Dr. Joseph Bordogna
Deputy Director
Chief Operating Officer
NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION
Rochester Institute of Technology
Board of Trustees Meeting
Washington, D.C.
July 13, 2001
Thank you for the kind introduction. Good afternoon
to everyone. I am extremely pleased to be here with
all of you.
I must confess to taking more than a bit of pride in
NSF's relationship with the Rochester Institute of
Technology. Your institution has much to admire in
terms of direction, performance, and building partnerships.
When I was preparing my remarks for your visit to Washington
in the middle of July, I couldn't help but think of
the heat and humidity!
It reminded me of a joke about just that-with a plug
for engineers to boot.
The story starts with an engineer dying and reporting
to the pearly gates. St. Peter checks his dossier
and says, "Ah, you're an engineer. You're in the wrong
place."
The engineer then reports to down under, and is let
in.
The engineer quickly becomes dissatisfied with the
level of comfort, and starts designing and building
improvements. Soon, there was air conditioning, running
water, and escalators.
One day shortly after, God calls up Satan on the telephone.
He asks, "How is it down there? Does it still feel
like DC in the middle of the summer?"
Satan replies, "No, things are great! We have air-conditioning,
plumbing, and escalators. There's no telling what
this engineer will come up with next."
God is shocked, and says, "What? You've got an engineer.
That's a mistake. He should be up here. All we have
are architects. Everything looks beautiful, but nothing
works."
That joke is one way to describe the ongoing dynamic
between the theoretical and the practical. That is
something we're working to synergize at NSF.
[quote]
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I like the way Robert Noyce --one of the cofounders
of Intel-- captured the thought. He said, "Innovation
is everything. When you're on the forefront, you can
see what the next innovation needs to be."
[Vision statement]
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Both science and engineering are cornerstones of innovation.
They are always changing the present to become the
future. Innovation lies side- by-side with discovery
and learning in NSF's vision statement. It's direct
and crisp: enabling the nation's future through discovery,
learning, and innovation.
The National Science Foundation aims at nothing less
than U.S. world leadership in science, engineering,
and technology. That's what we're about, and our budget
priorities reflect that mission - in both research
and education, and their integration.
[People, Tools, Ideas]
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With the community's peer advice, we invest in the
most capable people with the most insightful ideas.
With them, we provide the opportunity to advance a
field in a new direction, accelerate its pace and,
increasingly, help it build a bridge to another field.
Of course, none of this can be done without state-of-the-art
tools. In this case, tools mean not only instruments,
equipment, and laboratory facilities but also overarching
infrastructures such as networks and centers.
I want to spend the next several minutes looking at
the equation of people, ideas, and tools. They are
inseparable, and they brings us to five priority capabilities
for NSF and for the nation.
[Five capabilities]
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These five capabilities--nanoscale, terascale, cognition,
complexity, and holism-- comprise a cluster of five
key areas that help to connect and expand the core
science and engineering disciplines. In many ways
they will redesign our society and form the basis
for a new kind of education in both science and engineering.
[Nanoscale visual]
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Let's start with the Lilliputian world of the nanoscale.
We use the term nano to express nanoscale science
and engineering. It refers to a billionth of a meter,
which is the width of five carbon atoms.
Nanoscale is three orders of magnitude smaller than
most of today's human-made devices. Its focus is at
the molecular and atomic level of things-both natural
and human-made.
Nanotechnology gives us the ability to manipulate matter
one atom or molecule at a time. At the bottom of this
chart, we see NSF written in atoms. Each atom measures
about 1.5 nanometers.
Nanostructures are at the confluence of the smallest
human-made devices and the large molecules of living
systems.
To put that is perspective, a drop of blood contains
about 5 million red blood cells. Each of these cells
has diameters from two to five micrometers. Within
those are strands of DNA molecules that are from 2
to 3 nanometers wide.
Microelectromechanical systems are now approaching
this same scale. Here, we see some human-made examples.
We now enjoy the prospect of building a "wish list"
of properties into structures large and small.
Let's look at a couple of industries to see what nano
might hold for their futures.
In the electronics and communications industries, recording
in all media will be able to be accomplished in nanolayers
and dots. This includes flat panel displays and wireless
technology. An entire range of new devices and processes
with startling ratios of improvement await us across
communication and information technologies. It will
be possible to vastly increase data storage capacity
and processing speeds.
[Rosetta Project]
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Just last month, an article in the Wall Street Journal
updated the progress of the ongoing Rosetta Project,
coordinated by the Long Now Foundation. You know the
Rosetta Stone from history. It gives the root of all
written languages, Egyptian hieroglyphics. This project
is a true 21st Century version of that principle.
