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Well, good morning everybody. We are pretty much right on time. My pleasure to welcome to our bi-monthly PCAST meeting the members of PCAST, the members of the scientific and engineering mathematics and technology communities who have joined

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us both in person and following us on the web. As usual, we have a full schedule for this morning. We'll be discussing and I trust approving recommendations from two PCAST studies. We will be hearing from a very interesting panel on forensic science issues, a very interesting

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presentation on global issues around spectrum, and I'm looking forward to it all. Any further ado, let me just ask my co-chair, Dr. Eric Lander, if he has any words of welcome provocation or encouragement. Mostly words of thanks.

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I want to thank everyone who's joined us here today in the room and on the web. I also really want to extend my thanks to all of PCAST. We have two major reports coming to this PCAST meeting today for discussion and potential approval and it represents a huge amount of work on the part of everybody.

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There are still many more reports underway at PCAST and so I think although this is the last full year of the administration, as with every place else in the administration, I think the energy is not lacking at all and I just want to thank everybody in PCAST for their energies and commitment.

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Thank you. Yeah, let me just riff off of Eric's theme for one further moment. One who saw the State of the Union address on Tuesday night knows that the President is not letting up in the last year of his presidency, in his pursuit of initiatives

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and accomplishments that will improve the lives of the American people and help address the challenges that we face as a world, and the same is true of PCAST. PCAST is not letting up as those of you around the table who have been doing this work can testify personally.

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We still have a lot more to get done but this has, without question, been the most productive PCAST in history with now I think over 30 reports to the credit of this group. So let us turn to the first of the reports and sets of recommendations that we'll be considering this morning and that is on the future of cities and I will turn to our PCAST

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member Mark Gorenberg who has led this effort for PCAST with strong support from Craig Mundie and of course from the staff. So Mark, the floor is yours. It's an honor to present the findings and recommendations of our study on how the federal

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government can support science and technology opportunities to improve America's cities. There have been a number of members from PCAST that have been involved. This has truly been a team effort and I especially want to call out Craig Mundie who came up with the idea for PCAST to originally study this topic, has had many brilliant suggestions

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for direction along the way and we hope that he will make some comments after this presentation. There's been tireless work from the PCAST staff, particularly our director Marjorie Blumenthal who's worked sort of day and night for months on this and special contributions from Diana Pankovich and from Ashley Predith and our interns and we can't thank them enough.

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Last year we also added a dozen experts on the topic who joined us in a very intense working group. They're listed here. They've been invaluable in guiding this report.

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The topic is getting a lot of attention because this is a hundred year change in cities, not just here but around the world in terms of being a new historic era for cities. If you put it in context from 1920 to 2010, metropolitan areas have increased but primarily around the idea of central cores that frankly have been starting to hollow out as people

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have moved to the suburbs and this has been much more of automobile society for most cities. But in 2011 that actually started reversing itself as millennials and baby boomers started returning to cities and that has transformed the city form also from these central cores to unique districts and so we have a number of observations associated with that that

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are really helping to push that forward. One of them is that there have been very fast advances in many technologies that are relevant for cities and particularly technologies being re-transformed to work at the district level. Information and communication technologies are really aided by cheap distributed computing,

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new and expensive flexible sensors and they're revolutionizing what we can measure about our urban life and they are actually opening the door for a brand new field, the evolution from urban planning to urban science and there have been disruptive changes in technology and transportation in electric and now coming autonomous vehicles and energy especially

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those competitively priced around distributed renewable sources and storage, new localized water concepts as our whole water system is in position now to go under change, recycling strategies and frankly this is all starting to come mainstream. And in parallel with these technological and demographic changes and perhaps partly as

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a consequence of them we're also witnessing changes in norms of behavior. So people are now using digital technologies to be able to connect to their services. There's an emphasis on the sharing economy that we hear about mixed land uses, more emphasis on walking and biking, matching what's happening really in the rest of the world and not as

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much core car ownership as frankly we're starting to move more towards the concepts of mobility as a service as well as other concepts as a service. We've also seen that large city CTOs are starting to use these real time data and analytics to improve their services in areas like health and public safety.

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So we list many examples in our upcoming report but for example one that's interesting is in Chicago they're starting to use sensors to track how water is accumulating and from that they can get a better idea of what's moving forward in the rodent population and from that they can correlate all that to asthma cases that are happening in Chicago and that

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is actually tracking to very specific districts and particularly low income districts where this is particularly susceptible to children who are there. We've also observed through talking to many people that this is actually a very complicated subject of a combination of stakeholders to bring together so the private sector, governments,

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city residents of all kinds that need to share their information, discuss the results for each other with each other to move their cities forward. The federal government has already implemented a lot of helpful early programs from many agencies and this is a slide it's very difficult to read because there's so many listed here

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but starting point of what's been happening particularly in the administration being very sensitive to place based programs and 18 large place place programs went into place starting with the administration but really in the last year a lot of them have started to look towards technology.

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So for example the White House in September pushed forward their Smart Cities initiative and it was quite a boom of many people coming back to Washington. They introduced new R&D funding, created the MetroLab networks which brought 20 universities paired together with their city CTOs to look at some of the R&D problems that are happening

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there. So what is needed in these cities? First of all experimentation. Experimentation really at the district level and to test technologies and learn from that

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districts frankly have proven to be large enough to learn from but small enough to actually do good experiments and we can add technologies to districts that can make them more energy efficient and we can optimize on that essentially being green. We can look at convenience to make them more mobile.

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We can look at them to be in the word that we use connected to be much more inclusive for people to be able to use technologies like broadband. This helps improve health, lowers pollution, reduces energy use, better water management, creates safer neighborhoods, decreases congestion and offers these technologies as we say for

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a level playing field. McKinsey did a report recently that blue congested green districts where they saw a path to not only them being easily affordable but they used 20 to 40% less energy consumption, 60 to 65% less freshwater consumption, 25% less waste was created and 30 to 50% reduction

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in emissions and they found that a payback of these districts because of the cost involved at the beginning were typically in three to five years. We also feel that we need a breadth of knowledge platform where different from the start of the smart cities initiative which really top down where single large vendors were involved

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working with cities. This is very much a bottom, this era is very much being characterized as bottom up from many different parts of the stakeholder community but also startups that are creating ideas bringing those forward and just like the world wide web the best ideas are being adopted

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and being brought forward. So we believe that we need something like a city web that is sort of equivalent to the way the world wide web has been for corporations, multi-stakeholder shared data APIs to connect to programs and data, predictive analytics and optimization algorithms that people can

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look at and learn from, their results, their models, their best practices and frankly the idea of moving from these one off implementations that city CTOs are doing today to try to create real applications that can then be shared across cities and also allow then smaller cities that don't have technology capacity to be able to adopt these ideas and most importantly

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we think we need all this in an integrated approach and if you think about a simple example of how these technologies may work together 25% or space of the space in districts and cities or more is being used just for parked vehicles. And so if you could reduce that through the use of autonomous vehicles that will open

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up that space that can then be used to enable pedestrian paths, bike lanes, new denser affordable housing and that new denser affordable housing can allow us to start re-looking at our energy systems that we put in place to more district energy systems and so that lowered housing, utility and transportation costs will also allow residents to be able to afford to be

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in cities and be closer to their jobs. And this freed up space will also then allow us to look at some of the concepts coming back to cities like urban agriculture and cleaner manufacturing and that will produce the local supply chains that will be much better than the sort of very large supply chains we see today where we're shipping goods thousands

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of miles to their destinations. We also feel as what is needed is a new workforce, a workforce that is basically trained, educated and trained to be able to implement all these different technologies and frankly the concept of having them have credentials and accreditation so that they can export their skills to other parts of the country.

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So what is needed from the federal government to do all this? We think that we need to start to move, you know the agencies are doing their job in terms of silos today but we really think we need much more of a cross agency effort to put these pilots together. We need the government to work on helping the private sector to create this workforce of tomorrow.

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Clearly we need more federal funding if we're going to compete with the rest of the world. We need the government to help us in terms of creating this city web platform that many people in many parts stakeholders in the private sector are talking about the need to create particularly around standards and interoperability. We need to have international collaboration

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because frankly the ISO standards coming together are going to be very important for us and for our vendors here in the United States to be able to work with a lot of the problem overseas where there's even more acute view of people moving from rural areas to cities. And we also need coordinated R&D across the various government agencies where today there really

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isn't even an inventory of projects that touch on to this city effort. This is a multi-trillion dollar business opportunity that the U.S. cannot afford to lose. There are significant efforts underway in the U.K. and Singapore, countries like Germany, Spain, Sweden, the Netherlands, India, China. Our counterparts in the U.K. Science Advisory Council have

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now written 13 reports on this topic of all various types. And the U.K. has even created a minister of cities in their cabinet so they are looking very closely at what is happening in this area to lead the next wave. So these are some, as a result these are some of our recommendations. And our recommendations really fall, as it turns out, four main recommendations.

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Sorry. What happened? Did I hit a button? Go ahead. Maybe you can figure that out. Well in any event, let me talk to it. Okay. Yeah, okay. Are you going to advance it? Okay, great. Thank you. So these recommendations really fall into four main recommendations. Four main categories. Being around organization, technology capacity, legislative financing,

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and R&D. I think I'm just going to keep going and we'll let the slides catch up. Please keep going. They'll do their best to get it back up. I don't know what's happened. It came back up, but it gave up when they got to the recommendations. Hopefully that's not a sign. So the first recommendation about organization is that we need an integrated

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agency approach. Each of the agencies has technology capacity for cities at different levels. Frankly, we've talked to most of them. But the Department of Commerce houses many areas that are particularly applicable to the next era, city efforts through NIST, economic development, census, NTIA, NOAA, many other parts of the organization. And for that reason,

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we believe the Secretary of Commerce working with the Secretaries of HUD, Transportation and Energy should establish an interagency initiative to support the efforts for models for technology enhanced cities. And there are multiple parts to this recommendation. The first is that we would like to ask them to create, we believe they should create a multi-agency

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blueprint this year to be able to move this forward, frankly, for the next 100 years. We need to immediately, oh, you're going to run it from there? Okay, great. We need to immediately create an integrated technology competition program. So, model after the Department of Transportation Smart Cities Challenge, which was announced in December, that's currently

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underway, and it's gathering proposals to award $40 million to a single city for a living lab transportation experiment. It's created a real buzz around the country. We've seen the start of the working groups and the deadlines they're under. They've been able to do that to bring all the stakeholders together in a way that very few things can bring together

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to talk about how to move their city districts forward. We need to have this group explore the training programs that connect urban technology innovation to jobs development, particularly around certification programs, and help the private sector to move that forward. We need to work with federal agencies, such as DOD, to evolve urban districts, like military bases

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with these new technologies to learn how we can take that knowledge to the evolution of urban districts and cities. We need to have a convening process. You have them initiate a convening process using NIST and NSF, help spawn the standards efforts that will be needed for many stakeholders of the city web, and then turn it over to the private sector much

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the same way that the World Wide Web started with the creation of W3C. We also need to have the agencies work together with the US Chief Data Scientist to identify types of data that can help city services and then work with the private sector to come up with those incentives to allow them to think about data sharing, and particularly to input in

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place a lot of the privacy and security concerns that folks like that may have. Second, in terms of technology capacity, we believe that HUD plays a very crucial role for low income communities and should have technology tools like a CTO, like innovation labs, so that technology can empower these communities for better health, better education,

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better employment, with an emphasis to make sure these city districts are affordable to a wide number of people. Third, in terms of legislative financing, we have two recommendations. A large level of funding is going to be required to change our cities to this new era. Other parts of the world recognize this. The Asian Development

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Bank, for example, is spending $18 billion a year, as they expect 1.1 billion people to move into Asian cities over the next decade, so we're going to need to spend some real money to compete. The first, and probably the easiest, is the idea of approving what's called QPIBs, which is Qualified Public Infrastructure Bonds, and that has already been brought

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by the administration to Congress this past year as a new type of municipal bond that allows public-private partnerships to be funded by bondholders, which is especially needed for replatforming our cities, although it came up initially for general infrastructure. The second is that we believe Treasury should create an advanced technology infrastructure

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incubator loan facility to loan dollars for replatforming these cities. And fourth, in terms of our recommendation, is in the organization of R&D and the federal government. We propose that there be a National Science and Technology Council subcommittee. We call it the Urban Science Technology Initiative to coordinate federally funded R&D, starting

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with an inventory, then having these teams work together and even look at the concept of grand challenges for how our cities can move forward. So with that, I'm going to turn this over to Craig for comments. Thanks, Mark. And let me also thank Mark for his leadership on this project. It's been

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quite an effort, and he's done a fantastic job. He mentioned many things, but I just would like to reinforce a couple of them. One is that if you look back far enough, well, more than 100 years, it's always been a technological change that has driven, you know, really structural change in the nature of cities. You know, we created running water and then plumbing,

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distribution of gas, electricity, and then automobiles, for example. Each of these changed the nature of cities, the scale of cities, and the way that people lived and worked in them. And so it's, in my mind, quite natural to find that, particularly with the information technologies being added to this list of critical capabilities, and also looking at the aging

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of many of those now almost 100-year-old systems, that it has come a time where we should naturally expect cities to evolve one more time. And I think that this report is showing a direction that will help the country and world ultimately move in this direction. Second is that we now see that many of these things that evolved in separate ways now are going to be much

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better if we can integrate them. You can't integrate them as you're inventing them one at a time, historically, but now that we know that we need all of these infrastructures and we can add information technology on top of them, it provides a way of gaining advantage from that integration, which we think is important both in operational capability and economically.

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Third, there's a lot of talk today about smart cities, but in my mind, smart up to this point has been about optimizing the performance of the cities as we've known them. But we now have an opportunity to really re-platform the city, and this is a significant shift. And so while we embrace all that has been achieved in the smart city activities to date,

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and certainly would want them integrated in a natural way, this is a much more profound shift than just adding a level of instrumentation and optimization to the cities that we now have. It's also important to recognize that this is not an incremental thing, that this is really a replacement in many ways of the investments that we've made over time and

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would necessarily have to continue to make in order to sustain the infrastructures we already have. And I think it's important to recognize that it's not all at the margin incremental spend. However, as any business would know, when you have to re-platform your business, there's a period of time where you have to have an overlapping investment in

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order to bootstrap that change. So the recommendations and the focus on the need to provide these economic mechanisms for the bootstrap, I think, are absolutely essential, recognizing that it's not an incremental tweak that we're making to the cities we have now. And then I think it's also important, and Mark mentioned this, to recognize, and you can look to some

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other work and even other PCAST reports where we pointed out that technological change is largely going to displace most of the jobs in the world and the United States especially over the next 20-year period. And we have an imperative to find a way to move our workforce up to a more technologically advanced capability. And I think that this provides an at-scale

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opportunity both in the United States and ultimately around the world to create a new class of jobs and a new way of training people for those jobs, and that as this technological replatforming takes hold, it can bring along with it a huge opportunity to deal with what otherwise will be a growing problem of unemployment. And so I think this is a very profound thing.

