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Well, good morning everybody. It is my pleasure to welcome you all to the bimonthly public meeting of President Obama's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. We have as usual a full and very interesting agenda for this meeting. Before we launch into it, though, I have the particular pleasure of announcing, which has also been announced on the National

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Academy's website today, a wonderful award to one of our PCAST members, Dr. Chad Mirkin, who could not be at this meeting, will be receiving the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Prize in Convergence Research. This is the inaugural award of that prize, and he is receiving it in the amount of $400,000 for pioneering work on spherical nucleic acids and their

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application in medicine. This is an amazing achievement for our friend and colleague, Chad Mirkin, and so we congratulate Chad, even though he's not here. So let me now turn the microphone over to my co-chair of PCAST, Dr. Eric Lander, who will preside over the next couple of components of our agenda, Eric.

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Great. So I would also like to extend my welcome to all the members of PCAST who are here, and to those who have members of the public who have joined us here at the National Academy, and those who are or will be watching on the web either live or sometime in the future, because these are all archived and available. It has remained a very active time for PCAST.

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There are many studies still ongoing. I think we are expecting to work diligently for the next 16 months of this administration, lots to do in terms of these new studies, lots to do in terms of follow-up on previous reports of this PCAST, and so it's an exciting time, and I'm just grateful to the whole council for everyone's tremendous work and continued

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commitment. We have two topics before we'll take a break this morning, and the first is a study we've been engaged in about cities. Asking the question about how cities can best take advantage of the opportunities offered by new technologies to improve life for all residents. There are so many different opportunities for technologies in cities, but it's not easy

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for municipalities to figure out how to take advantage of them, how to ensure that the benefits are shared broadly across the city, how they can transform lives of the elderly, of young people, of people on fixed incomes, on limited incomes, and so PCAST has been engaged in this very wide-ranging study of the potential impacts of technologies and what's needed to

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make that most accessible, what kind of demonstration projects might be needed, and of course, because we're advisors to the president, what the federal government can do to assist in this case. So I'm going to turn first to PCAST member Mark Gorenberg, who has been very active in this study, and Mark and Craig Mundie are going to give us an update on where this project on cities is going.

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Mark. Eric, thank you. Ten years ago, no one was talking about smart cities, but this week there was a city summit conference here in Washington, D.C., and the White House announced. Oh, okay, sure. So this week there was a city summit conference here in Washington, D.C., and the White House announced its smart city initiative. It announced 160 million in funding, 25 collaborations,

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and perhaps most importantly brought together 20 city CIOs together with their sister research universities to look at how to create the Metro Labs network and to tackle some key local challenges. In February this year, in parallel with these efforts, PCAST also began a study, as Eric said, to look at how combining policy and science and technology together can improve the future of

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U.S. cities. Specifically, we're looking beyond the smart cities initiatives to integrate together all these various technologies and help cities become more green, low-carbon, energy-efficient, sustainable use of resources going beyond buildings to districts, more fluid, improving the mobility of people, resources, and goods, and make them much more walkable, and enabling cities to make

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them fairer, more inclusive, just environments, more creative, and enabling individuals and organizations and businesses to focus and invest in innovation, and also, of course, to make these cities more resilient. This morning, we're here to give you a preview of our direction and solicit new ideas from our colleagues and also from the public that may be listening in before completing

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our work and making a set of policy recommendations. Sorry. A number of members from PCAST have been involved because there are so many different disciplines that this study touches on. And as Eric said, Craig Munday, who actually first pioneered the idea that we should be studying this in PCAST, will make some comments after these slides. There's been tireless work

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from the PCAST staff, starting with our director, Marjorie Blumenthal. And also, in February, we invited a dozen urban and urban science experts to join us with some tremendous backgrounds and practitioners in industry, academia, think tanks, and even city government. And they're listed here, and they've been invaluable in putting together and guiding this report.

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Our mission statement, as Eric said, is how the federal government can support science and technology opportunities to improve America's cities, particularly for all its residents, especially for those less fortunate who will otherwise be left behind in this technology wave. We focused at looking at the federal government role, knowing that the key players

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are actually in the private sector, academia, civic groups, individuals, and local government leaders. But what can the federal government do to help make these cities more nimble, to motivate them to take on these technology changes for good? Over the past nine months, we've spoken to a number of technology innovators, technology integrators, and policymakers in both

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the local and in federal government to bounce some of these ideas off. Our observations are, first of all, that worth a dawn of a historic era for cities. Cities are adding 65 million people a year at an unprecedented rate of growing concentration, where interconnection and interdependence is going to become the norm. There are many new infrastructure technologies

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relevant for cities, and you see some listed here. Beyond the information and communication technologies that are aided by fast and inexpensive distributed computing and new and expensive flexible sensors, they're revolutionizing what can be measured about cities and urban life. But there's also disruptive changes happening in transportation, including electric and

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autonomous vehicles, energy, including competitively priced distributed renewable sources and energy storage. New localized water and recycling strategies are also coming into the mainstream. And in parallel with these technology changes, or perhaps as a consequence of them, we're also witnessing a significant change in norms of behavior. People and organizations

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are increasingly exploring new modes of interaction, exchange if facilitated by this information. And there's an emphasis on the sharing economy that models that we hear of every day, more mixed land uses, activities in urban spaces like manufacturing and farming that are coming back to the city. And thus, while there's a growing sense that for a variety of structural

