Okay, could I ask people to find their seats? Okay, folks, woohoo. You know, if we had to pay him what he's worth, we couldn't afford the billing hour, so I want to get started here. Thank you all for coming. Delighted to have you here, and it's really a great privilege to have General Bolden with us. First, let me tell everybody, you know, if you've got a cell phone, put it on silent sun. Stun, because if it rings, I'm going to walk over and haul you out, because we don't want the interruptions. This is a real privilege. On a personal level, I've had the privilege of working with General Bolden through a number of years. We served together back at DOD. He was still in uniform at the time serving so ably in the Marine Corps. And then I thought he deserved his private life, and he did too for a very short time, but then was called back into service with my President Obama and to head up NASA. I think it takes a combat-tested Marine to be the administrator of NASA today. These are tough days. You know, we've got, we have expectations that are enormous. We have budgets that are constraining, and we have, you know, foxhole to foxhole politics in Washington. This is going to be hard. But I happen to know General Bolden, and he's absolutely up to this challenge. He has such an embracing personality. You know, he combines what I always have admired in the Marine Corps. You know, a charming personality, but willing to fight literally foxhole to foxhole to get his mission accomplished. And it's going to take that this year. It's going to be a tough year. Because of his spirit and his energy and his courage, I feel fairly confident that we're going to prevail. He has an ambitious technical agenda for NASA coming at a time when the government feels it's broke. And one of the great challenges that he faces, of course, is to reinvigorate that sense of excitement. That those of us that are sitting here that have gray hair, remember that. A lot of the others don't. But I can still remember those days, how thrilling it was. We just were glued to the television to see John Glenn go in orbit.  You can't shake your head up now. You're too young. You can't remember. I mean, you saw the movies. But you remember that. You remember that thrill. And unfortunately, that thrill and excitement isn't with us now. So it's a harder story to sell to the American public that an active space program is still an important national objective. But it is. And that's General Bolden's responsibilities now. So we're fortunate to have him here.  And we should. Because this is what's going to be all of our responsibility to try to bring this forward and make sure that in this turbulent environment that the prevailing good that we see in NASA and in this program still is able to survive through a tough year. So with that, General Bolden, we look forward to hearing your remarks. Thank you all for coming. Thank you, General Bolden. Dr. Amri, thank you very much. Thanks for the invitation. But most especially thanks for the very gracious introduction. I do not deserve that. There is a person I want to acknowledge here. And she is a dear friend and a recent occupant of a room in the astronaut office in Houston. And that's Julie Payette, who is back here in the middle section. So Julie thanks so much for coming out. I had the privilege of welcoming Julie home. Seems like yesterday, but it was probably a year ago. I don't know how long ago. Two years ago. Was it really? Oh, man. Well, I guess I'm having too much fun. I do thank you for coming. And I thank all of you for coming out.  But when President Obama said in his State of the Union address that he wanted our nation to out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build the rest of the world, we at NASA knew that we knew exactly what he wanted. It's the kind of philosophy, sort of what Dr. Amri talked about in his introduction. It's the kind of philosophy that has always driven our thinking and our missions. It's what got us to the moon. It's why we have the world's most advanced fleet of Earth-observing satellites. It's why so many of our exploration technologies have successfully made the transition from NASA to the private sector and your homes and businesses. In this fiscal year 2012 budget request for NASA, the President addresses all the elements of our strongly bipartisan authorization act of 2010, which sets us up on a path to create new technologies to win the future. This budget requires us to live within our means so we can invest in that future. It maintains our strong commitment to human spaceflight and new technologies. It establishes the critical priorities and invests in excellent science, aeronautics research, and education programs. At its core NASA's mission remains fundamentally the same as it's always been, and it responds to our new vision to reach for new heights and reveal the unknown so that what we do and learn will benefit all humankind. But now we carry out this mission with a renewed commitment to focusing on what we do best while engaging America's innovators and entrepreneurs as partners in our journey. What the President is talking about is a renewed commitment to the energies and expertise that we already possess and a charge to bring them to the next level. And that innovation will help drive our economy through the creation of high tech jobs and breakthroughs that today we can't even imagine. America is the nation we are today because of the technological investments made in the past 50 years. Our lives have been greatly improved by directing scarce resources toward exploring space. Knowledge from weather spacecraft, efficiency improvements in both ground and air transportation, biomedical applications such as blood flow monitoring devices, implantable insulin pumps, pacemakers, and lasix eye surgery, and the protective clothing and air breathing packs that keep our military, firefighters, and police safe are all derived from our nation's investment in exploration. NASA's space technology makes a difference in our lives every day and can be a spark to an economy that is becoming more technology based over time. NASA's successes and yes, even its failures over the past 50 years have inspired countless people to pursue science, technology, engineering, and mathematics careers and the outcome of NASA's endeavors both in technology advancements and intellectual capital has transformed our world. NASA's renewed focus on innovation in technology is vital. By investing in high payoff disruptive technology that industry cannot tackle today, NASA matures the technology required for its future missions in aeronautics, science, and exploration while proving the capabilities and lowering the cost of other government agencies and commercial space activities. Consider for a moment how the architectural options for human space exploration of our solar system will change when reliable commercial access to low earth orbit, propellant depots, inflatable habitats, and advanced in space propulsion technologies are available. For our science missions, consider the improvements possible from new optics, lightweight materials, structures, and power systems in high bandwidth communications. Consider the efficiency gains in radiation shielding and closed loop life support systems that may become possible from improved human knowledge of human adaptability to the space environment gained through scientific experiments on the International Space Station. The President's fiscal year 2012 budget funds a diverse array of human spaceflight programs to maximize our use of current capabilities such as the International Space Station, facilitate innovative approaches to ensure US leadership in low earth orbit, and position us to explore the frontiers of deep space. Taken together these initiatives will enable America to retain its position as a leader in space exploration for generations to come. To do this, we'll need to transform the way we do business. We'll need to be innovative, creative and agile, adapting to rapid changes in technology and business practices. By transforming the way we do business, we can help ensure that our nation space program is affordable, sustainable, and realistic. Realistic does not mean less exciting. NASA's Chief Technologist Bobby Braun who's sitting right here on the front row and you'll get to hear a little bit from him when the panel is up. He's going to tell you about some of the ideas that we have. What Bobby does is very exciting. He'll tell you some more about what he has in mind for bringing NASA to the next level of technology readiness to achieve the big things we have in mind. As we increase our capabilities, we'll apply them to many different types of missions and move on to the next challenge incrementally. We need to get started on a lot of these technologies today and we will. Over the next decade innovative technology investments are required to bring future missions such as exploration of near earth objects, the moon and Mars within our reach. These transformative technologies will reduce the cost and risk of future missions. Similarly, technology needs a bound in deep space exploration, astrophysics, aeronautics and air science. In each case, NASA technology investment is critical. For without such an investment these future missions simply won't occur. Achieving great things also involves taking informed risk. The space program needs to return to our roots of informed and measured risks. Exploration and innovation have always come with risk. In fact if we don't understand, accept and even embrace risk, we can't move forward boldly. Landing on Mars will never be a low risk venture nor will the development of a telescope capable of detecting Earth size planets around other stars or the flight of a new generation of human rated space systems. Our nation needs to dream big and these are precisely the right missions for NASA to pursue. An informed risk taking strategy commensurate with the agency's goals and expectations is not only acceptable but also required. How else can we accomplish the grand achievements our nation has come to expect of NASA? At NASA a goal of the president's innovation strategy is to reposition the aerospace community on the cutting edge, pushing the boundaries of the aero sciences with the technical rigor our nation expects of its space program. Innovation education and technology development will be essential to America's success in the 21st century global marketplace. They will be required for us to reach new destinations in the solar system and are the engines that will create new products and services, new businesses and industries and high quality sustainable jobs while improving the capabilities and lowering the cost of other government and commercial activities. Small businesses have generated 64% of net new jobs over the past 15 years leading the innovation push into the future. NASA's budget calls for increases in the maximum award values to small businesses that propose innovative research and development ideas aligned with NASA's technology needs. NASA will invest $184 million in research and technology development by small businesses next year, money that will directly fuel the number of jobs that small businesses create in America. NASA also will continue to fund prizes and competitions that seek creative solutions to technical problems in aerospace technology solutions that can immediately transfer into the commercial marketplace. As the president recently pointed out innovation isn't just how we change our lives it's how we make a living. Nowhere is this more true than at NASA where America continues to reach for new heights, seek breakthroughs and new technologies some that we can't even imagine yet. Let me give you just a few examples. Earth science is all about innovation. All of our satellite instruments are more or less one of a kind of experiment in seeing in new ways. And the same could be said about our science missions that explore our solar system and look beyond it. The Global Hawk, a gift from the Air Force, a gift from the Air Force has now been made, that's not a joke. They really did. The Global Hawk, a gift from the Air Force, has now been made into a drone for science. Its flight capabilities come from the military but the way we've been able to zip it around the U.S. is new and the science that it's able to perform like crisscrossing a hurricane a dozen times or more has not been possible before. How about measuring the changes in ice sheets all over the world with lasers? ISAT did that and we have a new improved ISAT 2 on the drawing board now at the Goddard Space Flight Center. Then there's the grace pair of satellites. Who would have thought that we'd be able to learn about our world by precisely measuring small mass changes across the earth? Already they've measured declines in the water aquifers under California and Pakistan. This has never been done before. We were deeply saddened by the loss of