say first I'm a capitalist I certainly believe that people who develop things that are useful and effective and responsible for societal means I think they deserve to earn whatever they can from that so you know you know I think we have but I think we do have to look at the societal benefits and weigh that against the motive to make profit without being responsible it's very easy to say well I can build a system I know how to do it I know how to market it but the real question should be does it really serve society and I know that's a tough that last one can you know if you think you can get rich making something you're likely to do it but I always think of the joke about the homely comment about better mouse trap if it's something that really improves the quality of life do it that's my attitude well thank you Ron are there any other questions well if my colleagues and audience are quiet let me go through some oh please go ahead this is about predicting the future if you look at this is an article Freeman Dyson wrote some years ago on tool driven revolutions versus concept driven revolutions in physics there are a number of the concept driven revolutions are things like relativity quantum mechanics Newton's laws etc they come few and far between tool driven revolutions or come from a new tool which occurs fairly frequently like atomic force microscope or Fourier analysis or things of that nature it may be I'm wondering if your microphone is turned on I'm not sure okay I think I think everybody heard what I said so I think it seems like in terms of predicting the future predicting tool driven revolutions may be more easy predicting concept driven revolutions it's like predicting singularities and catastrophes that I find difficult to imagine you would be able to predict I mean nobody predicted the internet so you know any thoughts on the it's not a really a question as a comment and I would like to hear each of your comments maybe starting with professor yes I can start you see that I was like I was ready to jump in well first of all I don't believe in tool revolution I am an engineer but all tool revolution start with a concept revolution and I am a believer that for whatever advances to happen in technology it has to be truly creative breakthrough in fundamental science that's why advances and breakthroughs in fundamental science are crucial they are the driver of our society and that's why it's hard to predict and let me remind you the discovery of a laser when laser was invented people didn't know what to do with it it was a solution looking for a problem can you imagine a world without a laser an optical fiber communication systems right now no it was ahead of time but without the laser or without the semiconductor discoveries we would not be where we are the same is with quantum first were very fundamental discoveries of quantum states and quantum mechanical nature and laws and then we come up with ideas and I do believe that more breakthroughs are to happen and whether there would be human creativity alone or working together with AI I know you didn't mention it already that's something for us to see well excellent comment we are last five minutes thank you for your pointers I appreciate that so in close session like this is very difficult to summarize I must tell you so in summary what I'm going to ask the following question I would request reasonably quick response if I may say and the question is if you had to write and lock one engineering idea and a piece of advice to your peers in a time capsule now imagine a time capsule something like what we have we could that would open in 2070 what that one idea and one advice could be and with that Sasha if I may start with you I know this one thought and one advice and one idea one advice the sky is a limit keep creating with a human being and planet in mind I'm going to use this opportunity also to provide yet another answer to Blake's question of market failures we have a situation where the market incentives are not aligned with protecting people in vulnerable areas for example like Southern Africa where you could have enormous numbers of people are not protected who are infected simultaneously by multiple viruses and so it's clear for example that virus variants like Omicron are hybrids that originated when people are infected by more than one virus and so on so in that time capsule I'll say we apologize for missing this threat to humanity that killed 99% of the people on the planet and so when you open this capsule seven years from now we apologize thank you you know I mentioned I mentioned hydrogen earlier today and I really do look 50 years forward I really do look to a planet where hydrogen is the energy medium it has all of the right attributes and I don't mean to try to sell hydrogen but it's not geopolitical it's water and sunlight if you find the right material to split water you can produce hydrogen and you can use it as a fuel I really do hope the planet is at that stage in 2070 Alex go ahead Bear I have to build on the last two comments and you stole my idea about the we're sorry um and my version of we're sorry is we thought that scarcity and competition were all that we could do and before we get to the hydrogen economy I will remind you how flammable hydrogen is oh but hey let me let me answer you know methane is flammable but we use it for cooking and heating and it's engineering folks we have to manage risks and we can do it so I have now I have two responsibilities one to tell idea and a thought but before that I want to do something more important I first want to thank Dean Manchin Professor Arvind Raman Professor Mark Lernstrom and all the staff that have worked hirelessly to make this possible let's give them a round of applause to bring all the resources I also want to share now I believe I have watched Matrix movie too many times and I believe that I would love to learn a topic so many topics that I believe that I don't have enough hours in a day to learn more things I believe that we can find an instrument that I can learn fast to fly and to do other things that I would so device like this in 2017 but I think the thought that I would only share that what matters at the end of the day is what you're happy about and that I do not believe would change in 2017 as a human so with that note I wish you all the best I once again would like to thank my colleague and ideas like this inspire more of these so we look forward to see more of these so with that have a great end of the semester and a great summer thank you for attending have a good afternoon