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and resource related issues, we still have a number of challenges and challenges that will become, because of this, environmental challenges, health challenges, equity challenges, and frankly cost challenges of people living in cities. But the potential benefits of urban living have never been more apparent or hopeful than they are today. There are many stakeholders,

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as we talked about listed here, the private sector, local and federal government, city residents. But a key opportunity is getting these stakeholders to work together to form a single version of the truth. The critical element will be their successful integration into using larger, more finely controlled systems. This integration, which we will call in our report,

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the Integrated Cities Platform, does not currently exist. But components are starting to emerge as a result of the convergence of many efforts from the federal government, cities, and many other private organizations. A lot of it is open source collaborations. It is a key mechanism to interface traditionally slow changes in urban services and local governments with

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faster models of innovation and technology. So we're recommending the development of a system of technologies that feels more like an open and distributed internet operating system. Just as the internet transformed computing, the internet of things is transforming our industrial sector. We believe the internet of cities that integrates all these data and

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technologies and norms of behavior together can create a rapid experimentation vehicle for new applications for cities. And you see some of the components that we'll be talking about in our report listed here. The notion of open data and making data more open. The idea of facilitating technology and data exchange with application program interfaces to more easily

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get at this, the data and analytics that we hear so much about in terms of both prediction and also optimization. And also a number of integrated models for decision support and scenario evaluation that can be shared between cities. And the sharing of both large and small cities together in this will help to elevate this forward. The success of the applications

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that are built on this platform is going to require a lot of experimentation. And it's very difficult to experiment across an entire metropolitan area. So the first way that started to happen in districts was the idea of innovation districts, really clusters for technology development. And they've already been starting to move into cities to create more entrepreneurial centers

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for new startups. And we believe this concept can be extended to other aspects of urban living, including living and playing to form sort of creative density that will require the urban development districts as we are going to coin them, as we said, to be more fluid, more green, more enabling. These districts can be economically viable, but they will have higher initial costs

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and they will have return on investments as their operating costs are recouped. So part of what we will be doing is fostering experiments in these urban development districts to accelerate this maturity and make these break-even periods faster. And we think the shorter payback periods will also greatly increase the environmental and health benefits of cities. We think that the best

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practices can be judged and learned by other districts of metropolitan areas. And this will certainly lead to metrics, fine-grained analytics, and a plethora of APIs and available data to review and anonymize across to be able to optimize in this internet of cities. Long-term, these internet of cities can create vehicles maybe 50 to 100 years from now, such as all electric cities,

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or perhaps carbon-positive cities, or cities that are certainly less gentrified and certainly cities that have certainly a lot less urban sprawl. This is sort of a preview of some of the areas we'll be going down in terms of talking about how the federal government can be involved. Certainly one of them has been leveraging

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the place-based programs. There are a dozen or so place-based programs that have been very fundamental to this administration that can be extended with this technology as an underpinning. We also believe that there's a need for the empowerment of HUD, where HUD today is more about housing, but it can certainly be extended much more from housing to districts to be much

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more involved in urban development. And we look at the need for them to work with a number of other agencies, which they do today, such as Department of Transportation, Department of Energy, EPA, Commerce, and Agriculture on these concepts that are moving back to the city with new technologies. We believe this combined group can create incentives, can create competitions

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that can recognize the game changers that are happening in districts in these cities, and also to help experimenting districts look at the work of each other. One important aspect of the federal government is that it can help facilitate scientific research. And so many of the announcements this week were the Metro Labs about some urban science ideas that are being

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done in the agencies, such as NSF. We believe that the time has come for a new urban science technology initiative that can help coordinate federal research, that can take basic research, translational deployment, promotes urban science, and accelerates the components of this integrated city platform. We think that this group should start with a research inventory,

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and but over time it can solicit new ideas and also propose grand challenges for urban science. So we also believe that there have been a number of great work done in the open government data initiatives here, and they can be extended to cities for open data and data sharing and look at data sharing policy. And so we're in the process of translating these broad ideas into

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federal government recommendations, and with that I'm going to turn the microphone over to Craig. Thank you, Mark. Mark did a great job surveying all these things, and I just want to reinforce a few points and maybe give a few examples of the things that are driving us to this somewhat different approach. We all live in an environment today where we see very rapid technological

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change, especially in the information technology domain. But if you look carefully, you know, there are also fundamental changes coming in other areas around energy and transportation. And when we look at cities, we realize that there's really two challenges that we face, certainly if you look at it on a planetary scale as opposed to only a domestic scale.

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One is that a lot of people already live in cities, and that's especially true in developed countries. And you could say that the preponderance of Americans already live in cities and some of these cities are quite old. On the other hand, on a worldwide basis, the majority of people don't yet live in cities, but we can reliably predict that they ultimately

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will. And so there's a huge business opportunity for the country in this globalizing environment. If, in fact, we could perfect what we thought these important changes were likely to be. In order to do that in the face of competition, we have to be able to look a little farther out. There's often a tendency to live with what we have. But if we look back over the longer arc

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of time with respect to cities, we find that there were, in fact, in the day technological changes that radically transformed the city. Electrification was a fundamental one. The arrival of the automobile and the replacement of the horse and buggy basically fundamentally altered the nature of cities. And so today, in a funny way, we can look at each of these things