the glory mission last week. My heart goes out on a very personal level to the scientists and engineers who expended so much of their natural capital and passion on glory over the course of its development. Some of our folk had been with glory for 10, even 20 years. The good news is that eventually those people will be actively working on the innovations for that next mission. That's the truth about, that's the thing about innovation. It keeps going. NASA is also innovating our development acquisition and program management approaches to ensure continued US leadership in human spaceflight. Our commercial orbital transportation system program, among many milestones last year helped SpaceX become the first commercial company to launch a capsule, orbit the earth, and retrieve it intact. SpaceX and Orbital will be the first to carry our space station cargoes to space. But there are many others working on their own systems and also the supporting businesses for commercial space, both cargo and crew transportation. We have taken another major step with the successful commercial cargo and commercial crew development or CCDEV efforts during the past year. As we direct resources toward developing these capabilities we not only create multiple means for access in low earth orbit we also spark an engine for long term job growth. NASA is counting on American industry to come through as they have time and time again for this country. And we're facilitating the success of this emerging sector of the American economy. The CCDEV acquisition strategies include innovative pay for performance milestones, a fixed government investment, the use of negotiated service goals instead of detailed design requirements and a partnership approach that includes private capital investment. Among the current participants are Blue Origin with its launch abort system and Sierra Nevada with its dream chaser space vehicle. We have to embrace the innovators who may be able to do things more cheaply and effectively than we can. That can be nimble and entrepreneurial and pass those benefits onto us. New capabilities in commercial space for crew and cargo must, must succeed. And I have every confidence they will. NASA is also putting in place fresh acquisition and program management approaches, including the way we manage risk to reduce recurring and operations costs in both the multi-purpose crew vehicle and the space launch system. It's going to be a challenge to get these systems flying on the timetable that's been laid out for us. This streamlining process is one of the ways we're going to help move these schedules along. And those programs themselves, the new rocket that will allow humans to once again reach beyond low Earth orbit and the capsule in which they'll travel require us to think in new ways, create new technologies and meet the challenges not only of the mission at hand but the broader needs of our space program across a generation. So our innovations will not always be technical but will involve new ways of looking at our work. We're going to do what government does well, seed the future, help push things along to the next level, accelerate a market that might otherwise be just too big a nut for industry to crack on its own, drive the development of new technologies to reach those far off destinations in the solar system and to make discoveries in other galaxies. At the end of the day, we're going to accelerate what people think is possible. Speed is the drive-incy of innovation and inspiration is a constant companion to innovation. How many people entered a STEM career because of Apollo? Or because they saw an astronaut doing a spacewalk from a shuttle or the International Space Station? Or because Hubble blew them away with an image from another galaxy? Our nation has made great progress through its history by developing innovative solutions to the difficult challenges it has encountered. The grand challenge to build an intercontinental railway or to land a man on the moon and return him safely to earth not only utilized our best talent but also created new technologies and innovations. These achievements also inspired generations to pursue challenging goals, created new industries and ultimately improved our country and the world.  However, we won't get there without being innovative and willing to take risks. Robert F. Kennedy once said, and I quote, only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly unquote. This thought applies to NASA today just as much as it did to the NASA of the 1960s. New York Times journalist and critic Brooks Atkinson once aptly said, I quote, this nation was built by men who took risks, pioneers who were not afraid of the wilderness, businessmen who were not afraid of failure, scientists who were not afraid of the truth, thinkers who were not afraid of progress, dreamers who were not afraid of action, unquote. These are the facets of the larger picture of innovation at NASA. It's about technology, engaging a broad community of innovators, building fresh perspectives and embracing change. We're looking forward to many more years of harnessing the power to lead the world in new ideas and technologies that will make global space enterprise a reality. NASA is up to the challenge. I just hope all of you are. Thank you very much. And I think we're going to do questions. We will try Q&A for a while until they pull me off. General, thank you very much. My name is Greg Shuckman. I'm from the University of Central Florida. I want to thank Bobby for coming down last week and inspiring a whole folk, a lot of folks, both our students and faculty and the sub-Urbital folks that came in. When I was thinking about Dr. Hammery's introduction of you, and you saw the grin from ear to ear that he had when he was talking about how inspired he was seeing jungle and orbiting the earth. I know I wasn't there either, but I saw the movie. It's a good movie. And in your remarks today, and in every remark I've heard you and almost every administrator before you talking about how NASA has inspired students and inventors to go and reach further and to innovate, the one thing that I was puzzled when I looked at the budget was there were two areas that suffered a cut. Human space operations obviously, and that's because of what's happening in Kennedy. But the other was education. And it's almost 25% lower than FY10. And I know that NASA is sort of the driver for STEM Ed and inspiring all the people. So there seems to be a little bit of a dichotomy there. The education budget line is interesting because it's not it isn't a cut. It's the same. It minus a few million dollars it's the same as it has been for the last few years. What happens in budgets? Any budgeteers in here? No staffers? What happens to NASA all the time is that we always get plused up, particularly in the education budget. So we, when you go, like our budget is I think 138 million dollars for education in the FY12 budget. Which appears to be a decrease from 180 some odd million. That extra amount was actually put on top of the 130, 143 we requested in fiscal year 11 and we never turn it down but we don't plan on it. And so when we put our budget together we tried to be consistent in the budget that we put for 2012. So it looks like we took a cut. Well we decided we were going to spend less on education and we really didn't but we can't count on a plus up that Congress is going to stick on it. They all have special programs that they like. And I think everybody in here knows whether you've been in an organization where you're working with a federal budget or not, the plus ups are not always helpful because with them comes the responsibility of carrying out the program that that plus up was put in to carry out and sometimes the plus up is insufficient to carry out the program. I think there was a question over there was there? What was it? That dull? Hi Jeff Fowles, Future on Corporation. I want to ask how as an agency or even as a country we balance the need to accept risk with particularly in these fiscally tight times the perception that taking risk and failing is seen as a waste? One of my jobs is to help people understand that failure is an indication that you did take risks. When I talk to college, when I talk to students from kindergarten through graduate school, I always tell them three things and Colleen you will attest to this. I've talked to her graduate students and people say what would you advise a student? I say three things, study really hard work really hard so that you become the best at whatever you do and most importantly do not be afraid of failure. We are a people right now who I think are afraid of failure. I spent some time yesterday morning before we had an incredibly beautiful landing of discovery down at the Kennedy Space Center talking to the folk in the launch support processing team who actually were the people that did the processing for the glory spacecraft that we lost last Friday. They were devastated. As I mentioned, some of them have been with that program for two years and some of them have been with it for 10 years. There are some of the scientists who have been thinking about glory and working on the concept for 20 years of their life, a lifetime. They understand risk but even they were devastated when things did not work out. We have got to help educate our populace that if we are going to lead the world, we've got to be willing to every once in a while except that we don't get where we were going. So that's one of my jobs is to address the issue of risk and help. I don't want anyone to become comfortable at all. But I do want them to understand that just because you failed does not mean that you wasted money or you wasted opportunities or other things. I think you waste opportunities when you're afraid to fail and you won't take risks. Yes. And I'll let you all with the mics. You can see them as well as I can. So just take them. Thank you. That was a very inspiring and informative talk. My name is Christopher Krauss. I'm from the National Environmental Education Foundation and I just wanted to bring everyone's attention to there's an editorial in science. I think this is the February 25th issue and the title is House Cuts to DOE National Labs with Also Hamstring Industry. Now it lists a couple of examples here. Pharmaceutical companies using X-ray crystallography at Argonne National Lab and also how the petrochemical industry uses advanced photon sources. Basically they use these facilities through their experiments. And one of the arguments in here is that decreases in funding for these national laboratories will shut down this source of experimentation for these industries, possibly even prompting them to outsource their facilities overseas. So I'm just curious if maybe you have a couple examples that are similar to these examples that are listed in the editorial? Things that we're going to lose or could lose with reductions in the budget. Specifically that could affect industries and their ability to compete and stay in the United States. You know we're actually, because all of this is supposition and my job is running the space agency and trying to make sure that we keep astronauts safe and we live within our budget and that we comply with the essential elements of the 2010 budget. It may be foolhardy but I have really not given time to think about things that we could lose. It's too early for me to give up. So what we're looking at is ways that we can take the funds that we have and when we built the 2012 budget, we told ourselves what would be a bad case would be, and Bobby will tell you, what could be a bad case? And a bad case when we built the 2012 budget was that you would have to live under a 2012 spending level, 2010 spending level. So we essentially sized the 2012 budget to be roughly about what we thought the 2010 spending level was. Turns out that's a good case. And so we don't see with the exception of some very specific things that weren't in the 2010 appropriations like space technology, which didn't exist then, or some of the other things, we don't see yet areas where we're going to have to take things off the table. Now we have in the individual directorates, I mean the responsibility of the associate administrators is to say okay, if I am forced to reduce something what are the priorities that I want to maintain? And so if you go into any directorate they would be able to show you a prioritized list of projects and programs. But right now we've not gotten to the point where we see that we want to take anything off the table. Can I go back? I just thought of something. I can give you an example of where we are looking forward in having to do it. The Decadal Survey in Planetary Science just came out Monday. And what was the top priority for the Decadal, top two? One was a Mars mission that we're flying with the European Space Agency. And a second in priority was a mission called Europa. You know that goes to the moon Europa