Mark J. Lewis: Faculty Panel Discussion

well good afternoon everyone uh this is uh mong chang the uh johnny erison dean of college of engineering at purdue uh my sincere apology that uh i wasn't a good enough engineer to work out how to join the event at 115 and i'm glad to be able to say a few words to welcome all of you to the panel portion of today's incredibly distinguished engineering lecturer here at college as you know that purdue engineering now the largest top 10 engineering college in the country strives towards the pinnacle of excellence at scale as part of that we started three years ago to invite about eight uh most incredibly outstanding uh and distinguished uh lecturers uh to speak here in person used to be and now uh online virtually and today we welcome dr mark lewis uh now you might have already heard the introduction by bill crossley about mark lewis i'll try to be brief but i can not to really refrain my enthusiasm just because what an incredible national treasure dr lewis has been with an outstanding colleague he has also been i'll simply highlight uh without reading his entire biography here uh three particular dimensions one is that he is one of us in academia and served on maryland's faculty for 25 years including as the chair of the department of aero astro engineering and furthermore he was the longest serving a chief scientist at the united states air force and uh had an indentable mark uh and a very positive impact uh to anything that flies uh and deep uh knowledge about national defense and emerging technology the subject of today's lecture and thirdly uh last year he was also the deputy under secretary of defense in charge of all the modernization all the research and development of multiple agencies that were very familiar with uh and an incredible job as a leader uh in our national defense ecosystem and i had the chance to know uh dr lewis even prior to that uh when he was the keynote at the hypersonics uh summit in july 2019 and got to uh work with him on a few different things last year uh it is uh such a great pleasure to welcome him to uh the purdue ecosystem uh in ways more than one and today uh a fantastic privilege and honor to get to introduce now that i can work webex at three o'clock today to introduce uh doc dr mark lewis uh to all of you and looking forward to the panel discussion here and i think i should turn it now to dan who is moderating this panel with dr lewis thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you mung good afternoon everyone this is dan delaurentis uh one of the very uh proud college of engineering professors who work in aerospace systems and in hypersonics and areas that dr lewis talked about so eloquently i also direct our purdue institute of global security and defense innovation in which uh we've been able to work together with mark and others to try to advance a whole front of national security efforts uh so very gratified by uh this uh this day day and a half that dr lewis is spending with us and my most important role here today is to actually introduce a more effective moderator for the panel than myself and that is liz benitez liz is a phd student in aero astro researching hypersonic instabilities related to boundary layer separation given that it would be no surprise that she studies under professor steve schneider and joe jewell prior to starting your ph.d studies at purdue she worked as a research engineer at gtri and also earned a master's in aerospace engineering from georgia tech and she's currently as many of us are working remotely and finishing her phd in her case from ohio with her wonderful family so liz would you uh take us to the introduction of the panel yes thanks uh professor delerantes um so i'm going to introduce the the four professors that we have here today for the panel so uh first uh professor jonathan poggi uh he received his uh bachelor of science in mechanical engineering from the university of rhode island in 1988 he earned his master's and phd degrees in mechanical and aerospace engineering from princeton university after graduating from princeton in 1995 he joined the air force research laboratory where he worked as a research engineer until 2015 he's currently a professor in the school of aeronautics and astronautics at purdue dr podgy has a very broad research experience with publications in the experimental theoretical and computational aspects of fluid dynamics and plasma physics his work has been supported financially by afosr onr and afrl and by grants of super computer time under the doe insight award and a dod frontier project he is an asme fellow and an aia associate fellow next up is a professor with carol handworker she's a reinhardt schuman junior professor of materials engineering and environmental and ecological engineering at purdue before joining purdue in 2005 she served as the chair of the nist metallurgy division where she started her career as an nrc post-doctoral fellow following her phd in materials science and engineering from mit and i didn't mention i also have an mit alum for my bachelor's so it's neat to see so many alum here from there too her research areas include developing innovative technologies for next generation microelectronics and solar cells improving the reliability of lead-free soldering internet connects particularly uh for high performance military and aerospace electronic applications among several other topics professor handworker is a member of the doe critical materials institute leadership focused on accelerating technology transfer of cmi r d and recycling reviews and remanufacturing um she is also a co-pi of mayor dod program and his leading recently announced 40 million dollar five-year duty program and facility facilitating the transition to lead free electronics and defense system next up we have professor jennifer neville she is the samuel d kant professor of computer science and statistics at purdue she received her phd from the university of massachusetts amherst in 2006 and was pc chair of the siam international conference on data mining in 2019 and the acm international conference on web search and data in 2016. from 2015 to 2018 she was an elected member of the aaai executive council and in 2012 she was awarded an nsf career award uh in 2008 she was chosen by ieee as one of ai's tend to watch and in 2007 was selected as a member of the derpa computer science study group in her work which includes 130 peer reviewed publications with 10 000 citations it focuses on developing machine learning and data mining techniques for complex relational and network domains including social informational physical and biological networks and finally we have professor stephen heester who is the rise back distinguished professor in the departments of aeronautics and astronautics and mechanical engineering at purdue professor huster earned his bachelor's and master's degrees in aerospace engineering from the university of michigan and he received his phd in aerospace engineering from ucla in 1988. he