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I'm appreciative that PCAST leadership and my colleagues and so many people chose to participate in this program, and I'm enthused about what I think will come about as a result. Thank you. Great. Well, the floor is now open for discussion, comments, and questions by PCAST members. Jim Gates is the first flag up. Jim. Thank you. And again, I'd like to

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pay tribute to First Mark and Craig for their leadership on this project. It was certainly very inspiring actually to be part of the team to put it together. So my question has to do with something that a lot of us are concerned about, and Craig touched on it at the end of his comments. Namely, are we envisioning a city where all Americans have a chance

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to have the kind of middle class existence that our citizens have become accustomed to over the last 100 years? So could you speak to that just a bit? Yes. Jim, it's a really great question, and one that's certainly on the front and center of the mind of all the agencies in this federal government, and on the minds of all of us versus what we're

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starting to see in some cities, particularly in other parts of the world, where they're wrestling with cities not being affordable to a wide range of people that live there. And so the technology is the way that we can start to move from just the notion of affordable housing to the affordable living basically within cities. And you can do this by, as

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we talked about, by changing land use, by construction costs, which newer technologies will let you do. Land use will get back by moving these technologies around so you can create denser cities. But you can also with this have lower operating costs in terms of energy, in terms of transportation, and bring jobs back to the city so that people can live

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close to where they work. So if you can lower the basic costs of housing, energy, and transportation, and at the same time increase the number of jobs that are in cities and things like agriculture and manufacturing and other areas, you have the opportunity to have cities remain affordable to a large range of people. And a lot of the early projects have gone on really around

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the idea of low income. You know, solar technologies in particular, the HUD has worked with both the DOE and EPA. They have a Renew 300 program today where they're particularly bringing solar technology to low income areas so that people can afford to remain there, lower their costs, and frankly have the ability to even put costs back into the system to get dollars

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back for their money. So this is front and center for this. It will be very, very important to this initiative. Thank you. Bill Press. Thanks, John. Mark, this is a wonderful report and I think its recommendations are going to have a big impact. There are recommendations across a wide range of cabinet departments. You've suggested that commerce should take

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the lead, but clearly energy, labor, HUD are all involved. I recognize that you can't commit cabinet departments to do things, but I wonder just in the course of this report do you have a sense of whether there is interest in those departments for moving out in this direction? Yeah. No, absolutely. We talked to, and I give Marjorie a lot of credit for

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helping us to set up and get through to a number of folks. They're here. So we talked to a number of people that we call the inventors, the integrators, and frankly policy people and a lot of people in the federal government across these agencies. And we found that they're trying to create integrated approaches on their own in an informal way. So we're already

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seeing HUD work with DOE and EPA. We're already seeing commerce start to work with some of the other parts of the organization. We're seeing transportation that's moving forward. We've talked at high levels in these agencies, and there's definitely a interest in working together on these points and to be able to share their technology capacity with each other

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to create these integrated city districts. Michael McQuade. Again, I think just a terrific team effort to take a very, very large subject and come down to a set of recommendations that really capture the essence of where we are. So Mark, one of the key elements in here, there's the city initiative, and then there's the city web. Can you talk just a little bit

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about the city web? Maybe a few words on sort of how expansive that is, what the rationale is, et cetera? I'm going to say a couple of words that I wanted to hand this over to Craig, who really has helped a lot in pioneering the idea through the committee. And I want to talk about it more from the aspect of now sitting with a number of disparate private

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sector groups that are out there that are starting to work on proposals, and they keep looking at the idea of trying to create this themselves and know that it's very difficult one off. But there have been many plans around the idea of having to have sort of an open environment where people can share things, whether that's code or whether that's data,

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but even more so, their insights that they learn. So with that as a sort of starting point, Craig, why don't you go ahead? Thanks. We were motivated to propose the city web by looking at how the internet grew. It started out as sort of just basic connectivity. Then people had files and they were all around, but you had to know where they were. You couldn't

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access and you had to move them with some difficulty. And two things fundamentally changed that. We added HTML and HTTP, so people could all describe a web page in a uniform way. And with the metadata there, it allowed the emergence of the search engines, which everybody now sees as a ubiquitous way of finding what you need. So the question is, how do you take

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and create, in analogous terms, a way for all the people in this huge and growing community around urban science to go through this same point of evolution? How can they share what they have in some unified way? How could you discover something that was being done in a department in the Chicago environment and find it in a small city? We found in our work

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that many of the biggest cities in the country, of course, have people that are invested in doing some of these things, but even they don't know about each other and don't have a good way to share. And of course, if you look at the smaller cities, they just don't have the capacity to do this thing. So if you don't want this to become something that

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just affects a few elites, if you want the same ubiquity that we see on the web, we have to create some standards to allow this type of exchange and discovery to happen and to allow collaborative development to take place the way we see now in so many other areas. So the belief is that we could add a few sort of protocols and description mechanisms

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that are specific to both the discovery, collaboration, and operational elements of an interconnected, smart, new platform city environment and get the kind of leverage that we're getting in so many other areas applied to the people that work in this space. So that we believe can be assembled standing completely on the shoulders of all the success

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the world's had around the internet and the worldwide web, but give it the kind of specificity that's going to be necessary to bootstrap this new area of urban science. Good. Well, thank you. I see no other flags up. So I would like to ask if the members of PCAST are ready to approve these recommendations and the underlying report, subject as usual,

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to final edits. All those in favor, please raise their hands. Opposed? Seeing none. The recommendations are unanimously embraced. The report is approved subject to final edits. And again, I can only add my heartfelt thanks to Mark, to Craig, to Marjorie and Diana and Ashley who did so much work and also to the other PCAST members who contributed and the

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experts who were consulted. This was a big, big team effort and it's terrific to see it come to such productive and potentially influential conclusions. We will now move on to the second of the reports for our consideration this morning, the Technology and Aging Report. And there, I believe Chris Cassel will tee this up for us with Ed Penhoet,

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probably adding some comments after Chris's presentation. So Chris, the floor is yours. Thank you, John. And I do want to thank Ed, the co-chair on this report. And I will, thank you. I also can't help but comment that there are many similarities between the Cities Report and the Aging Report, two major ones that both of them really involve a broad span of government

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agencies and public and private players. And the second is that older people are a major component of our city's population and growing. One, and all of the recommendations that Mark and Craig told us about dramatically add to the ability of older people to live and flourish in cities. So keep that in mind. So our report was focused on a very specific question of

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how can technology help people as they get older to remain independent one way and productive and improve their quality of life. And one way to think about that is delaying and maybe even avoiding altogether the need for people to move out of their homes to move into more dependent situations such as nursing homes. So I'm going to go through a brief overview.

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A number of cross-cutting recommendations because we did find that a number of the recommendations really span a whole range of applications. And then three specific applications of technology if you will, one about social connectivity and health, another about cognitive ability and ways that technology can help in situations of declining cognitive ability and similarly

00:36:58.860 - 00:37:30.700

with physical ability declines. So this is the picture that we all should be keeping in mind about the population. If you look at between 2010 and 2020, roughly where we are now, 2016, you can see that that number of people over the age of 65 is rising and the number over 85 is very dramatically rising. And so it's no longer the case that we can

00:37:31.700 - 00:38:05.860

talk about de-elderly as a unified, coherent concept. It really is a large part of our population. And not only is it very relevant to federal policy and policy at every level, but as many people have pointed out, it's also an enormous market for products and services that really can help people and provide services. So the basic context though with aging, even

00:38:05.860 - 00:38:35.940

though I would point out that the majority of people over the age of 65 are quite healthy and independent and active, that with age comes higher risk for complex health problems for functional declines and for the risk of a number of serious medical conditions. So our study focused on, as I said, helping older adults remain independent and have higher

00:38:35.940 - 00:39:06.620

quality of life with a special consideration for disparities of various sorts. So cultural differences in how families live and interact, socioeconomic differences and particularly access to products and services by people who have lower ability to purchase those on their own behalf and ways that collective efforts in cities and communities can help

00:39:07.140 - 00:39:40.500

people. And then the last point is really important for PCAST members and others to understand that there is an enormous range of innovation going on out there related to new technologies and potentially ways in which technology can help people as they age. We decided to really focus on the short term impact, the low hanging fruit if you will, where the technologies

00:39:41.900 - 00:40:07.340

are most immediately able to help people within the next few years and where federal policy changes could have the greatest and quickest impact. So here's our group. Ed and I were privileged to serve as the co-chairs and we have a number of PCAST members as you can see there as well as experts from a number of different perspectives from academia, industry

00:40:09.660 - 00:40:42.860

and others. And I particularly want to thank Ashley Preetith, the assistant executive director of PCAST who really shepherded this and helped not only organize all the meetings but bring coherence and important organization to the text of the report. Also Diana Pankovich played a major role particularly with our cognitive aging subgroup and Rob Saunders who helped

00:40:42.860 - 00:41:11.540

us with the writing. So the cross cutting recommendations are important because what we discovered is that if you look at each of the special needs, mobility, cognitive function, social engagement, there are a number of themes that run across these and so some of these are that there's a great heterogeneity in the population. I mentioned that already

00:41:11.540 - 00:41:38.420

but what that also means is that there's a breadth of policies needed from many different aspects of government. When we think about aging policy we tend to think about HHS and about health and medical issues but in fact housing, transportation, communications, emergency services, education, a whole range of other policy areas are extremely relevant to helping

00:41:40.900 - 00:42:06.440

people stay independent. Second point was the foundation of internet connectivity. Internet I'm starting to think of internet as a basic health resource as well as a basic other communication and social resource. Monitoring technologies have now become with big data and data analytics and predictive modeling very sophisticated and can be used to great beneficial impact

00:42:08.340 - 00:42:34.260

in aging. There are a lot of issues there which we'll get into but that's a consistent theme throughout the report and then interface and interoperability standards for technology and for information are very important and then finally the need for more research. So recommendation number one has to do with this issue of the breadth of agency and policy

00:42:35.260 - 00:43:03.540

impact. So we really recognize that we need more coordinated action rather than we were tempted to recommend a department of aging but we thought rather than do that all of these people are working in existing agencies on relevant areas that instead they should be coordinated. So we asked OSTP to create a one year task force of the national science

00:43:03.540 - 00:43:32.540

and technology council to identify the technologies vital to an aging population and focus their recommendations on how best to enhance the work between these agencies. And then within the health area most immediately that HHS should bring the private sector into a public and private council with people from industry, academia and advocacy organizations to advise

00:43:32.540 - 00:44:01.860

on ways to advance technology in the same service. I imagine that the findings of that group can directly then impact what the interagency discussion would be. Recommendation number two about engagement and social connectivity, I want to point out that access to internet communications really underlies a whole range of ability if you

00:44:01.940 - 00:44:28.700

think about it of older people as well as everybody to access the kind of information that they need and reach out and engage in the communication that they need. Many people have this attitude that older people don't use the internet. That actually is not true and it's increasingly not true with the aging of the baby boomers. So not only do you have

00:44:28.700 - 00:44:57.020

old people entering the over 65 age group who have basic skills and familiarity with technology but it's also been demonstrated that older people even in the 85 and plus group can learn and are able to learn particularly if the learning is oriented towards their learning styles and educational styles. So we have recommendations related to both of

00:44:57.020 - 00:45:22.940

those. So the first thing is to have access to broadband and we've had other PCAST reports that address this but what we're asking here is that HHS through the agency for community living and commerce through NTIA should work together to create a national plan to ensure that older people have access to broadband. And then at the same time FCC should review

00:45:22.940 - 00:45:47.300

and consider in all of its negotiated agreements about federal communications approvals that older people learn included. There's been a lot of attention to making sure school children have access but less explicit attention to older people. And then finally FCC and NTIA should create a plan that includes a matching program with private support to support training

00:45:47.300 - 00:46:15.100

centers. There are a few of these in some cities that have been very successful in reaching out and making training available to older people but there aren't enough of them and they certainly aren't accessible to all of the people who could benefit from them. The third recommendation is about training, monitoring technology for frail and vulnerable

00:46:15.340 - 00:46:42.380

elders in particular and so I mentioned the promise of that. We tend to be concerned first and foremost about privacy and the potentially intrusive nature of monitoring but in fact the benefits far out ray those risks and so what we want to do is ask the federal agencies to find ways to further strengthen and enhance the benefits and reduce the risks of monitoring.

00:46:43.380 - 00:47:10.660

So we're asked and so if you think about it this monitoring can help us predict problems with mobility, with neurological function, changes in daily patterns of behavior so that if you just can have some signals that go to a family member or a medical professional if there are major changes like not getting up out of bed or not eating for a day or something

00:47:10.660 - 00:47:33.260

like that then people could continue to live longer in their own home. Some of these very basic functions could be supported in that way and then finally there's major benefits in financial security that I'll get to in a minute. So we're asking NIST to collaborate as it always does with the private sector to develop guidelines for marketing and instructional

00:47:33.260 - 00:48:01.820

materials so that consumers understand the operational requirements, the benefits of monitoring and also are able to appropriately calculate the risks and then also to develop guidance to identify privacy and security safeguards in a way that doesn't impose undue barriers to innovation and adoption. Recommendation number four is about research and there's of

00:48:01.820 - 00:48:25.820

course needs for research but particularly urgent in some of these areas that are just ripe for applicability but haven't quite reached that tipping point yet. So here's a place where all of the federal research agencies and in particular NIH, AHRQ, NSF, the VA, the DOD, and DARPA should get together and really develop a plan to accelerate research

00:48:27.980 - 00:48:56.460

in robotics, other advanced mobility technologies, communications, special emphasis on emergency situations, cognitive training, and home monitoring. So getting to the specific areas, we've talked a lot about facilitating social engagement and both information gathering and communication. For these purposes, one is social participation.