that we think is I mean just covered in water and has all these geysers and all other kinds of stuff and I'll stop there because I'll tell you something wrong. But what was evident in the language in the Decadal Survey and what we are already in the process of doing with our European partners in saying we have to change the way we do business we have to de-scope the missions because we cannot do them to the level of complexity that they were originally planned when they were envisioned say several years ago. So a flagship mission that used to we used to start out saying we're going to have a flagship mission that's going to cost three billion dollars we have told ourselves that's a non-starter so we will fly a flagship mission but it's going to have to we're going to have to find a way to de-scope it such that it comes in as a as a billion dollar flagship mission our portion of it and we're asking our European partners to do the same. Look for ways that we can both de-scope and if I can give you an example maybe not an actual example but an example would be a mission to Mars that was going to have two rovers. Why? If you can't justify the fact that you absolutely have to have two rovers why not go with one and why not let one of the partners provide the rover and the other partner provide instruments or something else to go so you're going to see a lot of that going on and that's already started happening so that may be an example that and that it does trickle down into industry because we don't build stuff for the most part you know Goddard does JPL does a little bit but industry builds most of what we do and so if we are going to de-scope a mission it means there's going to be something less for industry to do but we're all in this together. Yes. Russ Bartow, Charlie. Everybody here would say technology is great we wouldn't want to do technology but there's some people on the hill especially in the senate side in the CR of zeroed out technology. What do you do if you're faced with a cut to zero in technology? I was informed this morning that the newspaper said it zeroed it but not in reality. Because it's a CR a continuing resolution and Bobby helped me here because you were in the same meeting I was. Things are frequently silent in a CR and all that means is we didn't change anything so things that are if it didn't specifically say you know this is to go from that amount to this amount then we have flexibility and so our understanding is that we have the flexibility to conduct for the most part the technology the space technology initiatives that we want to do as long as we can go in and communicate with our stakeholders in the Congress and help them understand why we're putting priority on that so the space technology was not zeroed out in the continuing resolution they didn't plus it up and they didn't take anything off they gave us flexibility to as long as we satisfied their concerns that we not waste the money I have the flexibility to move money around so we can do it. Good to hear. But now again what I will emphasize for everybody is if we don't talk to the stakeholders if we don't travel to the hill and talk to them about why we want to do something Bobby and I spend most of our time back and forth to staffers and members and everybody trying to help them understand why this is a higher priority than that and why we're going to do this now and in my comments you heard me talk about you are going to see us do incremental programs a heavy lift vehicle we're not going to build 130 metric ton heavy lift vehicle we can't and we continue to negotiate and discuss with the Congress why that is not necessary not only is it not wise it's not necessary for us to build 130 metric ton heavy lift vehicle right off the bat by the time we need to go we're going to Mars or to an asteroid then you need 130 metric ton vehicle and because we will allow technology to help us get there 130 metric ton vehicle that's going to space and going beyond low earth orbit in 2030 I mean it may be half I'm exaggerating here but its weight may be significantly less than what 130 metric ton vehicle is today because we're using composite tanks we're using smaller components if you look at shuttle one of the things that we wanted to do in the space shuttle and we just never got there was go to instead of hydraulically actuated control surfaces go to electromechanical actuated control surfaces you get rid of the weight down you get rid of a lot of the risk of damage to hydraulic lines and the like we just were never able to get there but that would have been a huge technological leap in the shuttle program that we think would have reduced long-term cost would have reduced weight and every pound you take away from the launch vehicle is payload you can take to orbit so 130 metric ton vehicle is not 130 metric ton vehicle of today Susan Pearson I'm retired Lockheed Martin and I am constantly beat up from people who say that the space station is just a total waste of time and money and we haven't done anything there that's worth anything could you name what you think are the most significant discoveries or innovations that have come out of the space station and by the way I haven't heard you mention the word space station I did I said a couple of that space station I did and I even said that some of the technologies that have come out of the space station are the fact that space walks from the space stations have inspired people however the two that I would prefer to give right now because they are two that are the closest to actually changing life here on earth one is a salmonella vaccine that is coming about by Julie you may help me here the company is it's a company out of Arizona Estrogen is that it okay I'll let you say that that's right Bobby that took some salmonella bacteria to orbit and what they found it was a theory and what they found was that it becomes incredibly virulent in fact it gets really bad it grows incredibly fast when they found that out they were able to extract a gene in the salmonella bacteria that grew radically on orbit that they now will use as the basis for a salmonella vaccine potentially and they are now ready to enter human trials using that same biomedical technology they're looking at a potential vaccine against Marisa which is the you know the hospital infections the microimmune the bacteria in hospitals it gets immune to antibiotics and stuff so those are just two examples and they came about because of experimentation on the International Space Station there is a system on board the space station which exists on earth but it's not utilized the way it is on the space station it's called the wastewater recycling system and it stands for exactly what you think we do process our wastewater human generated and otherwise and we then retransform that into drinking water and for having tasted it water tastes like water H2O is H2O wherever you are it is the first time that we're using a system like that on a daily basis and who knows where in the world this kind of system is going to be extremely useful in the decades to come. Thanks very much Sheila. Real quick question for you is looking forward to the possibility of commercial crew or cargo transport to the station is given the supply demands of the station is that probably won't be possible to support five or six vibrant competitors and you'll have sort of a very limited number of companies that can successfully compete with that level of demand going forward as you're sort of looking towards this space station in the latter half of the decade and concerns about allowing those companies to keep operating in a viable way there might be a temptation to for instance switch more cargo delivery to commercial providers. Would that have the consequence of sort of freezing out European and Japanese cargo deliveries to the station? We can't let me give you this example and I am told that when we take the final payload to the international space station with STS-135 it will have 14 vehicles worth of cargo on board whether it's in volume or mass or anything else so you know we're a long long way from being able to replace shuttle as a transporter of cargo to and from the international space station we can't we could use many many more providers for cargo. Cargo is not a problem you know the issue will become commercial crew and one of the reasons that we have to facilitate the success of the commercial crew industry as rapidly as we can is because the international space station may go away you know in 2020. We will probably end up certifying it to 2028. My plea to the commercial industry is for people to stop thinking when they think about commercial space stop thinking about launch vehicles we always think about launch vehicles. We need destinations so you need an on orbit infrastructure to which the launch vehicle providers can go and you're absolutely right the government cannot sustain four, five, six launch providers. We're looking to have maybe two when you talk about commercial crew. It is up to the industry then once we as the anchor tenant facilitate their success it's up to them to decide that they want to create they want to enlarge the infrastructure. I'll take you back to 1972 I wasn't with NASA but I was there you know when I heard about the space transportation system and it was briefed to then president Richard Nixon and is Dr. Hamry he probably wasn't there either but he will know even more precisely than I do and Colleen's probably studied this so she can tell me whether I'm wrong but I am told that in 1972 when the NASA administrator and deputy administrator went in and briefed president Nixon on the space transportation system the concept it was going to be a three pronged system a launch vehicle a space shuttle that would be used to provide routine access to space at least one station space station that then its intent was to be the way station where we would fly smaller payloads components of a deep space exploration system we would fly it to the space station assemble it on orbit and then go back to the moon go to Mars go to other planets do all the kinds of stuff you wanted and because you would also want to move from one space station to the other as they as more would develop than the third component was an orbital maneuvering vehicle or a I think it may have been called an orbital transfer vehicle so it was a three pronged system president Nixon was just excited said that's what I want to do and then as the story goes and it's probably this is probably myth the next day the NASA administrator got a call and said what the president really meant was this is the amount of money you get and the rest is history and so NASA was stuck with okay how do we do this how do we prioritize well what would you pick you don't have a STS a space transportation system and for many of you didn't know that that's what it used to be called it was not always the shuttle transportation system I think it was after the Challenger accident that we moved away from space transportation system as NASA decided we just cannot afford an orbital maneuvering vehicle we're going to get a space station but the system that was briefed to president Nixon in 72 is just not going to materialize right now so we're just going to call it what it is it's a shuttle transportation system but that was where we were in the 70s that was a vision that had good basis for it good sound I mean people had done their business models and everything and it had a very sound basis here we are back again with another opportunity to do that and the nation can decide how to do it smartly and do it incrementally and say we're going to do it incrementally right off the bat so we stand a chance of success and we not do like we did in 1972 when we were going to build this system all at one time which was an impossibility you heard me use three terms affordable sustainable and realistic affordable we argue about what affordability means around NASA headquarters all the time it means a lot of things to a lot of different people to me it means it's got to fit within the budget plain and simple if the budget says I have this amount of money I can't spend any more than that amount of money and I can't count on somebody coming in and give me a plus up okay so I've got a plan to the budget sustainable means it's got to last more than one administration more than one congress more than one budget cycle and in order for it to be sustainable I need destinations I need infrastructure all this other kind of stuff and I have to have it cost low enough life cycle cost that I can show how I'm going to pay for it from beginning to end I can't do like we have always done things the Marine Corps NASA I'm a Marine I think most of you know that in the Marine Corps if I can get something started then in my mind it's sustainable I just got to get it started and then I can sustain it I think NASA's historical mentality was if we can get something