has work experience at lockheed california company and the aerospace corporation where he spent the bulk of the 1980s he's also spent time at trw and blue origin as part of sabbatical visits professor huster is published extensively in the areas of chemical rocket and air breathing combustion atomization fuel propellant injection injection dynamics and system level studies of aerospace vehicle concepts including detonation bias propulsion since 2014 professor huester's group has focused on development of rotating detonation engine combustors with current afosr and ue sponsored efforts along these lines so that's just a little background everyone's all these professors have uh it seems like extensive work uh in defense related projects in addition to open source material um and just to kind of get everyone started talking um i wanted to just uh go down the line of everyone here and just kind of asking in your field what do you think is going to be the next game-changing technology in terms of defense so um professor poggi if you want to start sure well i i'm a big fan of plasma based flow control as maybe a game changing a possible game changing technology so uh the advantages of that kind of technology is that you can do flow control actuation at electronic time scales rather than mechanical time scales so instead of say millisecond level actuation you can get to nanosecond level actuation and that would let us do things like uh perhaps manipulate laminar turbulent transition at hypersonic speeds uh so that's uh that's the the short answer of my my uh my game changer awesome thanks about um professional handworker so my game changer is heterogeneous integration and advanced packaging what's happening is we don't have just monolithic chips where you put all the information all of the functionality into the chips we need much more flexibility so there are these things called chiplets that are being developed and they have to be integrated in new ways that demand new materials new performance and new designs so heterogeneous integration advanced packaging the department of defense is investing in in this area that's my technology awesome thanks except professor neville yeah i think um my game-changing technology is already happening and was mentioned by mark lewis earlier that i think machine learning and ai systems are going to become more and more pervasive in i think the limitations that prevent these systems from becoming larger game changes are really issues that we have in combining together the systems into larger components where multiple ai systems are used together in robust ways that are not only robust to adversaries but also robust to unexpected data and events and so i think once we have the technology that can be allow our methods to be more flexible across new domains that haven't been seen before we'll really start to see the the game changing aspects of ai and machine learning awesome thing and uh last not least professor huster well i'm i'm one who burns things and in the combustion propulsion area uh today's engines we we we burn with what we call deflagration uh which is a low low uh velocity combustion essentially at constant pressure conditions uh community is a growing interest in detonation based propulsion and that's been an area i've been working as you mentioned with the the promise of not only increased thrust but greatly reduced combustor size both of these things have a large intersection with aerospace and in particular with the hypersonic propulsion aspects awesome and uh dr lewis i know you mentioned uh like four key technologies in your lecture earlier and maybe in case if anyone it has joined who might have missed the lecture if you want to uh mention them sure so so i'm gonna be your difficult panel member today i worry about the term game changer it gets used a little bit too often um you know there there truly are some revolutions in technology and then there you know they're evolutions to technology i happen to think that the field of hypersonics overall is as close to a game changer as you can get just as i have to think artificial intelligence is truly a game changer um hypersonics why is that important um well because it introduces you know speed maneuverability it really changes the way you use technologies in the battlefield um if i've got a hypersonic system suddenly i've got a capability that has you know tactical applications with strategic implications now how do you do that you know uh uh uh i think both both jonathan and steve correctly alluded to elements of that right propulsion advances uh flow control advances right um this these are very very challenging regime in which to operate i'd also say that the whole design aspects of a hypersonic vehicle being able to integrate the engine with the airframe handling you know temperature loads on very sharp leading edges that are also extremely efficient aerodynamic configurations that enables these systems then that create those those opportunities awesome okay well thank you all um so uh i guess i haven't seen any questions yet from the audience so uh for people who have questions for any of the panel members including dr lewis uh you can ask those in the q a box down here but i do have some questions to kind of get the discussions going uh between all of the panelists so um i have one uh for um dr lewis and professor poggi um so uh dr lewis you mentioned uh you called out ground test facilities in wind tunnels specifically during your lecture which i was very happy to hear uh since i currently work in a wind tunnel um and i know there are other industries for example i think i've read about formula one are transitioning uh exclusively to computational fluid dynamics and modeling simulation and away from ground testing uh and i was happy to hear you you see that ground testing has a role in defense uh in in the future anyway um so i i was wondering if and professor prodigy i know you work in modeling and simulation uh working together with experimentalists as well um so if the two of you might want to elaborate on how computational fluid dynamics and ground testing can support each other uh in the the field of defense jonathan you want to go first minnow sure sure well i think we should approach prediction with humility and especially um today which is the 10th anniversary of the fukushima nuclear power plant disaster you know we should reflect on that that we don't always know what's going to happen in a complicated system and so i um i i really think that there there has to be an integrated approach to prediction so um as a former experimentalist you know in early my career i did wind tunnel experiments um i have some perspective on that and i i'm i'm very skeptical of both experiment and computation now having done both so i think what we get from uh in this in this new situation is that if experiments are very expensive like flight tests um we can't skip doing them but by doing simulation beforehand we can make very good use of our time so we can pick what