00:48:58.940 - 00:49:21.940

It's not just a nice thing to have, there's very good data that people who are isolated and don't engage in their communities are more likely to have dementia for cognitive impairment to accelerate, to suffer from depression which leads to a number of exacerbated medical conditions and other kinds of problems plus they're not able to keep working if they want

00:49:21.940 - 00:49:48.220

or need to have to do that and they're not able to take advantage of volunteering activities. They also can access information and resources more easily and be more likely to be secure and safe in various kinds of emergencies. So the first recommendation in this area, recommendation five overall, is that the administration

00:49:48.380 - 00:50:15.220

should support education and training in online technology. So this happens in a major way through continuing reauthorization of the Older Americans Act and in particular Section 415 that specifically focus on access to online services and protections from scams and fraud. We also would ask the CNCS, the Corporation for National and Community Services, which

00:50:15.220 - 00:50:40.820

already has support for a senior volunteer corps to expand this to include older people who already have technology skills who could help other people gain these skills. Recommendation number six is about emergency response and communications and here's a place where you think about it, where older people, much of the attention in disasters have been

00:50:40.820 - 00:51:04.460

to people in nursing homes, rightly so, but also isolated people in their own homes who may also have impaired sight, hearing, not getting the messages everybody else is getting and even if they do impaired mobility that makes it harder for them to leave or evacuate. So we're recommending that FEMA should advance strategies to create effective communication

00:51:04.460 - 00:51:29.260

systems to reach people in those various circumstances, that the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response work with the Office of the National Coordinator and CMS to promote more rapid interoperability of medical information so that whenever and wherever an older person is in need, the relevant information about that person's condition can be accessed.

00:51:29.260 - 00:51:56.460

Also to identify people at risk in advance of known emergencies such as tropical storms or tornadoes where you could identify people who, for example, are dependent on technology such as dialysis, various infusion pumps, ventilators, et cetera, and get help to them in advance of a predicted emergency problem.

00:51:56.460 - 00:52:19.500

And then the last recommendation that FEMA, ASPR, and CMS work together to make medical device interfaces more consistent and interoperable. So this has to do with charging, signaling between devices and various backup strategies, all of which now each different device and each different maker of each different device

00:52:19.500 - 00:52:35.100

has a different approach to. So it makes it very hard to have a systematic approach to making help available to people in those situations. Interoperability is something people often think about when they think about problems

00:52:35.100 - 00:52:57.540

with aging. There is higher risk for neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's disease, but there's also, even with normal aging, a decline in certain kinds of executive functions in the ability to identify risk perhaps to analyze particularly financial situations, putting

00:53:02.100 - 00:53:25.460

people at greater risk for fraud and financial mismanagement and endangering financial security for older people who are on fixed income or limited savings in particular. So the recommendations here are about financial services and also about cognitive training. The first one about financial services is that the federal government should encourage

00:53:25.460 - 00:53:43.260

the banking and financial industries to offer monitoring to protect assets from fraud and exploitation. So here I want people to think about your credit card company that is very good monitoring. They understand your patterns of how you use your credit card and if they see something

00:53:43.260 - 00:54:07.060

out of the ordinary, they will decline the use of the card and they'll send you a message. Did you really, was this you making this purchase? And then it's very easy to just signal that it is and then they will authorize the card. That takes enormous risk out of the loss of a credit card or the theft of a credit card.

00:54:08.260 - 00:54:28.460

Very similar things could happen in banking. People do have patterns of how they spend their money through various banking services and dramatic or unusual changes in those patterns could be identified and people could simply be warned or asked or an authorized family member warned or asked, do you really want

00:54:28.460 - 00:54:49.020

to go through with this set of transactions? So there already are some banks that are doing this and there are many of the big banks who are exploring it and understanding that this is going to be an important need going forward. So we're asking the signatories to the 2013 Interagency Guidance on Privacy Laws and

00:54:49.020 - 00:55:15.540

reporting of financial abuse to accelerate this expectation of banks and within their regulatory capacities to help banks to get these services available to older people. We're also asking the Executive Office of the President to convene state governors to ensure that there's an appropriate and effective link between these kind of reports and adult

00:55:15.540 - 00:55:39.620

protective services, particularly for older people who are on their own or isolated where there's not a family member engaged in this kind of oversight or where there's some risk that the family member themselves may be involved in the exploitation. And then cognitive training, because of the concern that everyone has about cognitive

00:55:39.620 - 00:56:07.100

decline with aging, there has been a booming market in games and online training products to help people that ostensibly help people strengthen aspects of grain function. Turns out that there's relatively little evidence that these things are effective in any broad way and so we encourage and the FTC has actually begun to reach out and regulate the claims

00:56:10.180 - 00:56:37.060

of these products, many of which are unjustified and so we encourage the FTC to continue to do that on behalf of consumers. And then finally changes in physical ability. So this can happen at many different levels. Some of it is just limited activity due to arthritis and other kinds of conditions. Some

00:56:37.060 - 00:57:05.620

of it is real post-stroke or other kinds of situations which leave people dependent on wheelchairs for transportation and mobility. And in all of these areas there's great technological advances, much of it led by DOD and DARPA on behalf of veterans and injured veterans, but it could be applied to great benefit to the older population more broadly, but there

00:57:05.620 - 00:57:35.820

are barriers to that happening. So let me go first then to recommendation nine which is about telehealth. So telehealth is another promising way not only to get health services over the internet, over Skype, in various kinds of virtual communication techniques between healthcare providers and

00:57:36.820 - 00:58:05.020

people who need advice or monitoring for their health, the full promise of telehealth I would say on our committee identified has been limited by two things. One is the fact that medical licenses are done by states and the states don't have consistent standards and so doctors in one state can't advise somebody in another state even if they have greater

00:58:05.020 - 00:58:34.540

expertise. So the Federation of State Medical Boards that's FSMB has already begun a project of beginning to get agreements between the states on reciprocal recognition of licensure and we urge them to continue to do that and we are suggesting that HHS convene the FSMB with the National Governors Association to find out ways to accelerate this reciprocity.

00:58:34.540 - 00:58:57.740

The second point that limits the acceleration of telehealth is CMS policies which for understandable reasons have required that the patient actually see the doctor if you're going to send a bill to Medicare. They're worried of course about fraud, about ways in which people could game this system and that's understandable. We think there's technology solutions to that

00:58:57.740 - 00:59:20.380

as well but we think that CMS should within the innovation center which was started by the Affordable Care Act to find ways to advance payment policies that support innovation which moving away from fee-for-service to outcome-based payments where if you get the right outcome you shouldn't have to depend on actually showing up at the doctor's office. What should happen

00:59:20.380 - 00:59:50.100

is the person gets what they need through whatever mechanism is more patient-centered. Recommendation number 10 is about home design. So here we're talking about the impact of HUD and home design uniform policies in all kinds of accessibility standards that allow people to have in services and products that come into the home and not necessarily

00:59:50.540 - 01:00:16.420

have to be retrofitted for every different product and service that comes in. There's been a lot of designs in this area in other aspects of housing and this is particularly important for retirement communities. The last two recommendations are about product design. The first one is just general product design to make senior friendly packaging more

01:00:17.420 - 01:00:41.340

ubiquitous. This has already occurred within the pharmaceutical industry because for a while if you recall there were all these child-proof bottles of medications that actually were adult proof as well and so it made it hard for people to open them. They've now figured out how to do that with these simple pressure caps but all the other products in our world and

01:00:41.620 - 01:01:07.940

ironically particularly technology products are encased in these hard plastic containers that make it hard even for somebody who's not mobility impaired to access them but if we really want older people to have access to goods and services that they need we really need to get the Consumer Product Safety Commission to work with the private sector AARP and other

01:01:07.980 - 01:01:33.060

relevant groups to design better guidelines for packaging. And then recommendation number 12 is about assistive and robotic technologies and in particular mobility necessary technologies such as wheelchairs. There's also been a lot of work that DARPA has done with exoskeletons for people who have paralysis and other kinds of conditions that can get you out of a wheelchair

01:01:33.060 - 01:02:02.140

and get you moving. All of those things ought to be much more quickly made available to older people either in clinical trials or actually in services. Medicare payment policies again are intended to limit the potential for fraud which is again understandable but we think that examining Medicare payment policies to find ways that they can reduce the barrier

01:02:03.060 - 01:02:26.460

to access and particularly to market innovation. Some of this has to do with payment policies that limit the amount Medicare pays for a wheelchair and that therefore have led the industry to kind of limit the products that are offered just to that amount. So I think making payment policies more like reference pricing and other kinds of ways that Medicare

01:02:26.460 - 01:02:50.420

could offer a certain reimbursement but then allow the consumer to go and find what works best for that person and if they chose to pay above and beyond what Medicare would pay. So there's ways of thinking about working within that system. And then finally that a multi-agency and industry task force led by the Veterans Administration, DOD, DARPA

01:02:50.420 - 01:03:13.940

and HHS should really look at where we are with these mobility technologies and how to accelerate over the next five to ten years much greater progress. There has been a lot of innovation but somehow it just hasn't made it to the marketplace. So we think that's a really ripe opportunity. So in summary these are very specific recommendations focused

01:03:15.180 - 01:03:41.820

on the fact that the aging of our population is not only a challenge from the policy perspective but also a huge opportunity to make a vital and contributing and productive part of our population even more so. We focus on near term actions with broad application and very targeted federal action. So let me stop there and turn this over to Ed.

01:03:41.820 - 01:04:01.780

Thank you Chris and let me add my thanks Chris to the thanks that you've already indicated for all the participants in the study especially Ashley Predith and Rob Saunders but especially to you Chris. You can't imagine a better partner in a project than Chris Cassel and so you've done a great job on this project. I simply want to emphasize two points that

01:04:01.780 - 01:04:20.500

Chris has already mentioned. First of all the overlap with the city's project which I think will become more and more evident as we move forward in the space. And second of all in reading these recommendations you could walk away from this assuming that this is a lot of stuff being done for older people. But it's being done for I think a very good

01:04:20.500 - 01:04:43.700

reason which is to have them remain productive members of society. Their continued employment was likely to be an important factor in our workforce in the future. Their ability to mentor young people or middle aged people for that matter in a whole variety of areas where experience matters will be an important aspect of their lives. And I think in an area

01:04:43.740 - 01:05:08.260

of overlap with the city's project community leadership they may have the time actually to spend on these district problems and creating communities within the broader context of the city's. So the reason that many of these things actually are being provided for seniors is to empower them actually to continue to contribute to society's goals going forward.

01:05:08.260 - 01:05:35.220

And it's clear many of them will live in cities and they can be an important force in actually driving some of the change that we heard about earlier in the city's discussion. So don't come away from this discussion thinking this is simply a program designed to help older people. It's to help older people remain productive in our society and contributing in a variety

01:05:35.220 - 01:06:03.020

of different ways. And so I think with that we'll look forward to any questions anybody has and hopefully to approval of our report. Yes indeed. Do any PCAST members have questions or comments on this report? Bill Press. Thanks John. Thanks Chris and Ed. That's really a wonderful report. Several of your recommendations involve changes in policy at CMS and it's never

01:06:03.100 - 01:06:31.060

clear to me maybe you can help me. Which of those changes require legislative action? Which can CMS do as a matter of policy? Or which could they do only within their experimental areas and not easily do across the board? That's a very good question Bill and I think that we've actually talked with a number of experts within CMS and on the Hill and the

01:06:32.060 - 01:06:56.980

answer is it depends. So it depends on a whole range of things. So there are things that definitely require legislation and we talked about that in our hearing report for example because there is specific legislation right now that says Medicare will not cover hearing aid. So if there's something like that that's very concrete. Often there is some discretion

01:06:57.420 - 01:07:24.100

in the overall range for example in the wheelchair area. A lot of it has to do with precedent and where it's come from. Just as we heard with the FTC though it's always better to have input from and support from Congress if you're going to make major changes in these federally funded and congressional oversight areas. So that's why in some of the recommendations

01:07:24.860 - 01:07:51.020

we ask HHS and CMS to examine the possibilities for how to reduce barriers related to payment in telehealth for example and in the wheelchair area. The last thing I would say is that the experimental area that you mentioned, the Affordable Care Act created the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation, CMMI, which actually has enormous authority to try out

01:07:51.700 - 01:08:18.860

new models of payment, new models of health care delivery and within that venue they can try out a lot of these things and within the legislation it specifies that if a program is successful at reducing costs and maintaining or improving quality that then it can be expanded to Medicare without going back to Congress. So the Innovation Center actually has enormous

01:08:18.900 - 01:08:37.260

potential in this area and I think within some of these areas that's the avenue to actually getting a broader spread. Good. Jim Gates. Well again, thank you my colleagues for doing this. And my question actually is prompted

01:08:37.260 - 01:09:04.540

by your comment a few minutes ago that many of these recommendations are there to empower our maturing population to continue to contribute to society productively. And so I remember at some stage, I was one of your subgroups on this, I remember one stage hearing about some programs that I don't remember the formal titles but I thought of them as kind of senior

01:09:04.540 - 01:09:27.300

core where you have mature people getting together and organized groups and making contributions and I'm curious did you, in the final form of our report, did we find a trend of this, a sort of senior core out there, a core of talented mature individuals who want to be empowered to contribute?

01:09:27.300 - 01:09:47.660

There are both federally supported programs and privately supported programs, Jim, that are like that, that are remarkably effective. They just need to be more of them and they need to be more visible and more widely known. There was one called Experience Core in Baltimore that you may actually be familiar with but now it's actually gone national in which older

01:09:47.660 - 01:10:13.580

people volunteer in inner city schools and under serve schools districts as mentors, sometimes as teachers, just as people to help out with children of all ages. It's been hugely successful not only at helping the children but actually demonstrated better quality of life, better cognitive function, better mood, better sleep for all these older people who are doing it

01:10:13.580 - 01:10:32.620

so it turns out to be a win-win. Maxine Savits. Again I want to thank Chris Ed and Ashley for a really comprehensive report. Going back to 2011, the PKS reports with regarding health IT and the system that have all talked about

01:10:32.620 - 01:10:51.780

interoperability. Your recommendation 6 talks about interoperability of electronic health record. How much progress has been made and is this going to be enough to really sort of get us there, it becomes more and more important and also important regarding the city?