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that transformed cities before, running water, the ability to distribute gas, the electrification, and say, well, each of these infrastructures are fundamental to the society now, but each of them is essentially ready for another one of these big shifts. And so there's no reason to believe that it won't be quite natural to see that shift. But this time, we have to do it

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recognizing the hysteresis that we have in the very large infrastructures that we have investment in already. So we looked at a number of these ideas. Today, you can see people talking about, for example, autonomous cars. And most of the discussion is, well, how will we get the insurance right or the regulation right? But as scientists, we can look at the evidence and say it seems

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inevitable now that eventually we'll have autonomous vehicles. And so then it requires that you look a little farther out and say, well, if that was going to happen, then how could we project that the city should change? What could we do to encourage that change? And these are the kind of activities that we're looking at in this report. The other big idea we've seen now,

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particularly in the information technology domain, is the importance of bringing things together, to integrating across different aspects of the problem. And so we also seek to bring some of this notion of integration to the different technological revolutions that are likely to come in these classically disjoint infrastructures. And that is in part possible because we also

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recognize that information technology itself is diffusing itself into virtually every one of these things as a critical element of their design and operation. And we think there are substantial benefits that accrue from that kind of integration. And so this idea of focusing on the evolution of a platform that would promote the same kind of radical development and accelerated development

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that we see happening around us every day in the information technology space but applied to this broader array of technological shifts, we think would be quite beneficial. So that's just a little color on top of the details that Mark provided. And I think both of us are happy to take your questions. Well thank you both for the summary and for all the work you've been leading on

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PCAST and the meetings you've been organizing. The floor is open to questions from the PCAST and we'll follow our usual pattern of turning our flags up and Jim Gates I recognize. Thank you Eric and thank you both Mark and Craig for that review. We've talked about, you've both talked about transformation and of course we all know that an important element

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of a city is the people. So is there going to be some attention paid to some sociological factors about how people might be living differently and what impact that has as we think about these new platforms? Yes and you know there are different parts of society where they will be able to access this and actually it will benefit them tremendously. You know if you look at for example

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the aging population and I know Chris Castle can speak much more eloquently about this than we. The cities have an increasing population over 65. Their mobility is limited by physical and medical conditions and they can really use these shared economies transportation services for example to go beyond the mass transit ideas that they're today. Autonomous vehicles can be a

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huge boon to that part of society and frankly if you look at the elderly the quality time that they could spend in fact with their grandchildren in you know taking them to school is just one aspect of many things that could happen. And the other side of that coin is that there are a lot of new technologies in what we would call aging in place where they can be monitored, where they

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can live much more productive sort of independent lives. So with that access being sent back to family members caregivers etc. So that's just one example of things that we'll be looking at. There are some areas I wanted to say there are some areas of the country that have extremely benefited already that were sort of areas left behind by these new technologies. Solar farms

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have become really interesting in low-income areas right now particularly there are projects in both Chicago and Indianapolis that have been done in concert with the local housing authorities and the local utilities and the private sector that have remade areas like like Laurelwood in Indianapolis where they funded a pilot project and that is lowering

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the electricity bills of housing and they're also selling back into the grid to get money for that or it's converted in Chicago the Exxon Corporation converted abandoned industrial space into a solar farm a large enough to power 1200 to 1500 homes. Energy storage also can be tremendously beneficial for resilient cities to be more vulnerable. So I mean those are just some

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examples. That's great. Chris Castle. Thank you Eric and Mark since you mentioned the issue of aging in cities I just wanted to highlight and related to Jim's point two additional things. One is we tend to think of the generations as benefiting separately from the kinds of advances that you're describing but in fact one of the big advantages of urban settings as places for people to grow old

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and aging in place is the density allows for the kinds of service availability so that you don't have to go to a old person's community but there's a lot more opportunity for intergenerational interaction of all kinds which can benefit both younger and older people and there's a lot of good data on that. The second point I want to make is related to the density of cities has many

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advantages but also can be a real challenge in the event of natural and other kinds of disasters. We've seen that with Katrina and Superstorm Sandy as two big examples that we examined and looked at in terms of preparedness and resilience and so that's another opportunity for technology to anticipate the more vulnerable of that population many of whom are older people

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so I just wanted to add that dimension as well. That's great. Other questions? But if there are other questions now I want to thank Mark and Craig and their colleagues for all the work that's ongoing on cities I know we're a little bit over time but it was very good to hear the the whole breadth of what's getting discussed and it's really pretty exciting so thank you very

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much. Another update is from Chris Castle on work that PCAST has been doing asking about how technologies can help Americans age in place age with independence age with productivity and that's a broad topic that Chris has been leading a study group through and then within the course of that has been identified a very specific topic where there seems to be tremendous

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opportunities for I think short-term progress and that has to do with the question of the normal mild to moderate hearing loss that's associated with aging and the question of hearing aids to help with that and so Chris is going to give us a bit of an update on the broad work that she's been leading on aging and then particularly on hearing technologies.