things we need to measure you know what areas have the greatest uncertainty and uh we can design experiments to um try to tease out those pieces that we need to make the models better so um that that is one aspect of the work um so i i really am not an advocate of going to 100 simulation to design anything and at some point you have to test and this is the fundamental basis of science that you know the the real world is the test that we put our theory against and we always have to make that test that comparison to keep ourselves honest uh so that's uh that's another aspect of it the final thing i'd like to say is that even though our models and say in fluid mechanics are very based very much on physics and chemistry fundamental science that's well known um there are aspects of modeling that are based on rules of thumb and heuristics and judgment and so we we make approximations we make assumptions about what's going on and there many of those assumptions are not necessarily correct in all cases so when we step outside the box that we're comfortable with we have problems and when i was at afrl i had some association with some flight tests like hdb2 and x51 and if you're familiar with the story those flight tests there were significant problems at various stages and very unexpected events so um we we have to uh you know we have to consider that uh that aspect of it i'll hand it over to mark well janet i you know i couldn't have said it better so so i like to point out there are deficiencies in both modeling and simulation and in ground tests right let's talk about modeling and simulation so if i'm if i've got a computer model let's say i'm solving the fundamental equations of fluid motion what i'm really doing is solving numerical approximations to those fundamental equations and there are times when those fundamental equations actually fail in some of the regimes that we deal with right um especially in hypersonic flight um the are the the the basic equations fluid motion the navier-stokes equations have failings there are regions that they do not apply particularly well in parts of the hypersonic flight machine um so every every numerical simulation is an approximation same time wind tunnels also have deficiencies are real real real vehicles flying in the atmosphere don't have walls on either side right there there are effects that we cannot simulate so we use both of those tools to the best of our ability and use use each of their strengths and weaknesses to get a better understanding yeah i i love the example of both x51 and htb2 so there's a great story about htv too um it was a darpa air force project originally the plan was to do no wind tunnel testing it was going to be entirely designed with computation and we had some some brilliant minds at afrl said just a second we need the peter no wind tunnel and we did and it was pretty fortunate as we learned some physics in the wind tunnel that we had never predicted in any of the codes wound up doing a little bit of a redesign uh air force and darpa got into a fight over doing more wind tunnel testing we wound up not doing doing more wind tunnel testing we flew it it failed so so i'm a i'm a big fan of the combination of the chip so i think we have good agreement on the the combination the appropriate combination of the tools we have is the way to go yeah especially yeah that sounds pretty great to me um and happy to uh be in this field then and be a more computationalist with doing experiments for a portion of the physics at least um i have a good uh question here from uh professor crossley uh that's a broad question for all the panelists um can the panelists provide their thoughts about where university research might provide advantages over uh defense related work uh conduct or um over work conducted at a dfd research lab for example uh what about university research provides additional value um i guess um we can start with well uh professor foddy i'll bring it back to you just briefly since you did work at both africa and as a professor now um yeah just one one one quick observation is that uh dod research labs are necessarily very focused on particular aspects of um you know the dod needs and they have trouble working outside the box um whereas university is very unconstrained and can think about things that maybe uh are unexpected or unrelated to the mainstream that may prove to be um you know uh outstanding contributions uh but um not uh in the uh you know the the obvious uh flow of of technology development that makes sense um i know uh professor handwritten you previously worked at uh nist uh so would you uh have any insight in comparing your your experience at nist versus uh being in in the in academia for defense sure i'd be happy to so um nist has as its goal to use u.s innovation

and industrial competitive or improve that by advancing measurement science standards and technologies in ways that promote economic growth and development so nist had the advantage that you could do short-term research in in close collaboration with industry and with other parts of the government in addition we could also tackle some long-term research so it was that great combination that i think is um uh as jonathan just said maybe some of the dod labs don't have that advantage to look at some of the um the new developments or even to do things themselves you know nist has a has a world-renowned uh quantum computing group and from that i think they've won three nobel prizes so nist has that com that great combination and even in in metal or chain material science we were able to to use that model to make changes to make improvements but now in the future so in transitioning to purdue it was actually quite natural to be able to do that first of all we all live by funding right so uh so we worked with the department of defense transportation energy uh et cetera the only agency that we didn't really work with was nsf and so by going to um from from nist to purdue i found that same um i guess esprit de corps at at purdue that people really are open to collaboration they bring their uh their a game to the to the table and to try to do something in um in support of what the research uh the research sponsors need like the department of defense so i think that uh actually it's an excellent uh transition to be able to have awesome um professor huester i know you do a lot of work with zucrow do you want to talk a bit about um the facilities there and uh what advantage does it they uh supply for defense research oh well i i guess i wanted to dovetail a little bit off of john's uh answer there uh to professor crossley's question oh yeah go ahead the universities do um you know in my mind it provides for a diversity of thought [Music] working with young people that don't have inherent internal biases of a large organization is uh is neat um i'll give you an example yes i i spent some time at trw trw uh invented and developed rocket engines surrounding a specific type of injector a pintle injector so if you went to that