01:10:51.780 - 01:11:15.860

After I would ask both Bill Press and Craig Mundie, both of who have been involved in this same issue, I would just say some progress certainly in the sense that everybody now I think really realizes that we aren't where we need to be in this area. The progress towards getting there is still in I think more is slower than we'd like. The Office of the National

01:11:15.860 - 01:11:33.460

Coordinator put out a roadmap to interoperability. It's a 10-year roadmap and so I think a lot of people are trying to figure out ways to accelerate that. I don't know. We are running a little behind so I don't want to get too deeply into the electronic health record business but Craig you want to make a comment?

01:11:33.460 - 01:11:54.540

I'll just stand down then. Okay, seeing no further flags, I ask the usual question, are the members of PCAST prepared to approve these recommendations and the underlying report subject to final edits? All those in favor, please raise your hand. Opposed? Seeing none, it is unanimous. Again, I can

01:11:54.540 - 01:12:16.620

only add my thanks to Chris Cassel, to Ed Penhote, and to Ashley Predith and everyone who contributed to this. It is a great pleasure to have two reports approved this morning at this PCAST meeting and I will be conveying those recommendations to the President very promptly.

01:12:16.620 - 01:12:44.700

We now turn to a session on forensics and for that purpose, I'm going to turn the chair to the chair. Great, thank you very much, John, and I'll invite our speakers to make their way up to the front. We are very lucky to have today a remarkable panel of six individuals who bring

01:12:44.700 - 01:13:15.780

great expertise in forensic science to speak with us. As PCAST already mentioned, we are great expertise in forensic science to speak with us. As PCAST already knows, and as those who have been following PCAST on the web know, PCAST has been trying to educate itself about forensic science. It's a large, important, complex area, and I think it's fair to say

01:13:15.860 - 01:13:43.860

that we are probably engaged in more public information gathering and education on this topic than on any other topic. In addition to inviting groups of speakers to open PCAST meetings, to subcommittee meetings that have been held where we've tried to educate ourselves, we've also put a request out on the web for the first time asking for a whole bunch of

01:13:43.940 - 01:14:04.940

specific questions and for people to supply information to PCAST about those questions. And we've been just gratified by the response that we've gotten on the web. I don't know the count at the moment, but it's a very large number of long and thoughtful comments. We asked for pointers to the literature, and we're really grateful for that. And so we're

01:14:04.940 - 01:14:30.180

in the midst of sifting through all of that information that we've received. And so I think it's fair to say we are still at an early stage of digesting all of it, but today there's no substitute for having individuals who are deeply active in the field here to share their expertise. Now we have, according to our schedule, all about an hour, hour and

01:14:30.180 - 01:14:56.580

five minutes to do this. We've got six speakers, and I think the speakers have all agreed that they would confine their remarks to five minutes, and that would allow time for PCAST to actually ask questions and perhaps even have some dialogue within the panel there. I think we're just going to go in order. I think that's the best way to do it, and I will introduce each speaker

01:14:56.580 - 01:15:21.060

in turn. And we're going to start with Alice Eisenberg, Deputy Assistant Director of the FBI Laboratory. Thank you so much for being here. Good morning, and thank you for the invitation to speak to you about opportunities and challenges that face the forensic science community as we continue to advance this discipline, which lives at the intersection of science

01:15:21.060 - 01:15:43.460

and law. I wish to focus my remarks this morning on ways to enhance forensic science, first with the development of consensus standards that can assist in making the application of forensic science more uniform, and secondly, by ensuring that research performed to improve our laboratory procedures is sound. Most forensic science disciplines are founded on historical

01:15:43.460 - 01:16:04.420

and ongoing research, which has established not only the basis for the interpretation of results, but also the limitations that are associated with these examinations. In addition, these disciplines have been subjected at various frequencies to admissibility hearings in court under federal and state legal standards. To date, there is no scientific research that

01:16:04.420 - 01:16:25.860

exists to question the validity of the basis of these disciplines so long as the meaning of the results and the limitations associated with those results are communicated in a manner that is clear and understandable to the audience. While the forensic science community has benefited from the activities of several robust working groups to develop best practices for

01:16:25.900 - 01:16:48.740

appropriate interpretation and communication of results, there has not been a coordinated effort across all disciplines and all laboratories to set best practices for the community until very recently with the creation of the Organization of Scientific Area Committees, or OSAC, managed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. The FBI has recently developed

01:16:48.740 - 01:17:10.260

internal standards for scientific reports and testimony to mitigate the risk associated with the lack of such standards in the general forensic science community. These standards were developed and reviewed by both scientists and attorneys to set internal FBI policy for acceptable and unacceptable statements, as well as to document limitations associated

01:17:10.260 - 01:17:31.140

with the forensic examinations we perform. These standards not only provide a template for reviewing an analyst's testimony, but also document the state of the science for each discipline so that historical reviews of cases can be informed by these records in light of, for example, technological advancements or a better understanding of the distribution

01:17:31.140 - 01:17:50.740

of characteristics across larger sample sizes. Thus, one short-term recommendation that I would make to advance forensic science is to encourage the development of standards for report and testimony language across the entire forensic science community. The OSAC would be an excellent organization to take on this challenge given their mission to coordinate

01:17:50.740 - 01:18:10.820

development of standards and guidelines for the forensic science community to improve quality and consistency of work. With respect to the long-term needs of the forensic science community, continued improvement in providing context and meaning to the results obtained in forensic examinations is an overarching requirement. The FBI has recently supported

01:18:10.820 - 01:18:31.860

research that studies the decision-making process in late and print examination. These studies have been performed in collaboration with the international forensic science community in order to obtain a wealth of data surrounding the process used by analysts in reaching decisions. Due to the success of this research project, the FBI has established a research portfolio

01:18:31.860 - 01:18:53.260

for the five areas of research that we predict will drive the forensic science community into the next generation of technology and methodology. Others in the forensic science community have also initiated several projects to develop a research agenda or research priorities and would benefit from the support of PCAST in advancing these projects. However, in order for

01:18:53.260 - 01:19:14.540

the forensic science community to be able to carry out these research agendas efficiently, we also need the support of PCAST to augment the hiring and availability of statisticians to perform the required data analysis in these research efforts. While the forensic science community has a robust body of subject matter experts in the fields of biology, chemistry,

01:19:14.540 - 01:19:35.100

and physics, for example, it often lacks the statistical expertise that is needed to ensure that research and validation efforts are thoroughly and critically vetted. Whether this expertise comes in the form of postdoctoral fellowships, funded positions, or other incentives, the assistance would be tremendous in furthering research agendas across the forensic science

01:19:35.100 - 01:19:55.580

community. In conclusion, the forensic science community must build on the concept of continuous improvement that is so important in our accreditation programs and quality systems to further our understanding of the context and meaning of our results and the communication of those results. Improving the statistical analyses associated with our highest priority

01:19:55.580 - 01:20:16.780

research projects and creating consensus standards for the communication of our results are essential opportunities to advance our field in order to meet the challenges we face in the future. Thank you. Well, thank you very much. We're not going to take questions after each one. I think we'll go down and do it. But I do want to just especially compliment the FBI on one thing.

01:20:16.780 - 01:20:43.500

You only alluded to it briefly and did not take credit for it. But the FBI showed a remarkable openness in reviewing its own testimony in these hair analysis cases. And I don't know many agencies that would have felt comfortable making a public statement that in more than 90% of the cases, the testimony that had been given was not supported by the scientific evidence below it.

01:20:43.500 - 01:21:07.100

And you're taking that on board and it's fabulous. Not to say the cases came to the wrong result, but it's just like a microscopic look and saying those things should not have been said. And you should be proud to do that. A real hallmark of science is to hold the mirror up and say we got it wrong in places. And agencies don't do it that often. So I want to compliment you on

01:21:07.100 - 01:21:27.180

that. Thank you very much. We're going to turn to Jeff Salyards, the executive director of the Defense Forensic Science Center. Thank you. If I could just take a few seconds for some housekeeping items. I'm very honored to be here before you today and very humbled to be part of this panel with five very esteemed colleagues. I also need to point out that I'm not making Department of

01:21:27.180 - 01:21:45.100

Defense or Army policy here today, although I'm very proud to serve with those folks. And on a different venue, I could tell you some very exciting stories of how we're pushing forensics into the battlefield and expeditionary space. I think we all share the same goal here today, which is how do we make forensic science testimony more reliable, more accurate,

01:21:45.100 - 01:22:07.500

more scientific, more rigorous? And so in the short time I have remaining, I'd like to just offer you two ideas to to peak your imagination. The first is you'll hear a lot today about the OSAC structure at NIST. And I was probably among many that were a little apprehensive at first. Was this going to be unwieldy? Was the structure right? But I think all of us have become

01:22:07.500 - 01:22:32.540

very impressed by what is a very professional franchise. Many of us have subordinates who attend and have participated in this process. And they are really down to business. They are really tackling some good issues and not wasting any time. This whole effort, though, is really relying on a spirit of volunteerism. And that results in the real potential for a game of pick

01:22:32.540 - 01:22:54.060

up basketball. And so I think that we need to consider taking some steps to stabilize the leadership of that organization. So I would throw out just one thing for your consideration. NSF in particular has done a very nice job with the Intergovernmental Personnel Act, and they're visiting science and engineers and educators program. Other government agencies have

01:22:54.060 - 01:23:21.500

done the same thing. In the OSAC hierarchy, there's five SACs, if you will, three resource committees and an FSB. If we created nine IPA positions, a drop in the bucket of a large federal government, it would have a profound effect of stabilizing the leadership of that organization. I understand our recommendations are not supposed to propose new funding. I think a salami slice of all the

01:23:21.500 - 01:23:43.740

agencies that are interested in forensic science could probably handle that or maybe a re-prioritization within the NIJ budget could support something like that. The second idea I would throw out for your consideration is as we think about how to show that these forensic science disciplines are valid and rigorous and have been properly researched, it's been a real

01:23:43.740 - 01:24:08.300

journey and it's been very retrospective. We're looking at this vast library of research and it's hard to piece it all together. Some of its rigorous work, some of it is argumentative essays, and I wonder if we're going about it the wrong way. I wonder if we should propose something much more forward-looking, a clinical trial similar to something that the FDA would use for a new screening

01:24:08.300 - 01:24:33.340

test or diagnostic test. We've even tried to increase funding for validation studies, but when you do that, you put out a broad agency announcement that gets proposals from principal investigators. The strength of those proposals is they're very clever and original. The weakness of those proposals is they're very clever and original. What you need is a protocol that's very standard of what,

01:24:33.340 - 01:24:55.340

before we practice this forensic science discipline, before we testify to these types of conclusions in court, have we reached a certain bar? I think the FDA has already plowed some of that ground and we could probably borrow from their expertise. Finally, I would tell you that I have many more ideas, but I only have five minutes and so I look forward to your questions

01:24:55.340 - 01:25:16.860

and an opportunity to answer them. Thank you. Great. While you only have five minutes for the introductory remarks, Pegasus is really very interested in hearing about these ideas and so following up on things like trials that would let us know, as you said, whether something's really ready for use in a courtroom, if you wish to elaborate on that, we're just the stage we'd

01:25:16.860 - 01:25:39.340

like to hear more detail around that. I noticed that Alice Eisenberg had prepared remarks while we're recording all this. If those of you who do have prepared remarks would be willing to share it, with us, that would be great and if you wish, at the end of this, to send us further thoughts based on the discussion, we're very, very eager to hear particularly about proposals like what you're

01:25:39.340 - 01:26:01.980

saying. Great. We're going to turn next to Jill Spriggs, laboratory director of the Laboratory of Forensic Sciences at the Sacramento County District Attorney's Office. Thank you so much. Members of the council, thank you for asking me to discuss before you matters regarding forensic science. My name is Jill Spriggs and I'm the current crime laboratory director for the

01:26:01.980 - 01:26:22.940

office of the District Attorney Sacramento County Laboratory of Forensic Services. I'm also the past president of the American Society of Crime Lab Directors. I'm the current president of the California Association of Crime Lab Directors and current secretary of the American Congress of Forensic Science Laboratories. In my career, I have overseen the daily operations of both the state,

01:26:22.940 - 01:26:44.540

the California Department of Justice lab system, and local crime laboratory. I'll first address an actionable recommendation the federal government can do in the near term or within one year. In order for forensic testimony to be supported by reliable principles, all forensic disciplines should be accredited including digital evidence and multimedia. Digital evidence and multimedia

01:26:44.540 - 01:27:08.060

evidence is considered a forensic discipline not only by the OSAC but also by such accrediting bodies as ASCLAD lab. In fact, OSAC, which is an initiative by NIST and Department of Justice to strengthen forensic science, has within it a committee called digital multimedia with subcommittees comprised of digital evidence, facial identification, speaker recognition, and video imaging technology

01:27:08.060 - 01:27:28.220

and analysis. In March 2013, Attorney General Holder signed the charter for the National Commission on Forensic Science. The charter spelled out the commission was to develop or recommend guidance for the forensic sciences except for one discipline which was digital evidence. In April 2015, Attorney General Holder signed an updated charter for the National Commission on

01:27:28.220 - 01:27:50.300

Forensic Science. Only this time, there is not a clause exempting digital evidence. Instead, the charter speaks of strengthening disciplines only. In early 2015, the commission in a policy recommendation document on universal accreditation to the Attorney General recommended all forensic science providers, including those with the function of digital and multimedia examinations

01:27:50.300 - 01:28:10.460

be accredited. Of concern, recently, was a memo issued by the current Attorney General in November 2015 directing the department to take several steps to strengthen forensic science based on the commission's recommendation, but digital and multimedia evidence was specifically excused from obtaining or maintaining departmental accreditation. Although the Attorney General

01:28:10.460 - 01:28:31.900

did ask for a recommendation from the commission of digital evidence, which should be included as a forensic service provider or not at the very end of this document. If digital evidence multimedia is not considered a forensic discipline, I can assure you we will be sitting here 10 years from now discussing how evidence was handled improperly. Information was retrieved and lost and

01:28:31.900 - 01:28:51.100

reports were not written or reviewed. Even the retail company Target's digital laboratory is accredited at this time. It is encouraged that the Department of Justice changed their recommendation to include digital evidence and multimedia evidence as a forensic discipline. Second, voluntary accreditation of crime labs over the last few years have increased dramatically,

01:28:51.100 - 01:29:10.300

which helps to ensure that forensic testimony is supported by reliable principles and methods. With ISO accreditation, cradle-to-grave documentation exists in crime labs, where it did not exist before, as labs adhere to now over 400 standards. The ultimate goal of accreditation is to ensure these standards are adhered to and a quality product is produced.