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Thank you Eric. Well first let me just say that in terms of the broader study we the group is focusing on ways that technology can help people as they age with issues of cognitive function and cognitive impairment with issues of mobility enhancement with issues of social connectedness and engagement as well as this important area of hearing so PCAST will hear more about the broader

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focus in subsequent meetings so I'm not going to spend a lot of time since our time is limited today I did want to update the group on our findings today and the direction of our thinking with the hearing report so let's see if we can so as Mark did I want to thank and be very grateful to what you see here is a very hard working list of working group members for the whole report

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many of the PCAST members from many different disciplines and perspectives have joined this group as well as experts in all of the other fields that I mentioned you see their names up there I particularly want to thank Ashley Predith and Diana Pankovich who've really worked very hard to staff all of the subcommittees and various groups that are that are working in this area and also our

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science writer Rob Saunders so let me just give a little background about why this has taken sort of the forefront of of our work over the recent last couple of months the first is that there's not only an urgent need to improve hearing but a great opportunity right now this is a major health and social problem it if you think about it if you have

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trouble hearing it leads to social isolation it leads to an inability to keep working if that's what you want or need to do it can it lead to depression there's some demonstrated association with higher risk of falls falls with injury and even dementia there is and of course all of this is made more important by the good news that people are living longer in our country and that

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there are a vast majority of people with hearing impairment have hearing impairment because of age related hearing loss or what's called presbycusis and so our focus is on that group there is there's a lot of people in this country who have hearing loss from congenital problems who have serious hearing impairment from injuries and other kinds of disorders

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that are much less common so I do want to emphasize that our report is really focusing only on the presbycusis related hearing loss but if you think about how many people actually use hearing aids there is technology that can be extremely helpful for this problem and yet of the of the people who suffer from this problem so let me give you

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some numbers one out of four of people between the ages of 65 to 69 one half 50 percent of people between the ages of 70 and 79 and almost 80 percent of people over the age of 80 have some degree of hearing impairment so that's huge roughly we think 30 million people now and that number is likely to grow and yet very few of them actually seek help and get hearing aids it's hard

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to know because a lot of this is self reported but somewhere between probably 15 to 30 percent of people actually use available technologies so this is a big problem and as I'm going to say in a moment the Institute of Medicine is just launched a big study in this area of the whole broad area of hearing loss both age related

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and other kinds but as we look at the data on what the barriers are to the adoption of available technology the number one issue that that people report over and over again is the cost of technology averaging about twenty four hundred dollars per hearing aid and since with presbycusis is mostly is a bilateral condition most people need two of these and it's not uncommon to have them cost

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even more four thousand eight thousand dollars is not an uncommon cost added to that insurance Medicare does not cover the cost of hearing aids and most other insurance doesn't doesn't consider it a medical condition interestingly enough in addition to that the access is very complex often you have to seek out a audiologist in a specific kind of arrangement with one or more

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hearing aid companies the choices are somewhat limited by and large these are not available online or in other kinds of consumer venues the way people are increasingly accessing many aspects of health care there is a requirement that people see a physician to rule out medic other medical causes of hearing loss and so while the a large majority of people actually waive that requirement

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it's somehow also is seen as a barrier because then you have to also get a doctor's appointment with a doctor who knows something about this there are some innovators in the market in terms of marketing organizations like Costco and others who have begun to find ways to make the cost a little bit lower and to make access a little bit easier there's also a market in devices that are not

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hearing aids called personal sound amplification products that can make can amplify sounds but that aren't marketed to people who are hard of hearing and so they have not been widely used for that purpose there's also a kind of a social stigma it's kind of interesting to me as a geriatrician that people are wearing eyeglasses for example and we have age-related condition of

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people needing reading glasses it's called presbyopia and you know people nowadays think that there are different fashionable glasses that they wear and certainly don't hide the fact that you need hearing that you need eyeglasses and yet I think because it's so difficult and because the large number of people who need them don't actually use them that we just haven't gotten to

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that tipping point in terms of social attitudes so there still is a reluctance to admit that people need help and this is really important because there are risks to waiting too long and this is very well demonstrated that if you begin to notice you're having trouble hearing and you say well I don't need this quite yet and you wait six or eight years until it gets worse then when you do seek

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help it's harder to get back to baseline sometimes impossible because changes in the how the brain processes auditory signals decline and so here's another situation as in many places in healthcare where it's better to seek help early rather than wait and then another factor that I mentioned earlier is that by and large most primary care physicians don't consider this part of their

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business they rarely included in a review of systems with the patient and if a patient is hard of hearing it may be tough to communicate with them but they don't consider that they should try to get you help for that as part of your medical work up so all of this creates a kind of a situation that we think is actually ripe for a technology solution that that could be

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helped along by federal action now there is this big study that the national academies of medicine has just launched and we've talked to many of the same people we've attended their public meetings they're not likely to issue a report before probably a year from now and so we're thinking that and and what they're looking at is a much broader scope of this whole problem our focus is people

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who have aged mild or moderate hearing loss associated with age and what technology could do and what federal actions might make that technology both more available and more widely used so the goals of our report are the following to reduce the cost number one and we think that their market forces are quite ripe for doing that and also if the costs went down significantly

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the the likelihood of insurance coverage would be increased so we could have a salutary effect in both of those ways and those would increase the number of people who use this technology you know I mentioned the 30 million figure there will be more people as more of us are living longer and as the baby boomers are now beginning to enter in greater numbers that cohort so this

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this benefits people in terms of their own lives but it also benefits families so if you think about it's a lot more than 30 million people who have benefit from a spouse or a parent or a grandparent being able to hear better and then finally there there is enormous productivity and innovation in acoustic technology and signal processing people are wearing noise canceling headphones