organization you ask them for a new rocket engine they immediately show you a pintle injector and it may not be the right answer for that new rocket engine so having a diverse a diverse thought having people that that don't have internal biases is is a way that new ideas come about uh one way to generate to generate new ideas so i thought it was important to to dovetail off of this discussion we can come back if you want but i'm sure we need to hear from others oh yeah um and so we also have uh truster neville if you want to add in sure i don't know how my research compares to everybody else in the panel because a lot of words that have been said i don't understand so far but in the machine learning space i think one of the the big advantages in academia is that we often look for abstractions of problems that apply to both dod specific applications but other [Music] applications that are more benign that can be talked about in an unclassified setting and so being able to formulate a problem that's important to dod in a very generic way on a public data set that a large set of students and faculty can become interested in and and do their research on really pushes forward research at a pace that is not possible with you know many of the more complicated classified problems that dod labs are working with and so in my collaboration with labs where i often have students go for internships i can't usually even hear about some of the problems but we'll talk enough to know that i can frame it as some you know prediction problem on twitter with respect to fake news and and they'll say yes okay that sounds good and then i know that what we're working on is relevant so i think that's an important aspect as well that's really interesting so um we have another question uh from the audience here which i am going to direct to uh dr lewis um from uh jacob green what what is the likelihood of seeing a hybrid aircraft similar to the boeing sugar volt concept aircraft being used in military capacity in the near future um by near i'm not sure how you define near future [Laughter] it's always difficult making making predictions about the future um i wouldn't say in the foreseeable future but yeah interesting technology certainly certainly worth pursuing so by the way can i can i jump in on the last conversation oh yeah definitely so i'll point out that universities have a make a tremendous contribution because they not only produce top quality research they also produce students as other people have eluded that's also one of the products coming out of the university research lab and that's not to be underestimated i mean and think about the infusion of talent into the labs into the rest of academia and industry that's that's substitute critical so the department of defense generally has a formula for basic research roughly about 70 of the basic research dollars gets spent outside the department mostly in universities only about 30 gets spent inside the the laboratories that has some beneficial effects frankly it helps the labs keep their game up they're kind of competing with the best and brightest and that's important it also though having that much um it becomes a forcing function for academia and i just say when a when a program manager at a place like afosr or onr authors a broad agency announcement announcing what the service is interested in you get the whole of american academia kind of looking at those problems look at those issues think about how they can apply what they're doing to that particular area of interest for for the department of defense so it really is a very very close relationship an important relationship awesome um so i have um kind of a related question i guess to that um for you and uh professor neville uh so um machine learning is like a very big topic right now particularly in industry in addition to in defense um and computer science is in general a field with a variety of career options in the commercial world so um what would you say uh to a computer science student um why why should they be interested in working or collaborating with the defense industry as opposed to maybe going somewhere like google or intel or something like that i would say that we were actually working pretty closely with with across the industry um when i was in the pentagon intel was one of our closest partners so and google as well has has has has worked with the defense so so they're not mutually exclusive um but i think that careers and supporting defense activities can be very satisfying um you know artificial towns great example uh there are so many applications in defense that lend themselves to the capabilities that are enabled by artificial intelligence in so many operations that can be enhanced with artificial intelligence um you know very candidly i think the often in the room is you've got some folks who ask the question well will this technology be used in an ethical manner will be used you know appropriately and and the way to make sure that happens is to be part of the conversation be involved in technology development to make sure it is used means yeah i guess i mark said a lot of the same things that i would say i think that it's it's very difficult to convince computer science that students at least in the mlai space right now to go work for anyone other than the big internet companies because they pay a lot of money and they have really big systems and really cool problems to work on but ultimately the students that go work there are very small cogs in a very big advertising system and so if you want to have impact on other aspects of life uh i think that defense problems are um you know maybe people would disagree with this statement but i think this is a way to have your work have some impact for social good and that maybe dovetails with what mark just said right so of course there's people who think some of the applications in defense are um you know not ethical you know maybe they will be upset uh the use of face recognition for widespread surveillance or use of automated weapons without any kind of oversight but this there's really a unique opportunity to go and contribute to that discussion and create secure robust explainable systems that can really support doing this in a very safe and secure way which at the same time there's just such a wide complexity of the problems that are there in defense that i would think that it'd be much uh you know less boring than working on a very narrow problem in industry so i actually have a comment so it's sort of the converse to this it's not from the computer science view what i'm seeing is that there's been a tremendous wave in the last year of my former phd students phd graduates masters and undergraduates who are going back to get a degree a master's degree in computer science particularly for machine learning and they see that it's essential for for example for fabrication analyzing fabrication in a in a very large electronics company that you can't deal with the data anymore in the same way the