01:29:10.300 - 01:29:31.500

Accreditation should no longer be considered voluntary, but a necessity and should be enforced for the entire forensic community, even to include law enforcement agencies with small units performing analysis such as latent print analysis or crime scene investigation. After all, crime labs receive the evidence we analyze from them. Part of the accreditation

01:29:31.500 - 01:29:52.860

is testimony monitoring, which is a very important part. But in order to assure that testimony monitoring is including the correct conclusions in court, one of the things that needs to change is the technical reviews of cases. Currently, the laboratory has the ability to determine the sample size or percentage of completed case records to technically review. For example,

01:29:52.860 - 01:30:16.140

a laboratory may deem it only necessary to technically review 10 out of 100 cases or 10%. Instead, all test reports must be technically reviewed to ensure an adequate test report with the proper supporting documentation in order to aid in forensic testimony that is supported by reliable principles and methods. The technical review of examination records and

01:30:16.140 - 01:30:35.900

test reports should be mandatory in an accredited laboratory within the next three to five years to ensure the validity of scientific results and conclusions. Some crime labs will need to address work-related issues such as procurement of additional staff and training of staff in order to aid in the process. Testimony is an important part of forensic scientists' job. Testimony

01:30:35.900 - 01:30:53.980

must be clear to the jury and based upon sound principles and methods with the attention paid to an excellent product in the form of a test report. The public deserves the best a crime laboratory has to offer, and assurance that work coming out of the crime laboratory is of the highest quality. Thank you for allowing me to address you today.

01:30:54.940 - 01:31:10.220

Thank you very much. We'll turn next to Matthew Gamet or Gamet? Gamet. Gamet. Matthew Gamet who's the laboratory system director of Idaho State Police Forensic Services. Thank you for coming here.

01:31:10.860 - 01:31:29.180

Members of the council, my name is Matthew Gamet and I'm the laboratory system director for the Idaho State Police Forensic Services Labs. I'm also the current board member for the American Society of Crime Laboratory Directors and I chair the consortium of forensic science organizations which represents over 21,000 forensic practitioner memberships. I have

01:31:29.180 - 01:31:49.980

several suggestions for immediate improvement. First, laboratories should have an internal validation study for each method they employ in the laboratory. This should be a requirement for all forensic service providers regardless of accreditation status. However, since the majority of all full service laboratory systems are accredited to ISO standards and because I support

01:31:49.980 - 01:32:11.740

accreditation of all forensic science providers, I'll focus my comments today on how we can improve this criteria in accredited laboratories. Validation studies for scientific methods are a requirement under the ISO program. Even though validation studies are a requirement, there is variability lab to lab and even discipline to discipline on how each lab performs a validation

01:32:11.820 - 01:32:34.220

study and what is contained within it. While the ISO standard states that written validation shall be as extensive as necessary to meet the needs of the given application or field, the laboratory must independently develop and execute a validation plan. To further complicate the issue, many laboratory methods were established long before any current validation requirements

01:32:34.220 - 01:32:55.980

were in place. Additionally, the application of this validation standard is a better fit for instrumental-based disciplines than it is for pattern-focused disciplines. PCAST could assist by helping the community develop minimal standards for developmental and internal validation studies in each forensic discipline and providing recommended criteria for publication. Simply

01:32:55.980 - 01:33:15.900

requiring validations to contain more supporting peer-reviewed publications would be beneficial to our nation's courts. This effort may also standardize the validation publication format, making interlab comparisons and peer-reviewed scrutiny more feasible. An example of how important this standardization is to the forensic science community is the quality assurance standards

01:33:15.900 - 01:33:36.780

for DNA laboratories, which provides very clear direction regarding validation requirements. Highlights include the necessity of written validation studies, peer-reviewed publications underlying the scientific principles, and most importantly competency testing of each analyst on the new method. Second, PCAST and the federal government could be helpful to the forensic

01:33:36.780 - 01:33:57.420

community in making federal researchers, scientists, and statisticians more available to state and local laboratories for peer-review of validation work. There is a precedent for this type of validation collaboration at NHTSA, among other federal agencies. In my own laboratory, we asked NHTSA to evaluate our internal validation of breath alcohol instruments.

01:33:58.220 - 01:34:19.340

And in one case, while this is outside of their normal scope, NHTSA performed a review and provided us with excellent feedback. Having the ability to collaborate with researchers at federal agencies on all phases of validation has several positive effects. First, it encourages labs to publish their data outside of their laboratory system. Second, it produces more

01:34:19.340 - 01:34:41.340

standardized and robust studies. And third, it speeds up the validation work. My lab recently completed two substantial validation studies using external vendors. Like my lab, most small labs do not have staff statisticians, technical writers, or the ability to free up casework staff. Our vendor strategy produced a well-planned scientific and defensible validation studies

01:34:41.340 - 01:35:03.180

in a fraction of the time, but it was also very costly. Giving state and local labs with limited resource access to federal government validation experts and federal lab validation plans and studies would be a huge benefit. While the forensic labs are getting better at publishing data, every lab in the country has a treasure trove of validation data that is not published in

01:35:03.180 - 01:35:22.700

scientific journals. While most of the current forensic journals would not be interested in publishing state and local lab internal validations, the community would benefit if such a peer-reviewed publication existed. It would allow labs to share findings and access more data to support their own validation studies. PCAS could lead in the publication of research presented at

01:35:22.700 - 01:35:43.500

forensic science conferences. There are perhaps close to 100 or more of these conferences held each year, and very few of these have published proceedings. PCAS could offer mechanisms and incentives for research presentations to be converted into peer-reviewed publications. Finally, PCAS should address a critical need for forensic practitioner access to scientific

01:35:43.500 - 01:36:02.860

literature. Most forensic science providers do not have a budget for wide access to scientific journals and most use interlibrary loan or colleagues to get journal articles they desperately need. Access to published research is absolutely essential in the continuous improvement of the forensic science industry. Forensic practitioners must be accessing, discussing, and implementing

01:36:02.860 - 01:36:23.180

the most current scientific literature in their field. Perhaps a simple starting point is getting state and local labs set up under the federal EBSCO contract for library services. A PCAS longer-term plan would be a more robust plan for library services, including development of a forensic science literature search tool. In conclusion, I'd like to thank PCAS for the

01:36:23.180 - 01:36:44.300

invitation to address this very important issue and is only through continued dialogue and collaboration with practitioners that we will realize the fruition of these goals. Thank you very much. We'll next turn to David Sen, who is a clinical assistant professor at the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio. Thank you for being here.

01:36:44.300 - 01:37:06.060

Thank you very much for the invitation. Actually, I was a little surprised to be invited and I want to thank Dr. Pankovich for being patient with my skepticism and for explaining to me that this Council of Advisors truly is interested in objective information from a broad range of stakeholders in forensic science. I don't want to say that I doubted that

01:37:06.060 - 01:37:30.300

objectivity, but it was shaken a little bit when Dr. Joe Handelsman made a statement back in July of 2015 that she thought that she called for the eradication of bite marks from forensic science. And then she did that without checking with me or with anybody else in the American Board of Forensic Odontology and we thought that showed a little bit of lack of objectivity.

01:37:32.540 - 01:37:59.180

I really thought I should have been invited to the October 22nd meeting that you had here where someone spoke on the strengths and limitations of bite mark evidence and testimony. That's a topic that I know something about, but instead you invited known bite mark opponents and Dr. Mary Bush from the State University of New York in Buffalo and her husband,

01:37:59.180 - 01:38:27.340

Peter Bush, to speak and neither of them actually has ever done a bite mark case or neither of them are bite mark specialists and their research bears no resemblance to true bite mark cases. Nevertheless, I'm honored to be here today and back in this building where I spoke to the National Academy of Sciences in 2007 on the issue of bite marks. And in that presentation, interestingly,

01:38:27.340 - 01:38:50.780

I discussed the strengths and limitations of bite mark evidence. Or at least that's what I thought I discussed when I read the 2009 report, I discovered that I must have forgotten to speak anything about the strengths of bite mark evidence. So I wanted to maybe show you some of that today. Don't make that mistake this time then. Thank you. You told me to focus my remarks on these near

01:38:50.780 - 01:39:18.460

term and long term answers, but to not include anything about money or research. You guys don't make it very easy for us to make recommendations. So my succinct near term recommendation is that you review and truly understand the federal rules of evidence, especially rules 702 and 703. And I know that you already know that plus the state rules of evidence for each state. I know that you

01:39:18.460 - 01:39:43.500

already know that because and that you understand the role of judges as gatekeepers for this type of evidence, and you've even included one of the one of the four parts of rule 702 reliable principles and methods for your questions here. So I know I'm preaching to the choir about this. My long term recommendation, and I'm going to violate the money rules of engagement that you

01:39:43.500 - 01:40:07.420

made, there has to be training for judges to be better gatekeepers. And I think that's that's one of the problems. And perhaps a mechanism for doing that would be to provide training in science and technology and statistics for judges who are really pretty smart people. Maybe this could be done at the new forensic science center of excellence at Iowa State University that's

01:40:07.420 - 01:40:31.020

been developed that's been recently developed. And hopefully they will let some forensic odontologists come to our state and learn some of this material to which we think would be helpful. But what had it occurred to me on the airplane coming in that you may this this committee may or this council may not have ever actually seen how bite mark cases are done. So I wanted to show

01:40:31.020 - 01:40:55.980

you the way that they're used both in the investigation of some of these cases and in the testimony that's given for them. I think we're up. Yeah. So these are some bite mark cases that I wanted to show you. This was happened in Christmas of 2011. It's injury to a young child. This this is the way it happens. I get calls from emergency rooms or other agencies like Child Protective

01:40:55.980 - 01:41:16.620

Agencies and they say there's an injured child. Could this be a bite mark? And they send me some pictures and I say yes it maybe it could be a bite mark. Send me some more pictures and let's see what we what we come up with. And so they send and these are all on the same child by the way. They send me these multiple pictures of these patterned injuries and we get

01:41:18.380 - 01:41:42.780

more information. And if it's justified I go to the emergency room and take my own photography or have someone take some photography for me. These are multiple injuries to the same child. I'm going to go through this. I don't have a lot of time. We select the injury that has the best evidence and this was the one we selected for this particular case. It's on the actually on the back

01:41:42.780 - 01:42:04.220

of the calf the left calf of this this young person. And then we enhance that image to the best so that we can see all of the features of the of the bite mark. You know and this is a bite mark. You know we rotate it so that we think the marks made by the upper teeth are at the top. The marks made by the lower teeth are at the bottom and there's one two three four. I could count

01:42:04.220 - 01:42:25.900

them. There's eight marks for upper teeth and eight marks for lower teeth in this image. A pretty good evidence. You know so how do we use this evidence? If I took the evidence on the injured party I don't take the evidence on the suspected biters. I have someone else do that and they present the evidence to me as blinded evidence and all I know is that the suspected

01:42:25.900 - 01:42:52.380

biters are ABC and D. And we get images of the teeth of the suspected biter along with models of the teeth of the suspected biters to make our various tests that we're going to that we're going to do in this case. So we have for suspect A suspect B suspect C suspect D. And then we will go to various tests one of them which is an overlay test we make hollow volume overlays

01:42:52.380 - 01:43:19.420

and lay them over the injury same same scale same size and see if we can make any judgments. This is suspect A suspect B suspect C suspect D. I can run back through those and explain to you how we make those comparisons but in my opinion suspect D was the most likely suspect. In this case a live-in boyfriend was one of the suspects there was the mother the babysitter live-in boyfriend of the

01:43:19.420 - 01:43:46.060

babysitter and the babysitter's five-year-old son. In my opinion the five-year-old son made the mark and the babysitter's live-in boyfriend who was in jail was released. That's an investigative use of bite marks that tends to show innocence. We also can can profile biters that I get pictures sent to me from agencies and they say here's an injury to a child could it be a bite mark perhaps

01:43:46.060 - 01:44:12.220

let's analyze it. We do a profile I say there's some lower teeth that are rotated in the same direction some upper teeth that are rotated in opposite directions look for someone who has those features and about an hour later the child protective agency person sends me a cell phone photograph and says what about this guy? Yeah that could be a guy who could have made that mark

01:44:13.660 - 01:44:38.300

and even though these are cell phone photos that are not quality evidence that's enough to say we think that this is the person who's most likely to have made that mark the person that you have in jail can be released. There are a lot of terrific and horrific cases of bite mark cases here's a case that was used in court in Texas these are models of teeth that were used to make

01:44:38.300 - 01:45:03.020

some comparisons this is not my case this is someone else's cases this is a horrible case I apologize for the the graphic nature of the pictures but these are the kind of cases that we see multiple bite marks on a dead child in a morgue both on both sides we look for the best evidence in this case this the the dentist who did this case chose the bite mark on the neck I hope

01:45:03.020 - 01:45:27.420

that you can see that clearly there's marks made by the upper teeth here and marks made by the lower teeth here he uses a different system of of comparison he takes the actual cutouts of the of the dental models themselves and lays them over the the marks and makes his comparisons and in his opinion in this case there were three suspects at trial he testified his opinion

01:45:27.420 - 01:45:54.060

that he could exclude two of the suspects but that he could not exclude another of the suspects he didn't make any wild claims about statistics no one in a million I know you heard about yesterday just the opinion that some people could be excluded and some people could not be excluded so my opinion is that if the use of bite mark evidence is is prevented in some way

01:45:54.060 - 01:46:13.900

there's going to be a great backlash from the defense bar because their clients were not protected by doing these kinds of of analyses all right we're gonna have to wrap up I think so thank you oh actually though if you're done go back just a couple slides I just want to make sure that we looked at at something because I did have a question that made more sense to ask now

01:46:14.540 - 01:46:34.140

just go backward yeah that's great go back another one another one another one another one another one yeah we're right about there no no that's the one do you look at all those marks and ask if they're consistent with each other because if I look on the chest the upper right side of the chest there appear to be two different size marks yeah so do you actually look for the