started we can sustain it you know the congress will come to our rescue the American people will come to our rescue I have said we're going to do something that's affordable sustained truly sustainable and realistic if it doesn't pass the sniff test for realism then we're not even going to undertake that so that's kind of where we are and I really appreciate the time you've given me and look forward to having an opportunity to come back and talk again I'm looking forward to the panel so I'll step aside. Can I ask the panel members to come on up and we can move to phase 2 of this I'll start introducing them while they're heading up here and Robert Braun chief technologist at NASA long experience in the space community I'm sorry I won't even list all the programs it's practically everyone you know George Institute of Technology and now back at NASA so a true expert in this stuff Chris Kane formerly of IBM now of Mercator 21 a professional corporation that works on innovation he's one of the innovation gurus in Washington you probably don't know that but he's been working this for a long time mainly at IBM and then finally Ty Taylor capital advisors on technology where he's a president again long experience with space long experience with NASA long experience with innovation and a leader in the innovation field so what I've asked is that our three panelists each take 10-15 minutes or so to make a few remarks on the themes that the administrators laid out and then we'll have time for a few questions so Bobby do you want to start? Sure. No no this is fine much more comfortable you can hear me okay? Okay great first of all thank you very much for inviting me and for including me in this event it's great to see so many people here interested in technology and in innovation just real quick about me I'm an engineer I've always been an engineer I started my career at NASA wanting to build things wanting to build systems that would actually fly to Mars I worked in some aspects of planning our human exploration program they send humans to Mars and I spent most of my time working in the robotic exploration program actually building systems that landed on Mars after about 15 years with NASA I left and went to Georgia Tech where I'm on the faculty I'm a professor in the school of aerospace engineering and I went there really just to be honest because I love working with students and I don't know if you've been on a college campus lately but there are students all around this country interested in science and technology and innovation in engineering and the greatest thing to me about these students is that they go into these fields you know not for the money you ask any of them they go into these fields because they want to change the world they want to invent technology they want to build the future and what the administrator with General Bolden just spoke about was a way that NASA can build the future and so about a year ago he asked me to come back to NASA and serve in this chief technologist role you may be surprised to know that it's been about a decade since NASA had a chief technologist so I more than happily came back NASA is a fantastic place it's always been part of my family actually to be a part of NASA there are innovators all in and throughout NASA at the NASA centers in the small businesses that work with the agency at the nations universities in large companies it's a tremendously talented place and it's a pleasure to work with people at NASA and in the larger community and to get to represent the agency in this way I think of three longstanding core competencies that make the agency somewhat a special and unique place in the federal government and these core competencies go all the way back to the space act and the founding of the agency and they are a focus on research and technology focus on flight systems building spacecraft building hardware and mission operations if you think about NASA whether you think about the human exploration program or the science enterprise or what we do in aeronautics it's really the integration of those three things those three core competencies that makes NASA a unique place in my view over the past decade the research and technology side of NASA has been a little bit down NASA was rather focused on the near term on the very next set of missions and so what I've been doing over this past year is trying to reinvigorate that research and technology focus the research and technology people that are all throughout the agency now by the way when I talk about these three core competencies I don't really expect the budget to be divided into three equal pieces research and technology I think will always be the smallest NASA it probably always should be make no uncertainty about that but it does have to exist the budget for research and technology at NASA does have to be large enough that there's a critical mass of activity that there are enough people thinking about the next set of missions as well as the people thinking about the very next mission as NASA's chief technologist I get to think about the future all the time and I'll tell you NASA has a very bright future NASA's future in science aeronautics and in human exploration is bright the missions of the next decade or two are grand in scope they're bold in stature and NASA is an agency that can accomplish these missions many of the missions that General Bolden spoke of but we'll only be able to accomplish these missions the missions of tomorrow if we make the right investments in technology today and that's to be honest that's the pleasure that I get to have me and a small group of people here in Washington and spread out across the NASA centers we get to think about tomorrow and think about making those right set of technology investments and we're going to do that by engaging innovators all over the country this nation is not short on innovation this nation is not short on innovators we just need to invest in them they're at the NASA centers they're at universities they're at small businesses the engineers and scientists in this country are a very talented group and NASA is one area of federal government where we can engage them where we can make these investments by focusing a small portion of NASA on research and technology we're investing in NASA's future missions but just as importantly we're building the nation's economic competitiveness we're inspiring young people to continue to go into educational and career paths in science technology engineering and mathematics we're building on our nation's global leadership position our position as a technology leader and all of the benefits that come from that whether they be national security or are standing in the global world in fact many people talk to me about the 1960's as the golden age of NASA I don't buy it I'm sorry I wasn't there so maybe that's why I don't buy it I've only witnessed it in black and white I was alive I should point out but I wasn't other than watching on TV I wasn't that engaged the reason I don't buy it the reason that I don't buy NASA these are tough times and so we can't make these investments for the future because we have to worry about today is because they didn't do that in the 60's when we were building and flying Mercury they were developing Gemini and when they were building and flying Gemini they were designing Apollo and all throughout the Apollo program we were making investments in technology something like 10% of NASA's budget in the 60's was focused on space technology over time those investments have shrunk and I do think it's vital for the agency for an agency that's focused on the future for an agency that the American public expects to be bold and to be dreaming of the future I do think it's vital that NASA make those small set of investments today to enable our future missions and so that's really what my office is all about that's what we're focused on I should point out that it's not just my office this is an emphasis across the agency I do work with all the NASA mission directorates in this there are investments being made in the science mission directorate there are technology investments being made in aeronautics and certainly in human exploration we plan to fully utilize the international space station both as a scientific laboratory but also as a national lab where we can prove the technology is required to go out beyond low earth orbit and go after some of the missions that general Bolton described I guess you can probably understand why I'm excited about this position and more importantly excited about what I believe is a bright future for NASA and for this country in aerospace technology thank you Chris it was nice to hear somebody was looking in the rearview mirror I have to say I guess fortunately or unfortunately I was there in the 60s and I do remember it and not just on television so I'm glad that you've succeeded us though it's a privilege actually to be here this afternoon and to be participating in such a great program and general Bolton your remarks were great and I want to support probably just about everything you said just about I think it's I look at this from a marketplace perspective about innovation and that's what I bring to the table after 30 years coming from the marketplace the global marketplace most of it's spent in the technology sector of the marketplace and I guess what I'd like to just start with Jim is to say look there is a worldwide competition for innovation taking place today not necessarily the same environment that took place in the 1960s where we had a much more bipolar world NASA no longer is alone or just one-on-one competition NASA now is competing with many countries for this worldwide competition for innovation that should be good for us we have probably the strongest hand to play if we know how to nurture and invest in that hand which is some of the things the general was referring to and when Jim asked me to participate in this he said I'd like you to think about what is government's role in enabling innovation and spurring innovation for both our country's benefit but also our society's benefit as well so I think what I'm about to give you are a couple of thoughts about from my perspective the marketplace perspective this worldwide competition for innovation governments are all in a 21st century innovation marketplace I want to highlight two one is it's important for government and when I say government I'm talking about the US government I'm talking about both branches of the US government legislative and the executive because the executive has to design its budgets and propose it and the legislative branch has to validate approve and fund those budgets one can operate nor will it operate without the other our government has to create the conditions for attracting worldwide investment and this probably has to be the most important priority in my opinion for the United States in today's world creating the conditions for attracting worldwide investment we should be the best in the world at making policy decisions comparatively which means we have to understand who's competing with us what they're doing and if we're going to attract investment we have to have an offering that supersedes anybody else's offering if we want to have the resources the momentum the energy the inspiration the capacity to win in this worldwide competition for innovation now what do I mean by that think and act comparatively alright my proposition is we should be benchmarking everything we're thinking about doing how much to invest in NASA how much to spend at the national labs whatever it might be whatever our tax policy we should be benchmarking that against the G20 nations it's 85% of the worldwide economy in today's environment and it comprises both our closest allies and our strongest competitors so if we're not making policy decisions in a comparative way benchmarking ourselves against 85% of the global economy which creates a community of both allies and competitors for us to be mindful of I think our decision making process and our fiscal and public policy I don't think we do that very well in Washington I've been in Washington for over 30 years I think we have rightly been proud of being the largest economy in the world for a long time number of decades being the most successful economy in the world and country in the world the game has changed we have to think about making decisions in a comparative way benchmarked against the practicalities and the realities of what's happening around the world I'll give you a couple of examples unfortunately the first one's a negative example the president to his credit proposed in his budget in the state of the union address making the R&D tax credit permanent and making it more robust okay that's a good thing to do I guess if you're going to be the best in the world or if you're going to be number one two or three but why to enhance and to make permanent something that's better