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on the airplanes and there's all kinds of interesting things that people in the music industry and in the sports arena use and we live in a new world where there's much more rapid advances in that kind of technology also aging baby boomers are much more comfortable with things like trying things out at home ordering things on the internet programming devices on

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their cell phone things need to be interoperable with other devices all of your tablets and and music devices with loop technologies and theaters and public places so there's there the technology is out there and and innovation I think is is happening but it hasn't really been made available to this important market I think so if you look at a couple of observations one is that in every

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other aspect of electronics the technical advances in general reduce cost not increase cost and actually reduce cost quite dramatically and that in the traditional hearing aid market it's actually the opposite if you add features like programmable to your cell phone and other kinds of things that cost more not less and so we think that there needs to be a way to open the market up to more

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competition in that area secondly the technology itself is not that costly and several groups are actually selling the very same hearing aids at lower costs I mentioned the Costco example but the veterans administration covers first dollar coverage for hearing aids for veterans who need it and have told us that it costs them about five hundred dollars per patient or that's that's what

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they spend on that condition lots of European countries cover hearing aids as part of their health insurance programs and and buy them from the same companies and spend much much less so we think that that there there is a disconnect between the cost of these things and what's available in the in the market and these electronic solutions consumer products these

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electronic sound amplification products are available at a much much lower cost and some of those companies actually make traditional hearing aids as well as the PSAPs they have many of the same features and could in fact be very helpful in people who don't need a lot of fancy features who have a simple need for amplification and perhaps some personalization that could be

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accomplished in a much easier way so what we really need is consumer shopping that's the challenge here need to allow consumers to shop for the best value to maybe take a test online that evaluates their hearing and have a much more wide availability of trying things out and finding what works for them at a price point that works for them so that includes internet

00:40:20.680 - 00:40:54.040

shopping and would allow more new entrance into the field so let me then turn to this one concern that keeps coming up over and over again about well what if you had some other medical condition that was causing your hearing loss that went without treatment and we've examined this in some detail and find that there's the actual risk of this is actually quite small especially

00:40:54.040 - 00:41:25.880

if you focus on this issue of age related mild to moderate hearing loss the main concern in most of the literature is acoustic neuroma which is quite rare condition 0.001 percent according to NIH data it's a benign tumor it's not a malignant tumor very slow growing most common in people between the ages of 30 to 60 so not really in the demographic that we're talking about here

00:41:27.400 - 00:41:56.840

and you know there there can be very unusual conditions that would lead to a sudden hearing loss or hearing loss just on one ear but think about the way that eyeglasses are treated glaucoma for example is much much more common than acoustic neuroma three and a half percent of the population people have disorders of their retinal arteries or veins and if you have a sudden problem with your

00:41:56.840 - 00:42:25.800

eye or it's painful you go to the doctor and we trust consumers to make those decisions and so I think we need some comparison here about the risk of the relative risk of millions of people going without treating their hearing loss with the relatively smaller risk of missing a serious treatable condition so I think the we've heard from many people about this comparison with the

00:42:25.800 - 00:43:00.520

reading glass situation I think there are some lessons there and I think we also have ways of alerting people to seek help if they have certain red flag conditions and you know those those lists are out there they're available so in conclusion I think our path forward is that we think there are some technology based changes in federal regulations that could

00:43:00.520 - 00:43:31.080

make this technology more available and begin to promote more innovation in the market and that as these consumer products became more acceptable we think it could also lower the barriers and increase access and acceptance among a much broader number of people so let me stop there and see if we have any questions wow that's a great overview of the entire situation let me throw it open to

00:43:31.080 - 00:44:07.560

pks for questions mario I think one of the common problems with this age-related hearing loss is noisy environments so my question is are there any technology advances there or is it that present something that only the human brain can do namely discriminate human voice from background noise there actually are advances mario in that in that area where people who have where where there's

00:44:07.560 - 00:44:39.640

selective amplification of certain kinds of sounds like human voices as well as dampening of ambient noise of various kinds and some of the products in this PSAP market will do that too that where you can you can put microphones selective microphones on the restaurant table in a noisy restaurant for example and then wear a special kind of gadget in your ear that helps to to get both of those

00:44:39.640 - 00:45:10.840

things one of the concerns that we have is that in general the current regulatory framework doesn't allow those kinds of things to be easily available to people who you know if you have a mild hearing loss you may not need to wear a hearing aid in normal places where it's reasonably quiet like this room for example with good amplification um but i think probably everyone in this room has

00:45:10.840 - 00:45:35.320

been to a noisy restaurant where it's hard to hear a conversation and that kind of technology ought to be available and and more widely that's great mike i'm equated this is a really fascinating overview and presentation really good work um you mentioned in passing a number of places outside the us where these things are more uniformly covered under insurance do we do we know about

00:45:35.320 - 00:46:01.880

where the model that you're talking about the end was being implemented outside the us the more commercial driven easy access model do we have any evidence of success one way or the other by and large i i the answer is i don't know the uh in great detail about whether this kind of open consumer market um if there's examples of that i i do know that the barriers are much lower in many

00:46:01.880 - 00:46:26.600

of those countries but also there is an issue of what um in any insurance situation what the insurance will cover versus what peak consumers might want to buy and they might want to buy up to a different model or they might want to try um another model but um that's it's a good question we should probably look into that a little more good bill press yeah i was interested in in you're