01:46:34.140 - 01:46:54.700

consistency of all those because you're referring to picking the best one yeah we we select the best evidence to demonstrate in court but we use each we look at every mark and you then would report that every one of those are consistent with each other in the report and in that picture are they or not yeah so that's right that picture are they consistent that this is not my case so I can't

01:46:54.700 - 01:47:13.500

I was just trying to learn because you're trying to teach this were my case I would have analyzed every mark and I would have told in the report what the features were that were consistent and if there were some that were inconsistent then that would have been perfect very helpful to see these very you know disturbing pictures but just to help us understand your procedures that's great thank you

01:47:13.500 - 01:47:39.260

very much thank you let's move on to our last speaker Nora Rudin the co-chair of the Constitution Project Committee on DNA Collection thank you and thank you very much for the honor of inviting me to speak to you this morning that is certainly one role what I do day to day is I am an independent forensic DNA consultant and I review cases and of course I do a lot of teaching

01:47:39.260 - 01:48:05.900

and training and writing as well I'd like to speak to you today about first of all fundamental principles of forensic science and then I will segue towards the end into some comments about probabilistic genotyping we've all seen this image of the OSACs it has always struck me as a little bit of a headless monster and no disrespect to the very hardworking people on all of these committees

01:48:05.900 - 01:48:36.620

but I feel like it lacks some unifying principles we have maybe a bit of an autonomic nervous system in the FSSB committees that interact with all the OSACs but I think it would be useful if we had an overarching head or brain if you will again no disrespect intended that would help really direct and unify all of the committees so what I see really is an absence of guiding scientific

01:48:36.620 - 01:49:02.220

principles and practices which is a discussion for another day I feel that a consensus paradigm of forensic science principles would number one help to unify the disciplines really provide an overarching structure and such a structure would assist in articulating common problems and possible shared solutions forensic science has always been a bit of a bastard stepchild

01:49:02.220 - 01:49:28.140

has never really achieved acceptance in the greater scientific community and I feel that this consensus paradigm as well as another issue I'll talk about in a moment would really contribute to legitimizing the forensic sciences and help its true entry into the world of science so for a little bit of historical context over 50 years ago Paul Kirk professor of forensic

01:49:28.140 - 01:49:53.660

science at University of California at Berkeley wrote this famous paper ontogeny of criminalistics and in it he defined forensic science as the science of individualization and that really has to find our work in our practice for a very long time and in 2001 my colleague Keith Inman and I wrote a book principles and practice of criminalistics the profession of forensic science

01:49:53.660 - 01:50:21.420

and in creating our paradigm we bought into this aspect of individualization and we have since come to realize that we really need to leave this behind individualization is not a scientific construct it's an absolute and science really is more about estimating uncertainty not about asserting certainty and so I'll talk to you now about how we can leave this idea of individualization

01:50:21.420 - 01:50:50.060

behind this is our forensic science paradigm I've written here six principles if you will divisible matter transfer of matter and also of patterns identification which we talk about is categorization individualization which is now crossed out and I'll come back to that association of people and or objects and reconstruction the ordering of time of events in space and time

01:50:50.060 - 01:51:14.460

so coming back to individualization I will suggest that the better way to address it is to talk in statistical and probabilistic terms about the probability of the evidence such that it might support an inference of source first action I would like to suggest to the president that he should or could direct formation of a committee out or above the level of the FSSB to implement

01:51:14.460 - 01:51:39.500

and administer guiding principles and practices as as you heard Alice Eisenberg mentioned before of forensic science I kind of like our paradigm but obviously that is a discussion that could take place next I'd like to segue into talking about DNA as compared to the other disciplines in forensic science it has often been held that DNA is sort of the gold standard and different

01:51:39.500 - 01:52:05.740

than the other disciplines and I would like to suggest that in fact really at at the heart of it all forensic science is pattern comparison and DNA is really not much different or really at all different from the other disciplines DNA does have the advantage that it has a strong academic foundation the patterns are easy to digitize and we enjoy stable and well characterized populations

01:52:05.740 - 01:52:30.860

those ideas of patterns and how we characterize them in populations and how we define them really are at the heart of some of the challenges of the other disciplines and while they do have challenges those challenges are also not insurmountable can be addressed by statistical and probabilistic approaches and I won't go into the details here but you have the slide and

01:52:30.860 - 01:52:58.540

obviously we can chat later I'll also note that DNA has made the mistake of basically repeating itself not learning from early mistakes as the technology increased as we were able to detect much less much much lower amounts of DNA and we received more complex samples the technology really exceeded our ability to interpret and wait such evidence both the

01:52:58.540 - 01:53:24.220

weight and as well in the significance in the context of the case and DNA is finally slowly making progress in implementing probabilistic genotyping approaches that can assist in that and I would suggest that that approach can be transferred to these other disciplines it might be more difficult but again the challenges are not insurmountable and I've provided you with

01:53:24.220 - 01:53:50.300

a couple of papers where people have performed research on these issues any approach a model requires software can't do without software ideally software should be open source and it's nice if it is free of charge currently the probabilistic genotyping software that is quickly becoming the standard in the u.s. is from New Zealand Institute of Environmental

01:53:50.300 - 01:54:16.380

Services and Research private company that provides scientific services to the government of New Zealand it is commercial it is proprietary and it is very expensive and many of the laboratories that purchase this software purchase it through an i.j. grants in other words our federal dollars are being exported to New Zealand so in my opinion the model should be open source for software

01:54:17.340 - 01:54:44.940

free of charge as I say is nice and an example that has been created by the federal government is Osiris that should be all caps which was created by the NCBI it's a genetic analysis program so obviously that's possible software exists sorry open source and free of charge software exists our group provides one such example but small non-profit groups cannot serve the national need of all the

01:54:44.940 - 01:55:07.980

laboratories in the u.s. so again I would like to suggest an action that the president could take is to sponsor federally the creation of probabilistic genotyping programs first for DNA and then as a model for the other disciplines which would eventually need such programs thank you so much for your attention well thank you and thank you the whole panel it's great we have such a

01:55:07.980 - 01:55:35.820

diversity of opinions and perspective you know I pick up all you know a variety of very very interesting points and and some range of opinions and I think that's exactly what we've been trying to learn over the course of months now is the whole range of views and how to think about things several of you have offered ways to frame these questions and I'm hoping we can now engage in a

01:55:35.820 - 01:56:00.700

robust discussion with PCAST our practice is when PCAST members want to speak they turn their flag vertically and I shall invite Barbara Schall's the first flag to go up Barbara and then Bill and Craig far away well first thank you very much this was really very interesting and engaging one of the themes that has come out across the number of speakers is the need to have some very

01:56:00.700 - 01:56:32.300

large widely accepted standards in particular both Alice Eisenberg and Norrudin talked about statistics and probability of assigning genotypic data and I'm particularly interested in how widespread the use of such kinds of software is beyond just DNA and then even within the DNA you talked about different kinds of software packages do they have different efficiencies are they all

01:56:32.300 - 01:56:58.700

widely accepted as having the same standard and how do we get to a point where we have accepted standards for evidence for validating techniques and for analyzing data that everyone agrees are appropriate techniques yes thank you there are a number of different software packages actually there's quite a few of them from all over the world there's probably four I would say that

01:56:59.260 - 01:57:24.540

American labs consider and they have quite different models and quite different approaches and there has not been yet sufficient comparison to determine if there really is a fundamental difference in the inferences that might be made part of the problem of course is we don't know especially with probabilistic approaches what the true answer is even if we start from known samples

01:57:24.620 - 01:57:47.580

so that work really has yet to be done one of the things that impedes it is these commercial programs and so for example you have to have the program in order to perform the comparison so there are some issues and there's been some political issues with that and so the answer is we don't know yet I think they're all extremely useful and all a step forward but in terms of

01:57:47.580 - 01:58:12.940

comparing them work yet to be done yeah so I guess my question is to Jeff Salyards I wonder if you could elaborate a little bit more on the idea of clinical trials because in particular in in some of the forensic disciplines for example some of the pattern matching ones maybe it's it's bite marks I'm I guess there's the question that that Nora just raised of you don't know the

01:58:12.940 - 01:58:40.620

ground truth in the first place in real clinical trials you know the outcomes did the patient get get better or not and just if you could say a little more on how you might try to bring some of the clinical trial methodology into these more complicated fields absolutely so if we take the hard case of bite marks or cartridge comparisons or fingerprints even I think we could create ground

01:58:40.620 - 01:59:04.380

truth right I mean I can prepare sets of prints that these match and these don't match so the FBI under joined the scaglia about five or six years ago did a wonderful black box like study of will let you off the hook of any rigorous measurement but how are how successful are you at this and then that could be expanded to what if I only give you a half of the print or a quarter of the print

01:59:04.540 - 01:59:28.140

where does it break down so there's lots of ideas but that could that could just balloon into the thousands of experiments we could do that would be interesting and so that's where I think we need some help from a policy point of view of what lets us be valid and then we have to not shy away from the the rigor of what is it that we're actually measuring it might be very you know kind of

01:59:28.140 - 01:59:50.460

intuitive but there's actually something going on and we could begin to get it what is the thing that's what's the real index of similarity and and then that would lead us to probabilistic statements a more Bayesian model of if you have this index of similarity how likely is that evidence in the face of this hypothesis versus that hypothesis next up is craig

01:59:53.420 - 02:00:19.180

Matthew you talked about the idea of you know publications both access to them and and the idea of having a lot of these studies perhaps published in a peer-reviewed environment you know in in my experience lately even in fields that have many many decades of established publications and peer review more and more this is moving to be online that you know before you

02:00:19.180 - 02:00:41.660

ever get it to the peer-reviewed you know environment it's essentially published instantaneously like in the physics archive or other things and everybody has access to that immediately and and and so a lot of the science now is essentially being reviewed by peers but not for the purposes of producing a peer-reviewed publication and the whole thing seems to be

02:00:41.660 - 02:01:04.460

accelerating some of this so similarly if you're looking in that environment there's no cost associated with there's no subscription fees etc so I was curious why in your remarks you know you focused on what I'll call the sort of yesterday's approach to publication scientific publication at least to the exclusion of this idea that the community could itself bootstrap some of this

02:01:04.460 - 02:01:28.940

more quickly just using internet public public publication methods yes I appreciate the question sorry I appreciate the question I believe you're correct there are a number of methodologies that could be used to accomplish this efforts have been made by different organizations to try and publish some of this data for whatever reason and there are a variety of reasons laboratories are

02:01:28.940 - 02:01:51.180

a little skittish about publishing their validation state data out that hasn't been specifically reviewed by statisticians and others that they may not have resources to and so I think some of those challenges need to be overcome before labs are willing to publish out that data what do you think their fear is I think the fear is the unknown perhaps without having a

02:01:51.180 - 02:02:20.460

statistician or other resources to review that data they're not willing to publish out that data because then it could be challenged in court and other other avenues and venues that are important we don't want to be subject to legal challenges over things that we should have and and could have reviewed before we published it I want to thank the panel for these very lucid presentations

02:02:20.460 - 02:02:44.860

very deeply embedded in your mastery of the area I also want to thank you for continuing this experience of having PCAS interact with the forensic science community something I've been enjoying for about two years myself and the word enjoy it is in quotes I'll have you know my question actually arises out of the recommendation that Alice made at the beginning

02:02:45.500 - 02:03:09.500

which was that we should think about having OSACs at least if that's what I heard have the OSAC set a set of standards for testimony did I misunderstand you no you didn't can you can you expand on that please certainly what what we have discovered is that the underlying science supporting forensic science disciplines is is very valid the problem arises when we are trying to

02:03:09.500 - 02:03:35.980

communicate science to the layperson in an adversarial system or in a legal environment and even in our my own agency lawyers talking to scientists is often difficult and we until we really talk things through words have meanings that are different for both of those groups of people and it it helps if they're the the testimony the language that is used to describe a forensic

02:03:35.980 - 02:03:59.660

science result in a courtroom words like rare or unusual or unique those sorts of words mean different things to different people so there has to be a great deal of care and how someone describes the results especially of class-based evidence or other other types of evidence where there is no probabilistic information that's conveyed in the the results if I have me may have

02:03:59.660 - 02:04:22.540

a follow-up but what intrigued me was you suggested that the OSACs which basically operate under NIST should undertake this this is what I was a little bit puzzled about one could imagine that there are other organizations that might be better situated and so my question really is did you I agree that with you on the interpretation of the problem I've seen it as Jeff knows I

02:04:22.540 - 02:04:47.180

sit next to him often at the forensics commission and we hear these things but my question was have you gone through a range of possibilities of organizations that might bring this expertise to the solution of the problem I recommend to the OSAC as as a starting point because their goal is to attain public consensus through the the creation of standards so the standards that will be created

02:04:47.180 - 02:05:12.300

there will be vetted by anyone they have they will target interest groups in the the law community and legal community in the scientific community commercial community potentially and then even the public and all the comments are very carefully read reviewed documented and dealt with so there's it's a very transparent process and takes into account the the opinions of everyone thank you

02:05:12.300 - 02:05:34.700

Mike McQuaid is next up thank you very much it's a really terrific panel because there's I wouldn't say this is sort of a wild diversity of detail but a very big diversity of where you all come from in what is and I think Alice you said it in the beginning sort of right at the crux of law and science so so Alice I want to ask you a question so first I want to make sure I got right what I

02:05:34.700 - 02:05:59.180

think I heard in the very beginning what I think I heard you say was there's no scientific studies that call into question the validity of these techniques as long as the applicability is properly communicated is that an accurate thing as long as the limitations of of the the technique or the results are conveyed properly okay so so good so let me let me ask you to give maybe an

02:05:59.180 - 02:06:28.140

opinion on the opposite side of that question so what scientific studies or other work would you think as a standard to actually assert the the validity of the test so it's one thing to say I can't prove the tests are inaccurate as a general theme so not bite marks in particular or any other pattern matching or whatever when you think about what would make you comfortable that these various

02:06:28.140 - 02:06:54.540

techniques actually are proven to be valid within their limitations what do you think about in those terms what kinds of things would give you confidence that these are in fact valid techniques I'll use the example of the firearms discipline one type of research that is done to look at the validity of these that that discipline is to send out in a round robin fashion evidence or

02:06:54.540 - 02:07:19.420

examples of evidence that people compare to various firearms to determine if a bullet was shot from a particular firearm you look at the results of of that round robin testing to see how often people get the result correct then you also add to that research where you where would I expect to see the most similarity between two firearms well that would be firearms that are manufactured