same simple way as one did before so i think we should recognize the importance of data analytics machine learning and ai for all of the engineering graduate students yeah i think that's a good point even going back to what jonathan was saying earlier about the simulation and modeling i'm part of the collaboration i do with lawrence livermore in lab is that they have a whole machine learning team that tries to understand these very large scale simulations when they break down and fail and that's really has become a machine learning problem of how to debug the very simulators that you're you know i'm not sure if you specifically are using them but a lot of uh more engineering and scientists are using to study the questions that they want to study and so machine learning then becomes a tool to do that better and faster with lower costs yeah i can tell you there was so much enthusiasm about artificial intelligence methods and machine learning in the department so almost about a almost exactly a year ago i brought on board a new a new principal director for artificial intelligence dr jill chrisman who was kind of the senior technology lead for artificial intelligence in in in our office and the first thing i told her was all right get give me a get a sight picture figure out everything the department is doing in artificial intelligence she showed up my office about a month later well i'd see you know talk to her in the intervening time but she was a month later saying tell me this is impossible there is so much going on there are so many programs so many efforts we can't get a handle on it it's such a such a vast uh investment across the department so so you know economist comments really exciting area to be working right now and thanks for all that inside i didn't realize how widespread uh it's gotten across all the different disciplines not just boxing itself into like generally computer science now by the way i would also say that's that's why the department really needs people with top-level skill sets because the problem you run into is you have a lot of people who every time they now get a problem they say oh well we'll solve it with artificial intelligence you know we'll go to the artificial intelligence store we'll buy a can of artificial intelligence we'll sprinkle it on whatever isn't working and voila it'll start to work so having people who really understand the engineering and the science had it had to buy its way into to effective systems and that's a critical need for the department right now that makes sense to me um we have another audience question here uh from jacob green again uh as space becomes more accessible to other nations what technologies will be important in developing the united states space force into an established presence in orbit so i think that's for you dr lewis okay i'm sorry i don't mean them at all so no problem so look we got to move in a couple areas one we got to leverage what what the commercial sector is doing all right um we had a couple we have one big push in department i think it's still important an important direction which is making space less vulnerable how do you make it less vulnerable you proliferate you got lots of small satellites in orbit instead of big giant satellites that are in vulnerable orbits you do lots of smaller satellites you leverage what the commercial sector is doing so that's one getting the cost down that's something that the commercial sector is showing us how to do but associated with that it's not enough to just build it but also launching it so so making launch uh getting the cost of launch down making uh a cost more making making launch more accessible are absolutely absolutely key in this awesome site i had a related question to that actually um since you mentioned uh commercial space flight it's been taking off in the recent years um has the increase in uh private rock companies change the relationship between universities and dod sponsors and has a privatization influence fundamental research for example by certain companies keeping things proprietary instead of general uh knowledge well you know i actually haven't seen that i've seen the opposite i've seen a number of the companies reaching out to their university partners um you know we the department has a number of programs for example um so there's the sbir program the small business innovation program but there's also the sttr it's just like the sbir but it requires the company to partner with the university we saw some very robust efforts in the space space sector um i wasn't going to say a number number of the space companies weren't falling in that ip trap if you will they're being very open about their their their technology um some of the smaller ones some of the bigger ones you know spacex very famously doesn't do patents um so so i i i think it's actually it's it's a it's a great picture for universities great opportunities for the university in the space sector right now and i guess i'm going to also uh bring that question to uh professor huester as well as he on the theater i'm interested in and uh this is obviously approaches my field it's a such an exciting time you know so much venture capital flowing into this so many uh ideas for constellations and uh spacecraft and our students are getting tugged in 15 different directions i think the uh you know we see the uh as as dr lewis pointed out you know the collaborations enhancing with government but also i think government is becoming less and less of a factor there if you look at the dollars that are flowing a lot of private investment into the field uh the compression of the of the timelines you know the the development timelines and we see this across you know it's i think it's it's uh for those of us with gray hair we notice things happening faster and faster and faster the acceleration of technology and this is but one example of it uh you know in in the space sciences area space launch area such things of course is added manufacturing being able to print an entire rocket engine or injector in one piece in literally hours which would have taken you know maybe a month with traditional technologies the uh the entire development process is getting compressed so it's hard to see it's uh you know it's hard to keep up with to be honest i'm reading the news and seeing press releases each day from another new firm that wants to build a rocket it's uh it's daunting i don't know how folks in the government keep up with it because it's uh there's just a lot happening thanks uh we have another audience question from professor xi um he says uh mark lewis listed quantum as a future promise but not just an emerging technology priority uh since quantum computing and quantum communication if realized can make everything that we currently do obsolete is quantum still too immature to be a factor he is wanting to know oh so no i didn't want to leave that impression quantum quantum science is very much an emerging technology it was very much one of our priorities um so my own