00:46:26.600 - 00:46:49.480

mentioning that um medicare in the original legislation and until today doesn't consider hearing loss a medical condition in the same way that the other things are that it cancels and and i just wondered if you had any thoughts on how do we decide what kinds of things we consider medicalized i mean for example i i can't run as far as i could when i was 10 years younger but

00:46:49.480 - 00:47:17.640

but we don't have a latin word for inability to run as far we haven't medicalized that so is is that completely a question of social policy or is there a medical basis for for deciding when something is a condition well um that's a really big uh almost philosophical question bill um there was a time for example when we used to think senility was a normal part of aging and then we

00:47:17.640 - 00:47:45.480

began diagnosing alzheimer's disease and other causes of dementing illness and we created a national institute on aging that has led the study of that and you know similar it was interesting similarly there was a lot of stigma associated with that in in previous decades um uh similarly um things like osteoarthritis which is an age related condition um is treatable it isn't

00:47:45.480 - 00:48:13.960

reversible or curable in the same sense that a lot of other conditions are so i think we're evolving in our understanding of the biology of aging and where things are treatable or not whether they're considered medical conditions to my mind as a physician is you know if something has a medical treatment then that treatment ought to be available and so i i don't find that um terminology i think

00:48:13.960 - 00:48:44.520

it's becoming less useful as we look at ways to enhance function with aging and so you know that that medicare legislation dates from 1966 and so yeah yeah that was that was a long time ago so i was struck by your numbers um i'll just i know we're a trifle over it but we'll we'll stop in a second but if i've got your numbers right buying hearing aids for both ears is like

00:48:45.080 - 00:49:15.240

10 times more than buying a sophisticated smartphone or ipad or something like that and yet the technology is dramatically less sophisticated so a factor of 10 more than consumer electronics then the other number i was struck by was 30 million people who have mild to moderate age related hearing loss versus maybe the the couple of cases we're worrying about about

00:49:15.240 - 00:49:43.160

rare conditions of acoustic neuroma and and such that if i counted correctly might be out of those 30 million people 150 cases and balancing the possibility that 150 cases might not be picked up for what you said was a benign tumor anyway versus 30 million people either not having access at all or having vastly expensive uh devices available so i think those two numbers were

00:49:43.160 - 00:50:07.320

really striking to me was the cost relative to any other consumer device and the balancing of risks one way that is under treating the age related hearing loss versus the very handful of conditions that that might be missed in a medical inspection especially when as you said people could wave and often do wave any medical examination when they buy a hearing device so you know i don't want to

00:50:10.040 - 00:50:34.920

under appreciate that acoustic neuroma is a real condition and people who have it if you require a surgery sometimes it's slow so slow growing particularly in older people that it's people that the doctor advises usually just watching it and and if it grows more quickly so that it can impair your hearing then recommends either radiation or surgery but the surgery often

00:50:34.920 - 00:51:08.600

ends up damaging the hearing in that ear anyway so um uh it is an important condition to recognize but so two points about that one is that if you have hearing loss in only one ear then you should go to the doctor i mean and that is not bilateral issues so that's an easy way and the second is that um uh the um the numbers of people that um are affected are um well let me put it this way

00:51:08.600 - 00:51:28.200

that since so few people are seeking help for their hearing anyway picking up the people with acoustic neuroma it's not working yes anyway this method isn't working anyway if only one out of five people are even seeking help yeah and i i should be clear i don't mean in any way to to understate the importance of those cases i'm just bouncing numbers here then thinking about

00:51:28.760 - 00:51:53.480

leaving 30 million people you know under treated in some way is also a very serious thing given the the the comments you've made the major public health the major public health issue and we've got a thing all you know all regulatory decisions are about balances so but it's great i think you've assembled a great collection of facts i think you're pointing us toward somehow a market that is out

00:51:53.480 - 00:52:13.880

of whack and that that could be in a situation that had better served americans we look forward very much to getting your report with recommendations my understanding is you're hoping to to be able to produce such a report relatively soon and uh it may even be perhaps before the next p-cast meeting in which case we'll schedule a public phone call or right or whatever but we're very

00:52:13.880 - 00:52:37.480

eager to hear the recommendations i wanted to signal to my colleagues that i hope that you'll be hearing from us within the next few weeks to set up a phone that would be great excellent and i also want to thank ed penhote for his leadership on this uh general aging and specifically the uh hearing technology as well so we're now going to go to a break until 11 o'clock when we are

00:52:37.480 - 00:53:06.280

going to hear from uh willy may the director of the national institute of standards and technology in the under secretary of commerce for standards and technology during the break members of p-cast will be free to try to develop a latin name for bill's age related inability to run as fast as he used to we're on break it is a real personal pleasure for me to welcome dr willy may the

00:53:06.280 - 00:53:33.000

under secretary of commerce for standards and technology and the director of the national institute of standards and technology nist dr may has a long and distinguished career with nist for many years he led their research and measurement programs in chemistry related areas personal research has focused on trace organic analytical chemistry and physical chemical

00:53:33.000 - 00:54:05.320

properties of organic compounds a large pile of refereed peer reviewed publications a variety of other leadership responsibilities uh the folks on p-cast can see his bio in your packages so i won't uh read it all but um willy has been a great collaborator for me in the many areas where nists interests and ostps uh overlap and uh so again willy thank you so much for being with us today