It's archiving 1,000 languages on 3-inch nickel disks.
Each will hold up to 30,000 pages. To date, the project
has archived about 1,200 languages or roughly 10,000
pages of text. That fills one-third of the memory
space on this 3" diskette that is predicted to last
at least 1,000 years.
[blood vessel submarines]
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In the burgeoning areas of pharmaceuticals, health
care and life sciences we will see new nanostructured
drugs and drug delivery systems targeted to specific
sites in the body. Researchers anticipate biocompatible
replacements for body parts and fluids, and material
for bone and tissue regeneration. Here we see an artist's
rendition of a microscopic submarine with a theoretical
schematic. The race is on to develop a nanobot that
will travel our bloodstream to clean arteries and
repair cells.
The new nano capability brings together many disciplines
of science and engineering to work in collaboration.
Its scope and scale create an overarching, enabling
field, not unlike the role of information technologies
today.
The expansion of our nanocapability will depend on
insightful researchers envisioning and imagining its
possibilities-talented people with good ideas throughout
academe and industry.
[Clarke quote]
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The second of Arthur C. Clarke's three laws of technology
captures that premise quite nicely. It says, "The
only way of discovering the limits of the possible
is to venture a little way past them into the impossible."
We've done just that with terascale computing. Terascale
is shorthand for computing technology that takes us
three orders of magnitude beyond prevailing computing
capabilities.
[Tera-chart]
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In the past, our system architectures could only handle
hundreds of processors. Now we work with systems of
thousands of processors. Shortly, we'll connect millions
of systems and billions of 'information appliances'
to the Internet. Crossing that boundary of 10^12th
- one trillion operations per second - launches us
to new frontiers.
[protein]
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Take for example protein synthesis within a cell. It
requires 20 milliseconds for a nascent protein to
fold into its functional conformation. However, it
takes 40 months of processor time on current systems
to simulate that folding. With a terascale system,
we reduce that time to one day--one thousand times
faster. Think what that means for the task of functional
genomics, that is, putting our DNA sequence knowledge
to work.
When we dramatically advance the speed of our capability
in any area, we give researchers and industrialists
the mechanism to get to a frontier much faster. Or,
better yet in terms of NSF's mission, to reach a frontier
that had been, heretofore, unreachable, as well as
unknowable.
[infrastructure]
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The revolution in information technologies connected
and integrated researchers and research fields in
a way never before possible. The nation's IT capability
has acted like 'adrenaline' to all of science and
engineering.
A next step was to build the most advanced computing
infrastructure for researchers to use, while simultaneously
broadening its accessibility. Our vision here is to
reach terascale competency and catapult capability
into a whole new era of science and engineering. In
essence, we want to create a "tera universe or era"
for science and engineering ... and a freshly robust
national "cyberinfrastructure."
But, who will put all these nanosecond components and
millisecond reactions into a coherent picture? Even
the best tools are useless without well-trained people
who have the capacity to pose challenging questions,
conceptualize critical issues, identify opportunities,
and employ their skills to derive answers.
Many of the new educational technologies have features
consistent with basic principles of learning. The
interactive feature helps students learn by doing,
receiving feedback, and refining their understanding
of specific topics.
Technologies help people visualize concepts that are
difficult to grasp. And the most obvious-technologies
provide access to a universe of information that includes
digital libraries, real-world data, and a panoply
of people for both information and feedback.
[Science of learning]
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But technology should be integrated into a new kind
of educational system. That thought brings me to the
third capability we intend to expand, cognition. The
dictionary defines cognition as the mental process
by which knowledge is acquired.
Most of us would simply say this is learning. Learning
is the foundation territory of all other capabilities,
human and institutional. Our understanding of the
learning process holds the key to tapping the potential
of every child, empowering a 21st century workforce,
and, in fact, maintaining our democracy.
[Cognition]
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From the last 30 years of research, we know that people,
both young and old, absorb and assimilate knowledge
in different ways, and in more than one way. So the
"science of learning" is a critical inquiry into how
people learn.
More than any other species, humans are configured
to be the most flexible learners. Much of what we
learn is outside of any formal instruction. People
are intentional learners. We're proactive in acquiring
knowledge and skills.
Because of new tools and interdisciplinary research
investments, our understanding of the learning process
has changed dramatically in the past two decades.
A rich knowledge base in cognitive science has been
developed jointly by linguists, psychologists, philosophers,
computer scientists, engineers, and neuroscientists.
This has prompted us this past year to envision Science
of Learning Centers to complement and synergize our
Engineering Research Centers and Science and Technology
Centers.