perspective quantum is incredibly promising and can play a very important role especially quantum sensors you know quantum clocks quantum position navigation and timing i have to admit i'm i'm less optimistic about quantum communication um and other things you know quantum computing really exciting but a long way off all right so you you'll read story as a claim that you know quantum computers on the verge of completely changing the way you know way we do computing yeah not quite yet all right my my my quantum friends tell me that you need to have the fundamental unit of a quantum computer is a qubit it's the quantum equivalent of a bet it's it's um uh my friends tell me that for a meaningful quantum computer we'll have to have about a million qubits in order to start solving any any worthwhile problem you have to be at least a hundred thousand qubits uh google's quantum computer has 53. but we're not there yet we're we're moving in the right direction but it's not coming tomorrow um you know we've seen some algorithms that have been developed specifically for quantum computers there's been this neat little trend though someone will produce an algorithm that works on a quantum computer and then they'll figure out oh wait this also works in a traditional computer as well so so the field is kind of helping across the board um quantum you know we we i would i would you know we we had push we had pushes for you know quantum key uh decryption we had pushes for things like uh quantum internet quantum radar yeah that's a little not not the low hanging fruit i i the department right now is focusing on sensors that makes sense to me um yeah condom is going to be a big field uh it's also going to have impacts on uh security and and passwords i'm guessing uh the dod is probably also going to be interested in that well you know it's it's been it has been pointed out that qkd um you know quantum cryptography it's it's very it will be very expensive and doesn't actually solve the main problems that's why we weren't looking at it as a as a primary primary investment area maybe at some point in the future um to bring back to uh hypersonics um i have a question for um you and frustrate again so hypersonics um currently a very big field and it has been big in the past and this kind of as professor schneider has like to mention um had a cyclical history um in terms of funding and support um where do you both see the the future of hypersonics in defense and is this uh boom in hyper settings uh going to be different another prediction sorry yeah oh jonathan you want to take that one first sure well yeah this is this is very close to home for me because um i arrived at the air force research laboratory my first day of work you know this is sort of circa 1994 1995 and immediately there was enormous drawdown uh i would work for hypersonic's team and i've seen several cycles of this and if we had just taken the average of the uh available resources and provided that as a constant stream we would be in a better position today so um we can i think we can expect cycles to come but uh we should really plan for a uh long-term investment in this technology both in terms of national assets like wind tunnels but also in human capital and and pursue this for a long time so even if you know it goes up and down that we keep a finite level of uh investment in this area because it will really be important for a long time and there are other people working on it so uh you know one thing that makes me uh optimistic about the future of research in this area is our competitors are really good and uh they like the fire under you know the uh the government to uh uh to keep uh you know to keep work going in this area so uh i'm relatively optimistic but i do i do brace myself for the the next downturn in in this area yeah so i'll i'll agree you know i i would get that question often so is it this is it different this time so so it does hypersonics has had about a 15-year cycle and i also i finished up as i finished my phd in 1988 it was the middle of the national aerospace plane program money was flowing freely i showed up at the university i will say this by the way university funding especially the fundamental level was always kind of it never came to a complete stop and i you know hats off to there are some folks at nasa some folks at afossar especially and can i work with afrl that kind of kept the universities moving moving in hypersonics um i do think it's different this time and jonathan's got it exactly right a couple of factors um one is we've got competitors now we we didn't realize we were in a race we're in a race and it's a race we can't lose and to the this general recognition that um you know this is this is absolutely critical to to to the future of defense i mean i mentioned in my talk earlier we have done war games where if the united states does not have hypersonic capability we don't win the war it's as simple as that um and so i think that's that's driving a lot of it now we would be doing this tech pursuing this technology even if others weren't because i think it's an important technology but but but that's certainly a a strong motivating factor thanks so it's like it's good to hear as well um so uh kind of a little more specific for professor handworker since you work in materials science a big issue for hypersonics is uh high surface heating is there uh are there any innovations coming in material science that are working to handle that so yes their innovations with respect to um high surface heating but let's take a step back and look at three other issues one is it's a high performance high vibration environment so you've got high temperature high mechanical stresses uh and lots of vibration the other thing you have is long term storage so we also have to look at reliability when these with some of these uh systems may be stored hopefully at least for 20 years before they're being called upon to be used so we have to keep all of these different dimensions in mind we're developing new technologies so they're so my field is in microelectronics so they're new technologies that get away from solder solder is a low melting point material their new designs that are cropping up so these kinds of all of these technologies bring challenges because in many cases they haven't been used in uh commercial systems yet so there are many materials uh challenges in addition the whole material sets may change so it's not just you know tweaking a a solder or tweaking a circuit board somewhere that we may have to have vastly different designs so those are challenges and opportunities that i think are pretty well prepared for awesome things yeah i hadn't considered some of those other aspects of it um i have a question here from the chat uh so professor uh dr lewis you were mentioning um during your lecture previously uh about how important it is to um to build the workforce and to train students including foreign students as well and to potentially like look into more of giving them a green