00:54:05.320 - 00:54:33.800

and we look forward to hearing your thoughts on what nist is up to okay well thank you uh everyone good morning and i really appreciate this opportunity to discuss what nist is what we do and why you should care both the scientific community as well as the general public during the time that we have i'd like to talk about the nist mission and give you an overview

00:54:33.800 - 00:54:59.240

of nist who we are how we are structured uh talk about how when i get to our mission you could see you could drive a few mac trucks through that so how have our programs at nist evolved over the years in support of that mission and more importantly uh share with you some current examples of our activities uh in basic science if you will uh and also some of the things that

00:54:59.240 - 00:55:27.160

we are doing using that expertise to address contemporary contemporary societal problems any issues the next slide we can go through i've been around i've been around a long time i think i've seen a lot of this evolution i'll take credit for the good stuff and won't take any of the blame won't volunteer for the end of the blame anyway uh here's the nist mission that i

00:55:27.160 - 00:55:55.720

talked about uh promote us innovation and industrial competitiveness by advancing measurement science standards and technology in ways that enhance economic security and quality of life it's a very clear mission it gives us the opportunity to work in lots and lots of areas so again the challenge for us is determining what things we absolutely should do versus all of the things that we could

00:55:55.720 - 00:56:24.120

do with that very very broad mission certainly our main reason for existing was the development maintenance and dissemination of the national standards for measurement uh our director back in the 50s uh alan astin said very clearly that the standards work must keep abreast with the expansions of the frontiers of science so that's a license to have a world-class research program

00:56:24.120 - 00:56:51.480

and certainly this deep research expertise not only allows us to expand our standards program to address contemporary needs it sort of uh facilitates innovation in a number of areas like new materials advanced clinical diagnostics advanced communications and the like we also are a non-regulatory agency and sometimes i say uh sort of once i say that you know we're a non-regulatory

00:56:51.480 - 00:57:13.160

agency we can say that we're from the government we're here to help and people actually believe us but this actually gives us the ability to serve as a convener between the private sector the academic sector and government very much because we don't often have a stake in the game our job is to provide the absolute measurement truth to the extent that we can

00:57:13.640 - 00:57:45.640

so how do we carry out that mission we have four program areas we have our laboratory program i say world leading but certainly world-class program in measurement science and among national metrology institutes i'll say unconditionally we are the world's leading national metrology institute plan to stay that way uh we also have a manufacturing extension partnership

00:57:45.640 - 00:58:13.400

that's a a nationwide network of manufacturing innovation at least extension centers we have one in each state they're 60 in total and they essentially interact with mid and small-sized manufacturers in each state so to providing them whatever they need to be competitive uh they exist by uh grants between fromness to uh each of the states uh and we uh compete those

00:58:13.400 - 00:58:44.440

on a five-year basis now uh we have a program in performance excellence that uh sort of determines the metrics if you will for performance excellence in a number of areas health care this is the bulger's program is in widely accepted there uh education uh nonprofit uh manufacturing and soon to come we are now uh working with uh tony scott the ceo to establish a bulger's like

00:58:44.440 - 00:59:12.760

award uh in the uh in cyber security if you will to reward those companies who are embracing cyber security in a very very robust way to use them as an exemplar for uh for that uh that for others in their areas uh and we and we also have stood up in advance the national advanced manufacturing program office and this for this office is uh responsible for coordinating the

00:59:12.760 - 00:59:40.280

activities among this network of manufacturing innovation institutes that the president envisions right now there are nine of those spoken for uh the vision was initiative 45 i think by the end of this administration we're looking for 15 and this office sort of coordinates the reporting communications among the network and try to make the total greater than the sum of sparks in this

00:59:40.280 - 01:00:15.720

area well this is my vanity slide uh it sort of supports us being a world-class scientific institute uh work on our campus has gone at five Nobel prizes of four plus one uh since 1997 uh four four nist employees uh one is retired but the those who haven't retired or well even the one that has retired are still essentially nist employees and working with nist the fifth uh Danny Schleckman

01:00:15.720 - 01:00:46.760

actually got his Nobel prize for work he did during two sabbaticals with uh john kahn who's adjacent to him who uh poetically received the kioto prize that same year in uh in material science so uh to back off the fellowship winners a number of uh national mellow two national mellow of science uh well you can read the slide this is sort of a vanity uh slide if you will

01:00:52.280 - 01:01:17.160

this is the glass we have two main campuses one in gathesburg maryland and one in boulder colorado uh we have a an appropriated budget of around 864 million about 675 million of that is for our laboratory programs additionally each year we get uh reach about 120 million dollars for services that we provide for other government agencies on a

01:01:17.160 - 01:01:42.120

cultural and virtual basis and roughly 50 million dollars for the standards that we sell the standard reference materials the uh calibration we perform and not as much now for the standard reference data because we're giving away more of our data uh these days uh we have partnerships in every state primarily through the uh manufacturing extension partnership uh in terms of employees

01:01:42.120 - 01:02:05.080

we have 3 000 employees in 1971 when i came to this we had 3 300 employees so it looked like we're sort of shrinking but we're not the big difference is we have a number of associates i guess workers we have 3 500 now we may have had 300 then uh and those

01:02:08.280 - 01:02:33.160

this is not there those associates uh come from it's on the wrong place here we are off the third 500 about two-thirds are domestic primarily from academia but off the ones from industry it's interesting that we have about