is beyond me that's not playing to win and at best we will go our R&D tax credit which was the first in the world in 1981 under the president's proposal will go from being number 17th in the world to number 13 in the world I find that unacceptable for a country who has the ability and the desire to be the best it's an example of a public policy decision and strategy that will only kick the can down the road and continue a lack of exceptional performance and it goes back to attracting investment worldwide investment in a worldwide competition for innovation we have to have to have the same orientation toward government R&D programs and I think we have to make choices absolutely you can't win without making choices but we ought to compare what we're betting on our government R&D programs against what the other G20 countries are putting their money into and this is I think the International Space Station is a good example where we have an idea we've created a set of partners and we've chosen to pursue that strategy that makes a lot of sense to me we recently did a study Mercator 21 about the investment criteria that large corporate decision makers make about where to place their investments in the world today and meshed that and analyzed that against what countries were offering against six different criteria in some of those six criteria the United States well actually in the six criteria the United States only came out number one in one the availability of skilled talent but it's also diminishing in a comparative sense in every other in one other category we're at the bottom and every other category we were average now the world has many players that's okay to be not number one in every category but it's not a winning strategy to be average overall when you're competing in a world of intense competition especially it is a competition grounded innovation one piece of good news which was when the competes act was reauthorized there was an amendment adopted into it which creates an obligation by the Commerce Department to do an annual study to the Congress about the relative standing of the United States from a competitiveness strategy perspective with other countries good thing to do beginning a beginning step for comparative policymaking the problem was that the countries that were selected are not the competitors that we're dealing with in the 21st century they're the competitors we were dealing with in the 19th century so we have a few technical amendments probably that are needed here but if it said let's look at the community of nations that make up 85% of the world wide economy let's say the G20 be a lot more valuable thing to do than comparing us with the industrial manufacturing economies that we used to compete with so creating the conditions for attracting world wide investment the next point is helping companies in entrepreneurs scale markets are global today they're instantaneous they're digital and physical and one of the major roles that government can do is to help our companies and our entrepreneurs scale to meet that playing field growth resides outside the G7 countries by and large there's been a reallocation of economic assets that's taken place in the last 20 years dramatically taking place before that and we need to help our companies and our entrepreneurs access that growth which resides outside the traditional markets that we're comfortable with that is both a digital and a physical statement and is one of the tremendous opportunities I think and benefits the government can provide number two would be focus equally the general talked about disruptive technologies absolutely NASA's a great example of a incubator for disruptive technologies but we need to focus equally on disruptive technologies and disruptive business models and in fact I would argue the disruptive business models are frequently more important and more wealth generating than disruptive technologies and they don't a disruptive business model can change the world and it doesn't have to use a disruptive technology to do so think about some easy examples CNN very disruptive business model not necessarily disruptive technology the iPod very disruptive business model no disruptive technology okay there's a small company that's about to turn the advertising industry on its head it's called personal your personal information is using a metaphor the currency of the 21st century digital world shouldn't you be giving access to that information to others versus others just taking access to it potentially very disruptive business model service sector as important if not more than the manufacturing and agricultural sector both on for the United States GDP as well as employment government can focus on innovative breakthroughs in the service sector and last securing the global technology supply chains and here I give great kudos NASA they're part of an organization called the trusted technology forum public private sector partnership that's designed to focus on leading edge best practices to secure global technology supply chains and in the hybrid infrastructure that we have today of a digital and a physical infrastructure nothing can be more important and it can be tremendously leveraging to have a secure global technology supply chain that American companies and American entrepreneurs can use to reach that growth that is in those new areas of the world that's instantaneous well hello everyone I too am extremely excited and grateful for being here not only am I a native Washingtonian born and raised here but I am also a former NASAite as is my mother who I didn't tell her about today's forum because I was afraid she'd be in the back going that's my son I don't even want to do that and in fact I was so thrilled I am not an engineer I came out of college in fact I began my career with NASA as a cooperative education and began my career in the control his office and the beauty of doing that is it's all about the money and regardless of how dumb you may be as long as you keep asking those questions until they're answered you don't give away the dollars okay so they have to deal with you and you get smarter and smarter as part of the process I have to tell you Chuck Westner was going to try and be here I'm stepping in for him I'm a member of the National Academy of Sciences I support Chuck on a number of various committees that I'll mention here in a moment Chuck for some reason I was elected to be in Brussels today rather than here but I cannot imagine why but I am indebted to him as I am actually to NASA for a wonderful career because much of what I've learned and applied in the private sector quite frankly I learned at NASA and the essence of that is the can-do approach you can do it I have to tell you I apologize to the gentleman who made the opening remarks to introduce General Bolden the spirit if you will the excitement that's been alluded to that is somewhat one would argue is somewhat missing today you know I've been around the country and sometimes when the shuttle was up in the air and it lands it's not on the front page like it used to be okay it's in the metro section and I go what happened you know my kids promise they would never work for NASA because I'd come on and say guess what NASA did for you you know see that light bulb that's NASA technology you see this over that's NASA technology and all I was doing and in fact I even bought the little astronaut suits for them okay it's perfect they run around I've got the pictures of all that but I was really thrilled having worked on the space station program and been part of the headquarters team when the president said they'll do it it was a reincarnation not quite the same I wasn't there for the Apollo era I had a chance to work for some of the people some of the leaders of that time but I have to tell you it was quite exciting and I'm sure I drove my family and friends crazy about my enthusiasm about NASA but I am also convinced that in spite of the many financial challenges or economic challenges we have today that with the leadership here of General Bolden and Bobby and others that we can get back there we can get back there because I've taken a pretty hard look at your roles and responsibilities and you've got a big ticket there but it doesn't mean it can't be done what I thought I'd do very quickly is try and reinforce some of the comments that have been made from an Academy perspective benchmarking is very important to us taking a look at how things are done both here and abroad and quite frankly that's what Chuck is doing in Brussels he's taking a look at their innovation system one of the things that we've done over the last year or so is looked at a number of activities looking at clusters, looking at the need for photo botics, solar panels, energy related kinds of things who's going to do the right thing in trying to document the best practices all of this is important in relative to NASA one of the key, I don't know if you remember Dr. Mary Good she used to be the Undersecretary for Technology doing the Clinton Administration as we all know there's no longer a technology administration but Mary Chair is a committee that I happen to be a member of called the State and Regional Innovation Practices and it's important because we're going around the country looking at those areas where we find that from a regional perspective the states are actually making investments significant investments and I'm going to point out New York Ohio where you have high unemployment rates New York is making investments in nanotechnology Ohio is making investments in the manufacturing community and they are making those investments to do exactly what you alluded to to draw additional capital and as Bobby alluded to earlier to create high paying jobs and in the case of New York where they're making those investments in the nanotechnology area they are in fact they've put 2 billion in and they've been able to raise 10 billion dollars worth of capital, private investment in addition to that they've got a 4 or 5 million dollar plant being built outside of Albany in addition to that that's going to create about 1500 jobs over the next 5 years and those are very great jobs good jobs as opposed to some of the ones that are driven by the service sector. NASA in my mind continues to have a role it always did you know if you go back and you look at its creation many of you know those of you that have been around long enough knows its job the reason we have so many of our technology in the marketplace is because our mission was to you know disseminate to the widest practical extent our information now could we have done it better back then probably can we do it better now, yep, yep because the taxpayers and the nation needs for us to basically do more with less that's really what this is all about when you peel back the onion you stop excited about the technology and you look at what really needs to be done and those organizations or states that are having some success this is not the first time we say we need to collaborate this is not the first time we say we need to partner what we're talking about is degrees of partnership degrees of collaboration we need to take it to a level we've never been before because generally speaking if the R&D budget remains at roughly 2.5% of the GDP which it has over some period of time history says it ain't going to get much bigger so how do we continue to innovate create that atmosphere that structure and leverage the best minds that we have and I don't think there's any question about it that historically we are number one I'm an aging jock as I tell my daughter my trash talking ability far exceeds my ability to play basketball at this stage in my life but I will trash talk you to death and I don't like to lose and I'm sure NASA doesn't like to lose and I'm sure from a big picture the nation doesn't like to lose but you do have companies from a global I'm sorry countries from a global perspective Japan, France, Germany Finland, others that are looking at our best practices leveraging what we're doing and beginning to do it better than us so one would say in the old days we always talked about industrial policy you know we can't pick winners or losers and I guess we sure can't sit on our keys to read it and so I think the investments that we are making the investments that NASA is making the structure that it's put together to try and accelerate the transition of technologies and get the biggest bang for the buck it's the right way to go and again that's what I think our country is demanding so when I look at this it is a lot more it's not as much about technology as it is about the culture and is the culture we as people going to enable us to be as successful as we have been in the past and go beyond yes there's training you know I think we need to probably mix and match the people the workforce a little bit more with people in the private sector and that's what you're getting when