By Cheryl Pellerin DoD News, Defense Media Activity
ST. LOUIS, September 10, 2015 — Defense Secretary Ash Carter
stood at the crossroads of the future yesterday in St. Louis as the first
speaker at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Wait, What? Future
Technology Forum.
Carter joined DARPA Director Arati Prabhakar on stage at the
sold-out conference, where 1,400 attendees from companies, universities,
research organizations, federal agencies and other nations -- with more
participating online -- came together to share visions of the future and discuss
the technologies that are shaping it.
The forum, taking place here Sept. 9-11, offers a range of
plenary and breakout sessions and an exhibit area for scientists and engineers
to demonstrate a selection of DARPA programs.
Speaking with media later on the exhibit floor, Carter said
his focus on innovation is a continuation of something he’s done since becoming
defense secretary.
Building Bridges
“A major commitment of mine … is to the connection between
the innovative community and the Department of Defense that has historically
been so important to us, and making sure that we build and rebuild those
bridges,” he told the audience.
The bridges link the Defense Department to academia, to
companies big and small, and to companies that have worked for the Defense
Department and those that haven’t, the secretary said.
“All those parties are represented at this fantastic
conference that the gifted people at DARPA have put on -- with the best title
in the world,” Carter added.
During her opening remarks, Prabhakar described DARPA as the
agency tasked with preventing the kind of technological surprise that the
Soviet Union’s Sputnik created in 1957.
Breakthrough Technologies
“At DARPA today we're working to outpace cyberattacks, to
turn the tables on infectious disease. We're working to rethink complex
military systems … we're starting to figure out some dramatic new ways to use
the electromagnetic spectrum … and much more,” she said.
DARPA does such work because its role in the community is to
make the pivotal early investments in breakthrough technologies to create huge
new possibilities for national security, the director added.
“Our job is to take the risk that is part and parcel of
reaching for huge impacts and to do that work to advance national security
capabilities in big ways, in fundamental ways,” Prabhakar said.
Today, in a world of “kaleidoscopic uncertainty,” she said, questions
about other nations also demand DoD’s attention: How will China choose to play
its growing role in the world? What is Russia doing in Europe? What will North
Korea and Iran do next?
Future Unfolding
“Understanding all of those factors and understanding what
they mean for our security and for global security and then getting ready for
whichever future unfolds -- that's the work of the Department of Defense and
many other parts of government in our nation every single day,” the director
said.
National security issues are DARPA's focus, she said, “but
we also know that the way we make our contribution to national security -- if
we're going to do our job of creating and driving technological surprise --
only happens if we have a … wide-open embrace of research and technology, and
that's what this meeting is all about.”
The context for research, development, creativity and
innovation is increasingly global, Prabhakar added, and contributions in that
realm are the way strong and vibrant countries play a role on the global stage,
she said.
Dreaming and doing, she said, “is what we're going to start
doing in St. Louis here today.”
‘We Live in a Time ...’
The director asked the audience -- What future can be
imagined from this time and what future can be built beginning in this time?
“We have such interesting ingredients to work with because
we live in a time in which we can build macro materials with nano precision,
one atom at a time. We live in a time in which we can play a quantum duet with
light-controlling matter and matter-controlling light,” she said.
“We live in a time,” Prabhakar said, in which machines are
starting to learn, adapt and communicate as they execute their programs; a time
in which mathematics allows theorems to be proven about the behavior of
software.
“We live in a time in which we can engineer not just
microbes but entire microbial communities, and a time in which we're starting
to coax the long-held secrets of neural codes from the human brain,” the
director added.
“It's our time to step up to the plate,” she said -- to
dream beyond today’s experience and to change what's possible.
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