02:07:20.380 - 02:07:42.460

subsequent to each other and the way a firearm is manufactured is by taking a long piece of metal and cutting it into pieces and each of those goes into one one firearm after the other so if you can obtain firearms that are manufactured very close in time to each other you would expect that they would be the most similar as compared to any random firearm from somewhere else studies

02:07:42.460 - 02:08:03.980

have shown that you can differentiate a bullet shot from those different firearms that come from the closest period of time in manufacturing with each other so studies like that where you do have also potentially ground truth information with latent prints or something like that where you know the source of those those sorts of studies support the foundations of the the various forensic

02:08:03.980 - 02:08:26.940

disciplines so just a replay I heard sort of two different things right the second was there are some logical reason to believe there is a ground truth and there may be a way to get there and there may have to be a logical the first was essentially concurrence of a variety of experts and presumably there's some limit in there where you say if I send this out and 10 percent of the

02:08:26.940 - 02:08:48.300

people all agree I have a problem and if 99 percent maybe I have a different conclusion is that what was that one here and the more studies like that that are done the more confidence one can have that the the foundation of this this discipline is appropriate and the more you learn about the limitations of that discipline though as well and as a discipline as initially but when we

02:08:48.300 - 02:09:09.900

initial research is done perhaps the the results and interpretations need to be clarified and the limitations need to be very expressly given but the more research that's done to show that you get the same results across various people performing the examination or various types of evidence where there can be slight differences in characteristics the more

02:09:09.900 - 02:09:32.220

confidence you can have okay thank you the key is to put a number to that confidence as as as the doctor even suggested cool I'll just pick up very briefly on that point so would you then say that's the guide to what it means to have reliable principles and methods that the principles and methods have been tested for reliability in one or more of the fashions you've said

02:09:32.220 - 02:09:57.020

and that we actually know the limitations on the error rates because this phrase reliable principles and methods isn't often defined it gets used but I hear you offering almost the definition of it I would agree that that's the way we gain more confidence that that our results are correct I don't agree that the limitations are associated with error rates I think the limitations

02:09:57.020 - 02:10:21.340

are are in what where we know we would see variation and and the extent to that that's why we do validation studies is to determine the limits of what this test can we were able to say about it and the more different kinds of evidence or the different kinds of characteristics we see in evidence across a huge sample sizes the more confidence we can have in that but it's if you

02:10:21.340 - 02:10:41.020

don't have ground truth information it's very difficult to calculate an error rate so I so when you have ground truth information though you can calculate it and then it's right to speak of it when you don't know what the truth is you can only talk about the the correlation between examiners correct okay but those are the kinds of things you would say constitute the threshold of

02:10:41.020 - 02:11:02.380

reliable principles and methods basically yeah that's that's that's very helpful and I I'm gonna just ask does anybody in the panel have an alternative definition of what this is supposed to mean because I just found that really insightful is there another way to think about what constitutes a reliable principle and method Nora I like very much what Alice is saying about

02:11:02.380 - 02:11:30.940

limitations I tend to think of these validation studies in terms of capabilities in limitations and what is very important is to really stress the system so one can really reach the point where you can see what the limitations are define them and and see how they are really define their their limitations and then I would suggest that ideally we'd like to quantitatively characterize

02:11:30.940 - 02:11:53.980

both the variation and the limitations so we can say something quantitative about it the other point I would make is error rates can be a little bit difficult a rate implies a constant and one another way to characterize that is the risk of error either a false positive or a false negative so that's just a different way to think very very helpful all right I jumped in and I shouldn't

02:11:53.980 - 02:12:15.420

have done that but in any case I'm gonna turn back to Dan Shragg as the next and then I've got Ed Panhaut is your flag back down Ed's flags back down and Susan Graham and that might bring us to the end of our a lot of time so Dan and thank you Eric and I want to follow up on the same line of questioning I really do appreciate everybody's comments I've learned I'm learning a lot I want

02:12:15.900 - 02:12:41.660

to talk ask question of David Sen Dr. Sen I really appreciate your your testimony I really thought um it was very helpful to see how you go through this and I was particularly impressed with the the way you evaluate the the bite marks in a blind fashion as an investigator I'm actually curious about what fraction of of a now bite mark analyses around the country are done in that fashion but

02:12:42.380 - 02:13:09.180

that's a minor question my main question really follows up the other one which is how do you know your error rate how do you know both in terms of exclusion and inclusion especially given that bite marks there's a spectrum of probably easy ones and more difficult ones ones that are blurry ones that are very very clear and therefore in that when there's a

02:13:09.180 - 02:13:33.100

whole spectrum of quality of bite marks etc how and then you could do the same thing with partial fingerprints but but um how do you know and specifically for you how is it that there's a an artificial test or is it based on comparison of specific cases with other data like DNA or or how do you actually know your error rate thank you that's that's an excellent question

02:13:33.820 - 02:13:57.180

and as others have already said error rates a very difficult area for us because we don't know the ground truth in a bite mark case we only have opinions and we can only look at the data that's available to us and do the tests and and examinations that we do and to formulate that opinion and we try to state that opinion in in the past we had standards and guidelines that are

02:13:57.180 - 02:14:23.660

developed by the American Board of Forensic Odontology and by the way are currently being co-developed or co-amended by both the American Board of Forensic Odontology and the Odontology subcommittee of the OSAC NIST structure so since we don't know the ground truth it's very difficult to say that the error rate for a bite mark analysis is this it's it's a difficult problem

02:14:24.380 - 02:14:45.740

I mean have you looked at cases where there's a I mean where you've done your analysis and then there's additional evidence like DNA and and do you have a sense of what the error rate might be yes I mean there is I guess there is a sort of an error rate and I'm sure that when the Innocence Project was here I think yesterday talking about cases in which bite mark testimony

02:14:45.740 - 02:15:17.180

was later overturned by by DNA testing and and so we can say if we take that number of cases and there have been about 20 cases that have been of the exoneration cases that they list in their on their website about 20 cases that where a bite mark testimony was given and DNA testing of some type later proved some other truth and they attribute that to to faulty bite mark testimony

02:15:17.180 - 02:15:37.500

but none of those cases that I've looked at was the bite mark testimony the only physical evidence there was much other evidence so so there were multiple factors so if you take that as an error if you know then 20 cases out of I don't know how many there are hundreds or thousands uh is not a real way so we're gonna we're gonna move on I think I think the point Dan would make is of

02:15:37.500 - 02:15:59.100

course there's no denominator to that calculation and so we'd agree that's a meaningless number yes okay so it's not a helpful number and these would say as a man has to know it's limitation yeah I don't know exactly exactly I think your your first statement about we just can't know is is a good one and and Susan so my question is for David as well um and I too found it very helpful

02:15:59.100 - 02:16:41.660

to your your tutorial in in a sense of of how you do what you do um and the thing that surprises me is that you all still do this by hand if I think about or hand if I think about other areas of pattern recognition we've developed computer-based techniques to to implement the the strategies that human people use but then to automate that um and in part that tends to mitigate the fact that

02:16:41.660 - 02:17:10.780

some people are much better than others at doing human pattern recognition um has is that happening in your field and and how feasible do you think it is thank you um I like the idea and you know I would love to have a a computer program where I could take the bite mark uh image and the image of the the patterns of the teeth of the suspects and have it do like on csi they go bit bit bit

02:17:10.780 - 02:17:34.220

overlay and say match match match match match it just it does that that software does not exist and and for for us it may exist I think it exists in in manufacturing where they make sure a bolt fits into a certain place something but we just don't have that available to us so would you recommend that because many of us sit around the table talking about software and

02:17:34.220 - 02:17:56.540

pattern comparison things say boy that's an easy piece of code to write if if these face recognition softwares that many of the companies that store your photos have can spot whether it's the same person in diverse photos doesn't sound sorry so would you recommend that be developed would that be helpful in increasing the standards in the field any any software program that would automate

02:17:56.540 - 02:18:18.780

or help uh someone to make a decision about two things I think would be very awesome all right we've come to the end of our time and I really apologize because I think there are probably a lot more questions people would like but you have stimulated us tremendously I think we've heard you know it's very interesting specific details I think we've heard some very general calls for

02:18:18.780 - 02:18:40.300

clinical trials we've heard I think maybe the first person to give us a concrete suggestion as to what this reliable principles and methods might mean which I think is probably a really important thing to nail down I just can't thank you enough I know you've come from quite considerable distances in many of these cases for this meeting of an hour and 15 minutes and so I know it's a

02:18:40.300 - 02:19:11.260

lot of trouble but it's really very much appreciated so thank you to the entire panel and we'll take a 10 minute break let me add my thanks I think this was terrific just great so we are going to come to order and moderating this session will be one of our two p-cast vice chairs dr bill press thanks john this is a session on world radio on the world radio

02:19:11.260 - 02:19:37.500

communication conference but more generally on a subject that p-cast has been interested in for a long time namely spectrum management rf spectrum management and we're very pleased to welcome Julie Zoller p-cast members have her bio and I think she must be used to this it's the last one in your packet so it's easy to find on the back page alphabetically

02:19:37.740 - 02:20:09.180

Julie is with the department of state's bureau of economic and business affairs and in particular she's the senior deputy coordinator and director of multilateral affairs international communication and information policy she has a long and distinguished history in spectrum management and related things in particular she was with ntia at the time that p-cast's report was we like to

02:20:09.180 - 02:20:42.140

think so influential but certainly well well received by ntia as well as by FCC and other federal agencies so she has a lot of perspective on this field going all the way back to work early in her career at laurence livermore laboratory and with itt so let me just give you julie zoller thank you very much mr chairman it's an honor to be here and to speak to your committee

02:20:42.140 - 02:21:10.860

about the 2015 world radio communication conference or wrc 15 as it's commonly called world radio communication conferences are convened by the international telecommunication union the united nations agency for information and communication technology to review and revise the radio regulations the international treaty governing the use of the radio frequency spectrum

02:21:12.140 - 02:21:45.420

the regular three to four year cycles of works allow the regulatory framework to keep pace with technology works provide international harmonization of spectrum policies which is essential for economies of scale as well as in efficiency and interoperability more than 3300 delegates from 162 countries participated in wrc 15 which took place in geneva switzerland from the second to

02:21:45.500 - 02:22:18.060

the 27th of november the nearly 170 member u.s. delegation included world-class experts on every subject on the agenda and demonstrated how a delegation of public and private sector professionals can effectively work in partnership ambassador decker anström headed the u.s. delegation and i served as deputy head of delegation the united states achieved all of its high priority

02:22:18.060 - 02:22:51.820

goals at wrc 15 advancing u.s. innovation and economic growth preserving national security and continuing u.s. leadership in spectrum policy work 15's global decisions complemented domestic efforts under the president's wireless innovation and broadband policies to promote new technologies spectrum allocations and sharing techniques additionally half of the wrc 19 agenda

02:22:51.820 - 02:23:25.340

is based on u.s. proposals clearly reflecting continued u.s. leadership in mobile broadband aviation and space applications i will highlight several decisions wrc took concerning our key priorities for the conference first spectrum for mobile broadband everything is mobile the agenda excuse me the agenda to allocate spectrum to the mobile service and identify it

02:23:25.340 - 02:23:53.500

for international mobile telecommunications or i m t was our highest priority as you recommend in your report on realizing the full potential of government held spectrum to spur economic growth we made international harmonization of spectrum allocations to wireless broadband particularly in bands used or planned to be used in the united states a key element of the

02:23:53.500 - 02:24:25.660

u.s. position at wrc 15 working closely with colleagues in the americas especially our neighbors mexico and canada the united states was a leader in identifying new spectrum bands for the mobile industry as a result of wrc 15 many countries around the world now have available upwards of 250 megahertz of additional spectrum for mobile wireless services for the united states in north

02:24:25.660 - 02:24:58.620

america there's more than 500 megahertz of spectrum available as a result of this conference the 470 to 698 megahertz band or uhf band is harmonized across north america and is also allocated in select countries in south america the caribbean and the asia pacific region work 15 action in the uhf band complements the fcc's domestic incentive process to free up broadcast

02:24:58.620 - 02:25:34.700

spectrum for wireless broadband countries in europe africa and the middle east will consider introduction of mobile broadband in 2023 in the 1427 to 1518 megahertz band or l band the united states supported the introduction of mobile broadband while safeguarding existing us flight testing systems work 15 made 91 megahertz of spectrum available in the americas while 51 megahertz

02:25:34.700 - 02:26:08.860

was identified in other regions the 3400 to 3600 megahertz band or lower c band is identified for mobile broadband in most countries and throughout the americas with the united states canada columbia and costa rica extending this allocation up to 3700 megahertz providing a total of 300 megahertz of spectrum in these countries as was the case in the uhf band w rc

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15 action in the c band complements our domestic action the new citizens band radio service in the 3550 to 3700 megahertz band meanwhile the conference acted decisively to continue protecting the upper c band above 3700 megahertz recognizing the ongoing extensive use of this band by the fixed satellite service in summary the work to identify the lower c band 3400 to 3600 megahertz

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for mobile broadband begun at work 07 is nearly complete most significantly wrc 15 started what will be a decade long process to enable the use of the lower part of the uhf band for mobile broadband as a sign of things to come other countries such as india would have been included in the uhf allocation at wrc 15 were it not for the objections of some of their neighboring

02:27:16.860 - 02:27:51.420

countries the digital dividend reaped in the upper uhf band 698 790 megahertz will be extended to the lower part of the uhf band over time second aviation the issue of global flight tracking was added to the wrc 15 agenda following the tragic loss of the malaysian aircraft in 2014 the conference acted swiftly and decisively to approve an allocation to the aeronautical mobile

02:27:51.420 - 02:28:22.540

satellite route service in the l band to facilitate satellite reception of existing automatic dependent surveillance broadcasting transmissions while there was widespread consensus on global flight tracking identifying bans for control and non payload communications of unmanned aircraft was one of the most challenging issues of the conference concerns over flight safety

02:28:22.540 - 02:28:55.420

and the different applications for which uas can be used affected the negotiations and the ultimate outcome unmanned aircraft for civil and commercial uses is the next wave in aviation these systems stand to revolutionize the industry supporting functions ranging from disaster relief to meteorologic to agriculture wrc 15 action on uas will potentially pave the way for new