By focusing on cognition, we will advance our capability
in everything from teaching children how to read to
building human-like computers and robots. Industry
can capitalize on this knowledge in training initiatives,
in the manufacturing process, and in the development
of new products in a field that is blossoming. Fundamentally,
we will help empower people and, thus, empower the
nation. All of which can lead to wealth creation and
social progress currently unimaginable.
[Mitch Waldrop quote]
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Now to the 4th and 5th capabilities, complexity and
holism. They act as two sides of a coin to guide us
in the best way to use our accumulated knowledge of
science and technology to discover new knowledge and
better understand how to use it.
Mitch Waldrop, in his book Complexity, writes about
a point we often refer to as "the edge of chaos."
That is, "where the components of a system never quite
lock into place, and yet never quite dissolve into
turbulence either...The edge of chaos is where new
ideas and innovative genotypes are forever nibbling
away at the edges of the status quo..."
This territory of complexity is 'a space of opportunity,'
a place to make a marriage of unlike partners or disparate
ideas. We often find the most fertile opportunities
in these "foggy crossings" where the knowledge in
one field answers questions in another.
[Twinkle Twinkle Little
Star]
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High-paid consultants sometimes refer to people who
understand this territory and feel comfortable there
as 'out of the box thinkers.' The consultants may
use their vernacular, but both Albert Einstein and
the author Ralph Barton pegged it a long time ago
as "imagination." This slide shows us a little of
both.
Today, researchers are trying to put polymers together
with silicon. It's a marriage of opposites. Plastics
are chaotic chains while silicon is composed of orderly
crystals. The result can give us electronic devices
with marvelous flexibility that are also much less
expensive.
The awareness of 'complexity' makes us nimble and opportunistic
seekers not only in our science and engineering knowledge,
but in our industrial institutions. If we operate
with this awareness we will be able to identify and
capitalize on those fringe territories. We'll figure
out new combinations, and new outlets for the imagination.
[Biocomplexity graphic]
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Holism is the "flip side" of the complexity coin. Holism
and complexity have a symbiotic relationship. Complexity
teaches us to look at places of dissonance or disorder
in a field as windows of possibility. Holism teaches
us that imaginately-integrated combinations of things
have a power and capability greater than the sum of
their separate parts.
Holism is far from a new idea. We have seen it work
in social structures since the beginning of civilization.
We see its power today in areas as diverse as our communities,
science and engineering partnerships, and teams in
any field of sports.
Something new happens in the integration process. A
singular or separate dynamic emerges from the interaction.
That's probably why when economists are analyzing
productivity inputs they refer to the residual, what's
left after you factor in capital, labor, land, etc.,
as the "black box." They can't explain the dynamism
or interaction of the leftovers such as R&D;, education,
workplace interaction, and the like. They can only
recognize that something better or more enhanced comes
out on the other side.
This integration and interaction works at many levels
- the sociology of a team of workers can be a stimulant,
with ideas firing-off in many directions. Holism creates
supportive space where taking risks and challenging
the unquestionable is acceptable. Holism engenders
elucidation, the discovery of your own knowledge transformed
by other perspectives.
[Conventional vs. Emerging
Education]
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Although holism is an ancient dynamic, what is new
is that it can be applied to the vast accumulated
knowledge of science and engineering and the new knowledge
that is burgeoning as we speak. We see its principles
emerging in new approaches to engineering and science
education.
When we train ourselves to think about complexity and
holism as two sides of a coin, we develop a pattern
or attitude to search for the disordered fringes of
a field and to pick out fragments of possibility.
With these pieces of potential, different 'wholes'
can be created in new integration. The possibilities
are endless when you think about the flexible building
power that nanotechnology will provide, the enormous
insight from research in cognition, and the ratcheting
up of speed that terascale computer-communications
offers.
If you take each of these 5 capabilities and you ask,
what is the 'constant' or fundamental ingredient,
it's the simple formula of talented people and the
power of their new ideas. Innovators are never confined
by what they know, never restricted by existing rules,
and never afraid to propose what no one else had seen
or imagined. They swing with no net but never lose
sight of the ground. They created everything from
Velcro to America's democracy. Any team of individuals,
any corporation or any industry can do the same.
[engineering quote]
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As always, throughout civilization, the human resource
has been the most important resource. Engineering
educators must create fresh programs that incorporate
the thinking and skills of the 'big five capabilities."
In turn, the new engineer will employ them to create
the "intelligent renewal" of our existing infrastructure,
develop a continuously adaptable cyberinfrastructure,
and bring us into a sustainable future.
[Where Discoveries Begin]
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I'll close with that thought, but not before thanking
you for traveling to "inside the beltway." Your commitment
for fundamental research and education has a huge
impact. You speak with a knowledgeable and credible
voice about the nation's research and education needs.
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