card and help them stay you have any comments about um itar preventing international graduate students from applying to to some of the most interesting jobs in aerospace research or doing a graduate research in general because there are some itar projects that go on here at purdue um is and uh the the question from the chat is asking is itar appropriate and relevant today so you know i would say there there are there are no simple easy answers you kind of get two ends of the spectrum you get the one end that says there should be no our itar no limitations throw the gates wide open then there's the school of thought that says you know lock it all down don't let anyone who is the u.s citizen see it touch it hear about it i would argue either of those responses is wrong there has to be a common middle ground there has to be a common sense um you know i i think i mentioned my talk one of our great strengths in the united states is that we work with our allies and our partners so so let me throw out some numbers so so coming out of world war ii the department of defense accounted for about half of all s t investment in the united states united states accounted for about half of all s t investment around the world that means that the pentagon was overseeing about 25 of the total world investment in s t different ways to measure it so those numbers are approximate all right but that was coming out of world war ii fast forward to today 2021. primary defense is maybe about three and a half percent of total investment right so we have to leverage what other people are doing now if you if you break that down and say all right so let's just open the aperture wider let's ask how much of the s t investment across the world is coming to the united states not just depends just everything in the united states about 27 26 27 china's really close china is coming up right behind us they're about 25 26 percent they oh crap that's that's really bad they're almost where we are and then you know they their cost of doing business often can be much lower than ours except here's the good news you now look at all the countries below china the next six countries down the list they're all u.s allies they're the european nations germany france england the european union as a whole south korea uh that you know you look at the partnerships we have around the world that's our strength we have to nourish those um i'll also talk let me let me also point out you know the strength of our of our scientific ecosystem so last year the department uh announced uh its its award winners and something called the benevo bush uh faculty fellowship the most prestigious faculty fellowship of the department that the department of defense gives it's pick select faculty members who work on problems of relevance to the department um in the most recent cohort the vast mature majority of the faculty members who got that award were foreign born so um actually looking looking at their backgrounds you know it's hard to tell exactly what someone's background is but it was pretty obvious that that was you know across the board that's the strength of our system the best and the brightest come to study in the united states if that ever stops being the case if students stop wanting to come to study in the united states want to go elsewhere that's when we are truly having problems that would be a warning sign so again it's a it's a situation that requires balance we have a related question from the audience as well um so the u.s has a long history of

collaboration with allies abroad and defense research as you were just talking about um are there any specific areas in which uh we should pursue stronger defense partnerships with our international allies in either space hypersonics or otherwise um well one would be space the other would be hypersonics that would be otherwise yes to all the above look remember the united states has less than five percent of the world's population there are smart people all around the world we have to work with all and we find that if you look you look at various nations even sometimes small countries will have really a great expertise in in a focused area um singapore for example so singapore has some of the best modeling of human physiology of any any of any nation in the world and we and the us's work with them and modeling say responsive pilots in in injector seats trying to figure out what the physiological response would be to high stress um in hypersonics you know australia is an incredibly valued partner they bring so much to the table um you know the development of some of the test facilities we talked about well there's a there's a type of wind tunnel that we use in hypersonics called a stalker tube named for professor ray stocker he was a professor at university of queensland was his invention the australians actually flew arguably the very first hypersonic jet engine supersonic combustion ramjet engine it was a project that was funded out of the university of queensland called high shot which not only shows what a foreign partner can do it shows what a university can do in advancing technology so yes to all the above and and and frankly we had a the department has a very robust engagement across the board um i'd also say that's something that the universities can play a big role in because universities are a melting pot and and and often will interact with with international partners in ways that go above and beyond what say the government laboratories do or even what industry partners can do that's really neat here and i i um actually uh just to kind of add a comment on that uh i've um interacted with a bunch of faculty members from around the world uh at various like conferences and it's always been very interesting hearing what they're working on and their unique facilities that they have in their countries versus ours and how we collaborate so yeah absolutely absolutely awesome um so we we have about five minutes left uh it looks like um and so if anyone else has any questions i i don't see any more audience questions i have a general question um that anyone can answer here um so uh and this is related to the final question um from the uh the lecture earlier today um how can students who are interested in working in defense related jobs uh start to prepare while they're in college or graduate school before they they start applying elsewhere so should we leave that to other members of the panel oh yeah how about we start with uh professor patty okay so the the question is how to how to uh prepare to get a job in the defense sector or how to prepare uh you know for for work yes if uh you're a current uh undergraduate or graduate student and you want to work in defense what what should you be doing now uh to to sort of optimize your chances of of getting such a job yeah i think uh for example if you're in graduate school you should look for a professor who has close contacts with defense the defense establishment so for example we have a lot of ongoing grants and contracts