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applications that will add billions of dollars to the economies of the united states and other countries the 2012 world radio conference allocated spectrum for the line of site command and control of unmanned aircraft work 15 continued this work by identifying existing fixed satellite service spectrum in the k u and k a bands to enable control during long distance flight

02:29:25.100 - 02:30:00.220

when the aircraft is beyond the horizon the regulatory framework adopted at wrc 15 will now enable the international civil aviation organization i k o to proceed with the development of standards and recommended practices to provide a safe global communication infrastructure for uas operations third the future the agenda of wrc 19 each conference adopts a draft agenda for the

02:30:00.220 - 02:30:31.580

subsequent conference half of the 16 items on the wrc 19 agenda were based on common proposals from the americas having their origins in us proposals the wrc 19 agenda is rich with opportunity and member states at the conference preparatory meeting have already assigned the technical work to itu study groups all four us priorities are on the agenda for the next conference

02:30:32.460 - 02:31:08.940

while wrc 15 looked at spectrum below 6 gigahertz for mobile broadband the agenda item for mobile broadband at wrc 19 identified more than 30 gigahertz of spectrum in the range from 24 to 86 gigahertz to enable applications such as 5g mobile service this agenda item complements the FCC's spectrum frontiers proceeding to enable flexible use service rules in the 28 37 39 and 64 to 71

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mega gigahertz bands other than the 28 gigahertz band most of the spectrum the united states is exploring domestically is included in this wrc 19 agenda item however countries can move forward in the 28 gigahertz band because this band is already allocated to the mobile service on a global basis the agenda item for high altitude platform stations will consider spectrum that will enable

02:31:42.140 - 02:32:11.020

lightweight solar powered aircraft operating in the stratosphere to provide broad broadband to developing nations and underserved areas the agenda item for global aeronautical distress and safety systems will address aviation safety issues such as aircraft tracking under normal and abnormal conditions autonomous distress tracking and automatic deployable flight recorders

02:32:12.300 - 02:32:43.900

and the agenda item for radio local area networks in the 5 gigahertz band will enable evaluation of the 5350 to 5470 megahertz band for our lands complimenting domestic studies already underway there are also agenda items for advancing non-geostationary satellites in the v-band global maritime distress and safety modernization meteorological satellites and for reviewing

02:32:43.900 - 02:33:11.820

the orbital position limitations in the broadcasting satellite service plans all of these were based on us proposals looking beyond our own initiatives many in the united states are pleased with the outcome on other agenda items are stations on mobile platforms communicating with geostationary satellites in the k-a-band and intelligent transport system

02:33:11.820 - 02:33:44.380

applications to name two there are other less prominent but important actions taken by wrc 15 while debate over mobile broadband unmanned aircraft and global flight tracking captured most of the attention the story of wrc 15 also included other actions that will make a difference in people's lives the conference adopted a regulatory framework for public protection and disaster relief

02:33:44.940 - 02:34:18.780

applications that will pave the way for harmonized spectrum in the 7 to 800 megahertz range globally wrc 15 approved an allocation for short range radars in the 78 gigahertz band enabling automotive and on-the-ground aviation uses that will protect people from injury and save untold millions of dollars by avoiding equipment damage nasa and the world's other space agencies will benefit

02:34:18.780 - 02:34:50.460

from new allocations for the earth exploration satellite service in the seven and nine gigahertz band and the use of the 410 to 420 megahertz band for operations near orbiting vehicles such as the international space station in conclusion works continue to play the key role in setting international spectrum policy and the americas are leading the way we achieved all our objectives expanding the

02:34:50.460 - 02:35:17.660

spectrum available for mobile broadband providing for global flight tracking and the control of unmanned aircraft and setting an agenda for the next conference that is ripe with opportunity for the united states and for all countries a few trends are worth highlighting for the future incumbent services were well organized to protect the status quo at wrc 15

02:35:18.460 - 02:35:50.540

making the case against allowing new services into their bands nowhere was this more apparent than in the discussions on mobile broadband this will continue to be a challenge as we try and share more deeply the spectrum mobility is the future although not at the same pace as terrestrial services satellite services are also going mobile there is far less spectrum allocated to the mobile

02:35:50.540 - 02:36:22.380

satellite service than can meet the demand and recent attempts to identify more at wrc have not been successful we have found ways to use the stationary fixed satellite service for earth stations in motion on ships planes and vehicles but those successes often come with some penalties in terms of stringent sharing criteria i believe we will need to rethink how we define radio services

02:36:22.380 - 02:36:52.060

to enable such things as use of satellite links for communications and entertainment on the move as well as operations like controlling unmanned aircraft systems which adds a safety dimension to the discussion we are approaching an upsurge in the deployment of non-geostationary satellites technology has evolved and there's a real business case commercial constellations ranging

02:36:52.060 - 02:37:24.780

in size from 700 to 4000 satellites are being planned the number of nano and picosats with price points so low that universities are now in space is also growing this will present new challenges in terms of sharing spectrum not to mention collision avoidance in space the regular cycle of wrc's provides the only means to secure global frequency allocations and achieve international

02:37:24.780 - 02:37:54.220

harmonization of the spectrum works enable the international regulatory framework to keep pace with technology development and is essential for global business and global government applications a high value proposition for the united states thank you mr chairman thank you very much um let's see as is our custom if p-cast members who wish to ask questions raise

02:37:54.220 - 02:38:22.860

your flags and i already record two uh wanda you were first thank you for your comments and for what you're doing with the work that's that's terrific um my question is one of process and i just want to make sure i understand how this works so as you meet in the conference which meets doesn't meet all that often it meets against every four or five years um what's the

02:38:22.860 - 02:38:52.380

as you're making decisions about making more spectrum available do we have a process for testing or really knowing who's using the spectrum today and uh being able to validate what the impact of releasing that spectrum will be thank you for your question so wrc's are occurring approximately every four years and as i mentioned the agenda for the 2019 conference was drafted by

02:38:52.380 - 02:39:22.700

wrc 15 and it will be approved by the itu council this year already the agenda items have been assigned to technical study groups in the itu which will meet at least most of them twice a year and progress the technical studies to the extent that countries feel that those paper studies need to be backed up with actual testing back home uh they will do that and bring

02:39:22.700 - 02:39:57.180

those results into the into the itu study process towards the end of the study period um the conclusions that are reached will be folded into something called a conference preparatory meeting report and that will describe the studies conducted the conclusions and the options and advantages and disadvantages for satisfying that particular agenda item and countries will meet

02:39:57.260 - 02:40:29.980

at a conference preparatory meeting to discuss that and begin to exchange views on what their positions will be at the world radio conference in parallel with that each region has its own regional group that meets and develops preliminary views on the agenda items and over time preliminary and then final common proposals on issues about which they can agree in the americas that group

02:40:29.980 - 02:41:07.020

is called the international uh telecommunications i've got to think of it in spanish and go backwards international commission on telecommunications and so we will start that process in the americas in ctel again this spring of looking at the agenda and deciding how as a regional group we're going to approach these issues but testing comes into the the process

02:41:07.020 - 02:41:37.980

uh not in terms of the itu itself conducting testing but the administrations which provide input to the process conducting their own domestic testing and then bringing those results into the into the conference mark orenberg bill thank you julie first of all thank you for being such an effective diplomat for the united states in these proceedings it's been extremely helpful for us

02:41:38.700 - 02:42:05.180

and particularly uh your work on sharing uh your work on getting international harmonization for the 3.4 to 3.7 band has been prolific for us because it's creating more chips basically by vendors in this band and the band that was they came out of the peak house study was the 35 to 37 now called officially the citizen's broadband radio service so as part of the the peak house

02:42:05.180 - 02:42:28.220

reporting what's gone forward through the FCC in sharing is the creation of the spectrum access system and the spectrum access system was approved by the FCC and now vendors are actually getting certified in the united states to do that and so what i'm wondering is how is sharing perceived by the rest of the world particularly uh you know the sharing of this administration policies

02:42:28.220 - 02:42:57.900

policy the broad spectrum sharing this administration but also in terms of the spectrum access system canada is going to go through a similar set of proceedings now in sharing in this band is there any chance to evangelize this technology to them and potentially get it adopted in canada as well thank you for your question sharing is the name of the game at world radio conferences

02:42:58.460 - 02:43:33.900

we do not clear spectrum bands or we haven't been clearing spectrum bands at wrc's we've been adding new services to existing bands that are already occupied uh by other users so sharing is how we get that done and coming up with mitigation techniques whether they be power flux density limits or separation in distance we work out sharing techniques that are are viable within

02:43:34.700 - 02:44:07.100

the context of an international treaty in satellite bands particularly those used by geostationary satellites sharing is largely done through bilateral coordination between countries so that's an intensive process of negotiation which can take years to complete and is based on the registration of uses of spectrum with the international telecommunication

02:44:07.100 - 02:44:40.620

union which keeps the master international frequency register in terms of actual operations the itu doesn't get involved in in the details that would be required to to do something like what we're doing domestically so that would be strictly a domestic decision in terms of using those kinds of techniques and certainly we have a regular dialogue with canada in fact

02:44:40.620 - 02:45:11.020

they're really one of our closest partners canada and mexico in the international scene and and then of course we have our cross border coordination which is occurring on a near constant basis so yes i think there are opportunities to do this thanks craig i just want to pick up a little on mark's question but also your answer which

02:45:11.020 - 02:45:34.060

you know in the p-cast report we say look not just sharing is the name of the game which you've had to do by i'll say classical means in the work up to this point but you know we're saying with with the advances in digital radio architectures and software you know you don't have to share by just the classical means of separation by you know rf physics and that and

02:45:34.940 - 02:46:07.900

but the introduction of that as a legitimate model and then the spectrum access system is a codification of that but i guess the real question is did did the work 15 or in the work 19 you know has the agenda moved to the question of saying that dynamic you know software mediated sharing is an equally legitimate model of sharing as opposed to that which the work has been confined

02:46:07.900 - 02:46:33.740

to in the past where you had to find a physics based model of separation and it wasn't clear to me whether or not you know not just that sharing is the way forward that our report was actually went beyond that you know and what we're implementing both at the FCC and by the president's action across the all the agencies is not just to say sharing is good it's the specific say that you

02:46:33.740 - 02:47:11.660

know dynamic sharing is good and so i'm curious did that actually get projected into the work discussion and if not is it going to be in the 19th agenda thank you dynamic spectrum access and and cognitive radio systems have been discussed in the itu for i would venture probably five to seven years now but in terms of predicting the type of sharing that will be needed

02:47:13.100 - 02:47:44.460

under any item on the agenda the agenda does not point towards that as a particular solution to prioritize it leaves open what the technical studies might yield in terms of solutions at the end of the day but certainly that could be one mechanism evaluated in terms of options for satisfying the agenda i'm just present a little harder like you know to me the issue here is a

02:47:44.460 - 02:48:21.740

policy question which you won't get out of the technical working group and so how does the work address policy as opposed to just you know looking at the various recommended trade-offs within any particular band the wrc addresses policies based on the inputs of of member states so if if member states are promoting a particular mechanism for sharing that will be addressed

02:48:21.740 - 02:48:53.980

at the wrc and if we can form a consensus around a particular approach which is what we do on all of the agenda items and it's so important that we do that because the itu has no authority in terms of enforcement like the FCC does so it's important that we all agree that this is the way to move forward but if a member state brings in a particular proposal on a policy basis that will be

02:48:53.980 - 02:49:29.980

considered and debated at the conference given that the us policy both at the FCC level and the White House level as said this is our top priority as a member state have we actually brought it forward as such an issue not at the wrc level i expect that we have at the working level where the technical studies are undertaken but as you pointed out the incumbents you know mobilize

02:49:29.980 - 02:50:02.380

against this as a matter of policy and so and since the incumbents pretty much dominate at the working group level based on historical participation you know that leaves us you know with a conundrum where we've made at the national leadership and independent agency of FCC a policy change that is pretty much guaranteed not to be implemented if left to that mechanism

02:50:04.140 - 02:50:26.940

in my opinion so i i guess i'll now declare that craig is hectoring the witness and but i'm gonna call on myself now for i hope it's not quite more hectoring but it's a related question i think the whole question of the 24 to 86 gigahertz

02:50:28.460 - 02:50:54.780

opening that up and in particular the low power applications on that whether it's you know microcell nanocell picocell of short short range within buildings right because most of that doesn't go through walls and some of that doesn't go through the atmosphere it it seems to me there are enormous opportunities there for dynamic adaptive agile radios

02:50:56.700 - 02:51:23.580

that that are different different from fixed spectrum allocations in not quite the same way that that Craig and Mark were discussing but but related ways. PCAST in our report I think well we're big big fans of you know the original model is the wi-fi model and i guess we think of that as unlicensed but it's it's called licensed by rule i guess is the the technical term

02:51:25.900 - 02:51:57.740

in in those bands that are very very short range and very rarely would cross international borders are the member states free to do whatever they want could we could we declare rules for licensed by rule at low power across large swaths of the 24 to 86 gigahertz band or would we run a fowl of the consensus of of the itu in in doing something like that we absolutely can do that

02:51:58.380 - 02:52:34.460

and all member states have their sovereign right to decide what their national regulatory structure will be the requirement is that in terms of transmitters that you not cause harmful interference to a station operating in compliance with the radio regulations and authorized to have international recognition in order to be protected from harmful interference

02:52:34.540 - 02:53:05.100

which means it's been registered with the itu i don't see any other flags from p cast members so with that let's thank julie zoller for an and now john back to you well thank you very much it's my understanding that we do not have any public comments scheduled for today is that correct so i believe unless any other p cast

02:53:05.100 - 02:53:35.100

members have a business arising they would like to call our attention to and seeing no flags to that effect it is only left to us to again thank the p cast members the folks from the wider community in the audience and on the web the staff who have worked incredibly hard in support not just of these meetings but of the reports that we approve we really appreciate everybody's

02:53:35.100 - 02:53:59.340

engagement in this effort and of course we appreciate the engagement of the experts who agree to come and talk to us and be hectored by the in a friendly way in a friendly way by the p cast members so thanks thanks to everybody eric any closing benediction just again thanks so much to everybody for all their efforts still lots of work to go we got a year's worth of work

02:53:59.340 - 02:54:10.540

still to go so looking forward to it thanks to everybody we are adjourned