you really form these very strategic partnerships but it's going to take you know we talk about sustainability it's going to take a sustained commitment it's going to take strong leadership and it's going to take a sustained commitment we can't turn the faucet on today and 18 months from now go ah just kidding you got to be in it for the long haul even during the tough times and based on some of the research that we've done from the academy perspective we think Ohio and New York New Mexico is beginning to do some things in this regard they're making investments in very difficult times for the long haul that's the right thing to do so I'm a little biased probably if Chuck were here he'd say Ty you know you're a NASA and you're probably you know being a little biased in your remarks on behalf of NASA let me be the first to say that's right because I've never been so proud of a federal agency quite frankly I'm a big believer in the public sector my wife although sometimes calls me Mr. Private Sector now I will add but I really do believe that we've got it right now it's about execution so let me just stop there and we'll go Q&A thank you great remarks by all three panelists I'm going to take the moderator's privilege and ask the first question which is the general mentioned JPL and companies building things and how important that was so I want to ask you you know one of the topics we hear about today is the decline in manufacturing capabilities in the US how important is it to actually make things to be innovative manufacturing fit into innovation what would you say about that and clearly for NASA making things is kind of crucial to what you do you know sure sure so I think the last part of your question is actually the answer for NASA it's not enough just to have a great idea and play in the sandbox for NASA we want to build something for us manufacturing is an integral part of what we do we're talking about new flight systems we're talking about operating these systems in the harsh environment of space so it's a coupled problem now when you get into manufacturing itself there's the manufacturing of a technology and there are the process improvements business practice improvements for the manufacturing sector themselves and we're interested in both of those so just for example NASA has developed some pretty impressive analysis tools that we use for process flow of the space shuttle down in Florida or for assembly of the International Space Station these are computer models computer analysis tools that we want to make available to the manufacturing industry in this country so that they can use those same type of models for efficiency improvements across a wide range of sectors that's something that will affect NASA to improve NASA's future products but it's also something that will affect us across the United States critical it's critical in order to be competitive to manufacture something but I think what we've done over the years is focused so much on the manufacturing piece almost in isolation of what extends the high economic leverage of manufacturing in today's world where manufacturing is getting increasingly computerized automated employing fewer people in order to keep that going you have to have a high skilled workforce that should be the best at manufacturing services expertise and we don't really talk a lot about manufacturing services and that's where the premiums are in the marketplace today companies make a lot more money off of the capability to support the four billion dollar nanotechnology fab in Albany through services than they do by running the fab because the fab is going to be pretty automated and they'll maybe be 600 people in the fab running in the kind of a classic manufacturing sense yet around it is a hugely leverageable ecosystem of talent and services and we don't really think about that very much so manufacturing is critical but to extend its high economic leverage it is the ecosystem and what I would point to is the services that come from that can't argue with this importance it's been part and parcel of our nation's growth in terms of the manufacturing sector I think you're right it's a good point about the premium there are only going to be so many high tech jobs working on the floor themselves but I also think from a park or from a regional cluster perspective there's an opportunity you know we all know their X number of NASA centers that have various capabilities and I think there's an effort be it manufacturing or be it anything else for NASA to strengthen its relationships at the state and local level to enable it again to capitalize on the knowledge base to capitalize on the experience and leverage those dollars and manufacturing is key no doubt about it. Thank you for your presentations my name is William Bennett and I'm an energy lawyer in Washington DC with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and I'd like to ask you a question about the innovation process and management of the innovation process if you were going to put together a team that is to become a high performing innovative team what kind of people would you want on the team and then you were going to invest a lot of money in a team over a long period of time or a company over a long period of time what kinds of things would you want to know about the way in which the company managed the innovation process in order for you to invest money in that company over a long period of time. So let's talk about people I would want people who have skills that look like that a T brought on the top deep down to some subject matter expertise that makes them truly differentiated leaders. In many organizations we have people cobbled together who just look like that and I and in today's collaborative interconnected world it is more important than ever to team and to leverage the knowledge insights and experiences of your colleagues because you can do it 24 hours a day instantaneously and the people who have the best organizational models and the best leadership teams are doing that and the ones who are slow to respond and reacting to the marketplace or to other developments are still stuck in a more industrial era siloed collection. If I can just add to that for a second I think that's exactly right. I would also want a diverse team. I would want a mix of young people who are energetic, passionate, dedicated, who actually don't know how hard the job is. They don't know that it's impossible and I would want them to be mixed with some scarred old timers basically. People that have the experience in doing something like we're now trying to do in an innovative way. So they have some of the lessons learned and they have some of the experience and what we're doing actually at NASA right now is trying to put together teams just like that. We have a lot of people at NASA that have years of experience whether it's in human space flight or in other parts of the agency and that experience is incredibly valuable and we have young people perhaps in our nation's universities or in small businesses in some of the commercial companies that Administrator Bolden referred to and we're really trying to match those folks up in a team environment. Let me answer that from this perspective. I actually have had the pleasure of the last five or six years to run a entrepreneurial summer institute. We're retrained entrepreneurs and the students by the way are from 20, 19, 20 year olds to 50 somethings and the one thing that we emphasize is from an academic perspective we want everyone. We just don't want the engineers we just don't want the chemist, the scientist, etc. We want a little bit of everyone because when we mix them all up the power of what they can do is tremendous. One of the things that we give them is patented technologies and we challenge them to come up with a secondary application of that technology and we actually give them NASA technologies as part of that portfolio and it is amazing when you mix the gray hair with the young to make your point what you get and they have to function as a team. It is so critical it's not about me, it's about the team, it's the overall objective. So again a diverse category of people would be very important. The other thing is if you look at, I think of innovation I also think of technology transfer which I've spent a fair amount of time working in and if you look at the universities that have the most successful commercialization business models you see that those organizations are typically spinoffs from the university they are non-profits that operate outside of the traditional university bureaucracy. And so we talked earlier about risk, we talked earlier about flexibility and being agile and they in fact are able to be more responsive to the business needs. They are in fact able to hire and fire more rapidly. They are able to get the job done more effectively and I struggle sometimes recognizing, you know, trying to figure out whether or not the existing system, and I say that in a very broad sense not just to include NASA does in fact, since we've got these big goals is our system designed based on current challenges both here and abroad because things have changed over the last 20, 30 years for us to be able to meet these overarching goals and I just don't know I'm not, I think maybe you know, the old DARPA, ARPA or whatever, maybe even a separate organization away from the main organization might be a viable way to go to some extent. Could I add one thing? You asked a second question about what companies or what would be your investment criteria in an enterprise or a company. Right. I would not invest in any company that was not pervasively multilingual. There is a prize by the way if you stumped the panel so you almost got it I got to say that any more questions because we are coming close to the, oh we have two more I guess go ahead. Do you have time for, can you do, okay great. Hi, it's Mike Bevan with the Office of Space Commercialization at the Department of Commerce just had a question about the investment tax credits I think mentioned earlier on the panel. There was a bill last year that was introduced in the Senate that talked about investment tax credits for commercial space companies emerging in entrepreneurial space companies. Just wanted to, if you guys could give us your thoughts on that and what you think about those. Assumption is you think that they are good but I know there is a lot of debate. Well at least in my remarks I was referring to the research and development tax credit. Investment tax credits are in the same family but not necessarily the same thing. My general experience is the tax policies is important. It is a differentiator but it's infrequently the controlling decision point. Infrequently, I didn't say never. This work we did that I referred to looked at six criteria that senior level global decision makers use to invest. Tax and financial policy was one of those six. That's a good question. Let me take a shot. That's a very good question. You're close. Let me start off by saying that there are many factors that are the same. You've already heard things like the government's role in seeding innovation. Things like the government's role in disruptive technology and R&D investments to spur along private investment and to spur along corporate investment and tech transfer and commercialization. Those are important in space as they are in other industries. I think personally the primary difference in aerospace on the NASA side, civilian side of aerospace, is that NASA does have a plan. NASA has a set of destinations that they want to one day send humans to. We have a whole series of decadal surveys in the sciences where we would like to go do some pretty ambitious missions to improve our scientific knowledge, our understanding of our place in the universe, of the world around us. That provides a high level strategy, if you will, for NASA's technology investments.  Many of those investments are spun off and commercialized into companies that are quite profitable into products and services, into high tech jobs all around this country. So in that regard NASA acts I think like some of the rest of the government. The flip side of that is we know what the inhibitors are in some cases. The inhibitors are you only build so many shuttles. You only build so many stations. But clearly NASA has a very rich history of those technologies being disseminated into the marketplace. The counter, even the inhibitor point is that even if you look at the SBIR community, which just represents a small portion of the R&D funding, you will see that many of the companies and I think the numbers as high as 80% of those companies that compete for NASA research and development funds through SBIR are also competing with the DOD community. And so you get some leveraging effect here that is also facilitating a greater dissemination of those technologies or those outcomes, if you will, from those investments.