with the air force research laboratory and we have a huge number of opportunities to say go visit there for the summer uh you know the same same thing with uh we've worked with the army research laboratory and they're just very very eager to get students to come be summer visitors you know as soon as covet is over they won't be virtual anymore and um uh so there's a real uh hunger in the defense establishment to bring in some new talent and you know this brings in this issue of the aging workforce so for many years uh i was the young person in the office at afrl and uh they're in that same kind of situation uh situation now and uh you know there's this need to replace the cold war era generation with a new generation so just making contact uh developing contacts in the establishment is a good place to start i don't know liz if you wanted uh us to add to that or i you know dr podgy has the right answer i think those who are doing uh doing work with the department of defense have connections there and it's a natural natural route uh to establishing contacts uh the summer programs have sent a number of students to uh to spend the summer in dayton or various government labs and uh to gain to gain some experience and you know to establish a relationship once uh you spent some time there people know you and become familiar with you uh then they're generally wanting you to become one of the team awesome uh this is kellen i have a um an example of um how we um sort of break that mold where it's one-on-one and send students to um uh through our own personal contacts so purdue is the lead in a new workforce development program with the department of defense it's called scalable asymmetric life cycle engagement program and so we're partnering with 14 other universities and with agencies all dod agencies and the defense industrial banks to provide a curriculum that is microelectronics specific so they get they get some things even in their first year first year engineering their core courses and then take special classes and research and the dod and the defense industrial base are providing uh internships for those students and we're tracking that uh as well uh with the number of jobs that are available so the so the agencies are looking for students with particular skill sets including radiation hardening you mentioned that before uh mark and it's a key issue across the department of expense so radiation hardening heterogeneous integration manufacturing system on chips supply chain and embedded systems so so this is a different way of doing it so we have these partnerships for co-teaching classes and it's been well well supported uh both financially and also in terms of engagement with department of defense thanks um so uh professor neville i'll give you a chance to add on to that question and then we have two quick questions for dr lewis before we close up here oh i would just uh say in the machine learning space if you're a us citizen and you want to be involved all you have to do is like hold up your hand and everybody will jump on [Laughter] but uh besides the other statements of uh you know talking with people to get internships i think that's a great way i would just say for purdue students a lot of the dod lab people i know will show up at our recruiting events the round tables on campus and that's a great way to go and start talking to people um and making contacts yourself so other than that i don't have anything to add to what everybody else has already said awesome so um dr lewis the question uh the first question we add um since we don't have anyone uh any faculty member particularly focused on directed energy research right now um a member of the audience wants to know uh what areas are focuses are best places to start for finding open research and what locations are best for student research in the in directed energy oh gosh you know there look so first i i i actually don't know that's true um you know i i think if you look across uh the college college of engineering at purdue i would be surprised if you didn't actually find some people who are working very heavily in the field oh i volunteered for this panel specifically no no no yeah wow okay so you know there's so many different areas you can work in direct energy um optics obviously really important fundamental physics um there are engineering aspects of the rapid energy um uh you know i've got friends on the space side we're looking at using direct energy in space so really lots of things you can do i i actually you know i i was an aerospace engineer my my first graduate work was in using lasers for flow visualization so i actually became a laser guy as a as a master's dude so again uh really rich opportunities in any of the top universities any of the top programs i think would be good okay i i didn't want to add you know there are financial opportunities for students who want to work in fence there are fellowships for example the ndscg fellowship um the uh the uh the smart scholarship uh which which really create uh financial incentives i mean they're really good programs to get people working in the in the government laboratories so students should be looking for those as well oh yeah i should mention i am an ndseg fellow so that has been a great opportunity for me for my graduate studies um and final question uh for you dr lewis uh from the audience is uh what's your opinion on f-35 is it uh too big to shut down a failure or a success oh man let me see i can tell you how i used to be able to answer how i couldn't answer that when i was in the pentagon look you know the f-35 was an incredibly ambitious program and when it started um it began as an image yeah i mean we knew it was an ambitious program um it's obviously had some fits and starts along the way as you you you maybe should have anticipated um i i've got some my own frustrations with the program i i personally think there should have been a second engine for the f-30 f-35 um they were we we had historical examples of what happens when you don't have those you know other other propulsion options available for an aircraft and and i i'd like to see that one uh uh corrected um you know the program is i have no doubt the program will eventually get to where it needs to be it's just been a little bit more painful than it should have been awesome thanks for that so that that's the last audience question we have now and it is four o'clock so i'm going to pass off control here back to professor de laurentiis for some conclusions and thank you dr lewis and all of the panel members for your time and answers here well uh i just want to add my thanks as well uh mark you've been very generous with your time and your thoughts uh not only of course for this session and today but throughout your service so i know you're always eager to get back to what you probably love the best which is the academic setting so thank you very much to you and to the panelists thank you you

2021-03-23 15:46

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