SCP-627 was brought into the Foundation in December of 1932. Senior researcher E. found SCP-627 during his work with the German government on their own SCP protocols and felt that it could be more useful with us. SCP-627 is a sphere made of unknown stone of approximately 3 cm in height. One not in close, defined as skin contact, or in clothing being worn, contact with a human being, SCP-627 rolls in a circle approximately 1 meter across. It will not avoid inanimate obstacles, instead rolling up and over any impediments. It will never attempt to go around impediments, and, if contained in a space smaller than 1 meter, will increase in speed until it has worn itself away out.


We're back for another edition of Dynavat Man on the Street. Let's see what happens. Any of you guys pro cannabis? Weed? Cannabis? No? Weed? Any of you guys like weed? Not to buy weed, but for a device. I think they think I'm a cop. Okay, man on the street. Lessons learned tonight.  Look out for the narc. So, do we have new footage to use talking to new people tonight? No. We walked around a lot. We talked to a lot of people who wants free stuff, and we got rejected left and right.


Up front I would like to say I'll not be talking about something that you wouldn't know already. Probably what the short talk would do is trying to kind of bring together everything into a framework. What we call system thinking to how data scientists need to think about business problems in some way. So as a brief introduction I work for OLA. I work in the OLA data science team. And OLA doesn't need an introduction. I think at least some of you would have come here taking an OLA. So at the scale that OLA works in hundreds of cities now internationally as well, enabling millions of rights, it's kind of very important to make the right decisions to give a seamless experience to the customer as well as kind of consistent earnings to the driver. So unless data science comes into picture to make efficient decisions at that scale almost becomes impossible. So with that, let me start with what a popular understanding of data science is for most people. It's about predictions. It's about deep learning. It's about human like abilities of machines. But if you think of what data science for a business is, a business like OLA, it's much beyond predictions. Maybe predictions is just a part of this entire bigger system. So just think if we have a cool model that can predict whether it rains tomorrow or not. Fine. What do you do with it? Unless you act upon that prediction in some way, just mere predictions will not enable a business to thrive. So let's start with something that's called a drivetrain approach that was outlined back in 2012 by Jeremy Howard. I think that gives a very good start to how data scientists need to start thinking about business. So every business, there are two kinds of businesses. There are lots of companies collecting data over the years. Now that hardware computing everything has become cheaper, it's easier to collect data. And the two kinds of companies are one which start with saying, I have collected a lot of data. What do I do with it now? How can I leverage this data for my business? There are other kinds of companies who start the other way saying, there are these sets of problems I need to solve, these sets of decisions I need to take. I'm anyways taking them now. Can I leverage the data to take the same decisions in a better manner? Nothing wrong or right about the two approaches. Just that in the first approach, it's like you're in a jungle and you're on a safari without a map. You're just exploring it to see if you get to site something in another. It is like you exactly know where you want to get and you have a map with the destination and you're just traveling through it. Right. So what the second approach kind of enables is the pace at which data science can help a business because there is so much of hype on what AI ML data science can do that because of the hype. It also can be very fast, especially for fast growing businesses. You dream that data science or ML can do a lot of things for you. And if you don't do it fast enough, then maybe it all looks like just hype. Right. So maybe the second approach kind of helps in first defining an objective as to what is the goal that the business is trying to achieve. And then coming to the aspect that what are the levers under my control or the decisions I can make today to achieve that goal. Now here the lever could be many. It's not just one particular lever that you would exercise here. But what are the different levers or different decisions that I can make to achieve the same goal? And then you come to the data to say for these levers, do I have the data that can enable me to exercise these levers and finally comes the models. Right. So as data scientists, we always start thinking about models first, but actually model is the last mile in this entire journey where you walk backwards from the goal and finally arrive at the model that you want to build. So let's take examples here. Probably becomes clearer. So if we take example of Google, what do you think the goal was when Google started? Anyone? Yeah, that's their mission statement. But practically, if you speak, what did they try achieving for Google users? Maybe just enable the users to get the information that they are searching for. Right. And what are the levers that Google had to actually enable this? What could they control? They can control that like user enters something what they could probably control is the order in which they display something to you. Right. That's one lever that they could control in getting the information. Now the data that they had for that is all the different websites that are out there. And all the hyperlinks between them and then came the page rank model. Right. So that's kind of an example of what we spoke about in the previous slide. Let's take another one. Facebook, all of us use it. Some of us would be doing that even in the sessions. If we think about it the same way, what Facebook would have started off with is just keeping the users engaged on the app. Right. That's kind of the goal. Now, if we think of what is the levers, it's about what you show to the users, the content you're showing the news feed or your friend suggestions. That's kind of what you are able to control. And the data that you have is basically how users are interacting with your system, all the activity. And then the model comes into picture where you're trying to build, you know, detect communities or build recommender systems and stuff like that. Right. So any business, like most business problems, especially like marketplaces who are aggregators, they are dealing with this is a complex statement. They are dealing with multi agent resource constrained multi objective optimization problems with multiple levers. Right. Probably this becomes clearer when we talk of examples of challenges in my world at Ola. Right. So why is it challenging? So if we think about several other aggregators who are similar, like marketplaces, two sided, right. The challenge with right sharing is that like, for example, if you're searching something then in information retrieval system, the URLs don't disappear after one person searches. Right. But when you're sharing right, the cab disappears after one person gets the booking. Right. It's, there's no infinite supply from that perspective. If we talk about retail marketplace, right, you're ordering products. The products don't deny a customer saying I don't get delivered to this customer right or products don't rate customers. Whereas in this case, even the drivers are rating customers and customers are rating drivers. It's a two sided human agents that are involved. If you think of a healthcare marketplace after appointments, doctors don't move from place to place. They are at one location. Whereas here the cabs are moving from location to location every time you're allocating it. No, that that's just to give a flavor of it. But if we think of what this necessitates data scientists to do, it's what is the topic of the talk today, which is evolving from model thinking to system thinking. Because as data scientists, we are all used to model thinking where we think of model metrics like am I maximizing the likelihood here? What's the error of my model accuracy precision recall curve? We look at many such things. Right. But when we think of what these models are there in place to do for a business, we need to evolve into what we call system thinking. Where it's not just one model, but many models coming together to solve one optimization problem for the business. Now that optimization problem has multiple agents involved, which means you need to cater to multiple objectives and you are also enabling multiple levers to do that. And how each of this is important in different contexts. Like let me give you an example. For example, if you are booking a cab, all of us want lowest ETA, right? We want the cap to be right here any moment. So maybe there is a cab standing just next to us. If I allocate it, maybe the customer will be very happy, right? But there's also the other angle to it that maybe this driver has just finished a booking and there's a driver, maybe 10 or 15 minutes away who has been idle for half an hour. So as a platform, which is two sided, it's also important to the cater to the objective that they need to be the drivers need to be utilized all the time. Right. So that's just an example of how the even the single optimization that we are solving becomes difficult in terms of quantifying each of these. So as as a system, if we think of it, we need a model to predict customer behavior as to how he responds to the experience. We also need a model to predict the driver behavior as to how he responds to the idle time. Right. And the two together are coming together to make the decision as to which driver I need to kind of match this customer. Right. So let's try to put all the different models that we need to build for a right sharing business into objectives and walk this path backwards. What we spoke about, right? As a business, the objectives are very clear. You need to be a profitable business. But for that profit to be sustainable, we need to enable good customer experience and good driver experience. Right. If these are the objective, what are the levers as a platform you would have any guesses what is in our control that we can change. Pricing. Yes. Yes. Availability. Availability in the sense which car we can use for what? Yeah. Okay. Yes. Allotment or assigning it to cars. Routing. Right. So these are the multiple levers that we have where pricing, what offers you give to customers, what incentives you give to drivers. How do you route the cabs? How do you allot and how do you maintain a mix of your different kinds of like set on and hatchback cars? Right. So all these are under control and what exactly is the data that we get? Yes, location data mostly from the customer apps, driver apps, some third party data location. Yeah, that's also kind of coming from the customer app. So these are the different channels from which kind of acquire the data. Now if we think of models, there are broadly kind of, like if you look at most businesses, there are broadly four kind of models that you build. One is behavior prediction, like how my customers behave or my drivers behave. The second is volume prediction, like how many total customers do you expect today or how many drivers will turn up for work today. Right. And if we look at the stack of models that we need to build, customer behavior, driver behavior, volume of demand, volume of supply. And also there is an aspect of location here. Like if we think of locations, maybe it's just a latitude longitude, but the intent of the ride is very important. Like, let me give you an example of a spot in Indranagar where the Indranagar metro station is there. Right. So there is also a tight there. Probably when somebody is getting down from the cab there on a Friday evening, they're going to the tight Monday morning, they're going to the metro station. Right. And every day if someone is traveling, they're probably, you know, behind the seat, somebody might have their house as well. Right. So how do you exactly kind of tag a location to get the intent of travel? Because only if you get the intent, you'll be able to kind of predict the volume of whether you can expect more demand from there or not. So the type of location is very important. And we need to have models to kind of tag these location types and simulation, because there are so many second order, third order effects. If we take the right sharing example, that how this one particular decision we are making here kind of translates to many multiple things through the day. For example, now if I have two customers and only one car and I send this car to let's say airport and there are no flights arriving for the next three hours. Compared to I send this person to let's say majestic. I know that this person will get another booking from there immediately. Right. So this one decision I'm making now has multiple second and third order effects, which just looking at one decision, I cannot make out anything. So we need simulation models to actually track the network effects. Right. And all these kind of come together where we have a list of, you know, business metrics that we track. Like what is my cancellation rate? What is the utilization of the drivers? And from this is what the feedback loop kind of comes into the model to say which of these need to be tuned to actually, you know, drive these metrics in the right direction. It's very much possible that there is higher in two models, but just because they are in the opposite directions, they are somehow able to achieve the same business metric. And actually if I own only the model, I'll try to improve it and impact the business metric negatively. Right. So there are multiple examples like this across different domains. If we think of, for example, aviation, I know I have only five minutes, 10 minutes, five minutes. So I'll move quickly through this. So if we look at aviation domain, it kind of fits into a very well into the same kind of objectives and models. There also the levers are pretty much the same.  And the data is very much the same. It's coming from your websites. It's coming from the travel sites. And the models you build there as well as your building customer model as to whether they are converting on the prices.  If you give them a roster and demand volume and your aircraft maintenance schedule, how do you need to route aircraft? So you need a lot of prediction on the delay as to like, because of the weather, how much delay I expect in this airport, which will have again second and third order effects and probably disrupt my schedule in an airport very far away from here. Right. So it kind of maps or any problem that you take across businesses kind of fit into this framework of system thinking very well. One last example on e-commerce. I think by now I think pretty much all of you only can fill in the blanks here. If you think about it, the objectives are very similar. What you control is very similar in terms of prices, your inventory, your delivery, like how you're managing your logistics to deliver the product. For them, the models that again come back to like volume prediction, customer behavior prediction and network simulation to see what are the effects of, you know, something getting disrupted in the delivery logistics. So the main driving point I would like to drive here is for any business, we have now got a general view of the system of models that come together. Mostly the models are behavior prediction models, which are most of our classifier models. There are models which kind of and to predict this behavior, you need to group them in some way because there is so much heterogeneity. You need to identify some homogeneous groups, which means a lot of clustering segmentation kind of come into picture. You need to do the volume prediction for any business to manage either your inventory, supply or cost, which means volume prediction. Something that I didn't touch upon is a lot of things go wrong, especially with sharp minds that we have in India. So a lot of fraud detection models have a lot of anomaly detection going on. And in e-commerce, especially recommendation, whenever you have millions of products, recommendation is an important factor for it. And simulation definitely to even before going live, most businesses have to see how it will do with all the network effects coming into picture. So as a summary, what I would like to say is data science for any business is not a collection of 30 independent models optimizing their own metrics. Then they'll become like the blind man and the elephant. What it needs to put together, it's kind of solving a single optimization problem with multiple levers that are kind of jointly getting impacted and often at loggerheads with each other. So that's the main point that I wanted to try. So any questions? This is a failure because of system thinking, not because of data science because as a data scientist, I would have looked up to several data points, which might have, you know, comparison with my competitor and it would have suggested me a lower price or equivalent price, not a higher price. But because of Ola system thinking, I have to do search pricing and I have to increase the prices. I would say it's not fault of system thinking because competitor is also a part of your system. But when I'm saying a system, it's a set of connected things interacting with each other and your competitors never out of that system. So a lot of times people struggle because you don't have competitor data to bring it into the system, but it's not because of system thinking. But you have connected data science with system thinking and there is a model which is failing, might be not data science, but what else? Here the model is failing because you don't have the data for the part of the system that it's interacting with. But my objective is to get the data. So I should have got the data and then only incorporated. Yeah, but I, if you look at the data sources that Alice, there are third party there, but a lot of third party if they don't cover your competitor system, you don't have that part of your system to make decisions on. It's not because of system thinking. Okay. So in an ever growing model that your business has, how do you decide on future extraction, like for example, on a given day as you keep adding more data sources to the team. It's important to select the right features. So do you follow any process or what are your thoughts about how do you go about future extraction and future selection? Right. So some aspect of it, I think today's talk on by go Jack was very relevant as well, where every signal that you're able to get live from the ground, right? Whether it's driver location, whether it's customer app data, all this data coming into your system is adding more and more signals. Now for solving a particular part of the problem, whether you use that signal or not is pretty much a data scientist discretion to use that feature or not. And I would say a lot of it comes from directly talking to the business operations and the product teams because they know certain things that you'll probably put in two days and come up with an insight which they would say I knew this if you had asked me two days ago, I would have told you right. So a lot of feature engineering actually comes directly from the on-ground team to say what's important for a problem.


The Minister of Works and Housing, engineer David Umayy stated that the Abuja Kaduna Highway is only 20 percent complete. He asked the construction company to expedite their project for completion by 2024. Speckin Doruna visited to the Kaduna State Government House with all the officials as part of his inspection to our federal roads under construction. The Minister highlighted his commitment to presidential directives for timely completion. The Minister also confirmed that funding for the project is not the issue or for the delay in the road to completion. And if that is not the case, we shouldn't have any need to disturb the existing sub-crate. We should actually build a pavement on the existing sub-crate. So we need to know why the introduction of a new lathright and then it must do the compaction test, it must do the CPR test to prove to us we are engineers. You don't just say seven and we're just putting a pocket. I will not do that. I won't accept why respecting the ingenuity popular page. But if we all went to the same school, you can put, you know, water in a glass and tell us that it's wine and you expect us to believe you. That's not engineering. So we're going to look at this. And again, I've asked NSIA to run me figures. Let me know how much money they want to give every month for this project because there is a limit you can push the contractor if you don't have funding for him. If he generates some tickets and you can't pay him, he can't do more.