01:02:33.160 - 01:02:56.360

three times uh those from small businesses as from larger businesses which means we're really tapping into the innovation uh we're driving innovation through working with small uh businesses we have a number of uh foreign guest scientists that's increasingly become as an academic institution we need this but there are some other issues there that i will

01:02:56.360 - 01:03:16.440

discuss with you at lunch uh our laboratory program oops two metrology laboratories this is so the old realm of the old national bureau of standards if you will we have two technology laboratories an engineering laboratory and an information

01:03:16.440 - 01:03:43.640

technology laboratory we have two organizations that serve as national use of facilities to provide the best neutron uh the best neutron source for materials characterization that we can more the top in the world and in our nano center i would say it's probably the nano fair part of that is uh maintains the best facilities that money can buy to make them available to uh to uh

01:03:44.840 - 01:04:09.800

to the public uh on a uh competitive basis that's okay we have a number of joint institutes and centers of excellence our joint institutes were established for opportunistic reasons over the years some of our people got to

01:04:10.360 - 01:04:33.400

get with some of their people at several places uh in college universe of colorado to establish jillock which is unquestionably the world's foremost atomic molecular and optical physics institution the world we have uh the hollings marine laboratory and charlson south carolina uh the joint quantum institute as you can read them there and these are all

01:04:34.280 - 01:05:14.040

established to assist us in our science mission uh in putting these together we didn't really consider their lifetime so they are essentially uh their ongoing uh relationships for it these new centers of excellence that we have they are to help us to solve short-term problems and assist us with assignments that we have they are grants at least cooperative agreements with clusters of

01:05:14.040 - 01:05:39.640

universities for a five-year period of time and they can be renewed for five years and i'll give you some context for that as i go forward oh here are the three that we've done the first one was to assist us with our responsibilities on the materials genome uh again this was a nationwide competition the winners were uh the university of chicago northwestern uh our gone national

01:05:39.640 - 01:06:10.440

laboratory and is to work with us to uh in our program uh in materials by design uh we have one to assist us uh in our program in community resilience and you can see the partners uh and the final one is to assist us in our program in forensic science now when we were established we were established for many of the problems that we have today just for manufacturing uh

01:06:10.440 - 01:06:36.920

commerce and trade work with the private sector work with the academic sector uh again primary mission was to uh provide custody and the dissemination of our actual standards compare those with other countries if you will uh we still are very active in this area uh we have recently developed uh the world's most precise atomic clock a strontium latus clock with a

01:06:36.920 - 01:07:09.240

tick rate accuracy of one second in the life of the universe uh we for the time being we're also uh leading a national international effort uh to redetermine the kilogram well why would you do that that's so esoteric one is uh it's necessary because the kilogram for better or worse what's defined is as the mass of a

01:07:11.560 - 01:07:34.680

block of platinum iridium that's kept in the basement of the international bureau weights and measures in paris if that thing drops and chips the killer the killer the unit of mass has been defined because it's defined as the mass of that block of platinum iridium so there's a worldwide effort to try to define the kilogram based on

01:07:34.680 - 01:08:00.040

a physical constant that is Planck's constant there are two ways to do it one is the so-called watt balance where we uh null out uh mass and power and from that you can extract Planck's constant the other way to do that is through uh redetermining avogadro's number by literally counting the number of silicon atoms in a mold of silicon and from that you can determine avogadro's constant and

01:08:00.040 - 01:08:26.360

when the results from those two experiments conducted by a number of laboratories around the world in 2018 we'll redefine the kilogram we're so this is sort of the old mission for this that we're still involved in but since our inception as the national bureau standards in 1901 we've recognized that in addition to do maintaining the basic standards is the initial mission was

01:08:26.360 - 01:08:51.640

we have to be involved and provide uh support to address contemporary societal problems so in 1901 we were in the midst of the industrial revolution so we were looking at improbable interoperability issues that was a fire in Baltimore half the city burned down because when the fire engines came from cities all around they couldn't connect to the host company so to the host so we did that

01:08:51.640 - 01:09:13.880

light standards standardizing irons and steels for buildings we're building lots of buildings then and working within the state commerce commission to reduce railway accidents those were the things fast forward to 2015 these are the things that we're looking at advanced communications advanced manufacturing advanced materials biosciences cyber physical system cyber security disaster

01:09:13.960 - 01:09:39.560

resilience uh forensic science and quantum science a lot of that supported uh thank you john by oh stp to help us get the resources to work in these areas so quickly in advanced manufacturing i mentioned that the president's vision vision is this national network for manufacturing innovation it is uh taking form uh supported by the department of defense and

01:09:39.560 - 01:10:06.200

the department of energy and the reason for that is we have the vision but that's not the money to do it so the department of defense and energy have used essentially a playbook that we developed this to identify areas that that might be dual use so they've i think nine of these have been stood up and there are two in the works the niche role is to host this advanced manufacturing program

01:10:06.200 - 01:10:31.560

office as i i talked about to coordinate the collaborations among the institutes provide annual reporting to congress to share best practices among the institutes and for commerce to establish two institutes when we get the money that focuses on sort of the white space that are not necessarily focused on defense or energy needs but focus on private

01:10:31.560 - 01:10:55.240

sector needs we are providing resources to the existing institutes to conduct measurement science research to sort of conduct miss mission in that space if you will and we provide laboratory experts to support activities in those areas and also we are owned the bull advisable as for all of the existing institutes

01:10:57.880 - 01:11:22.600

we also have a very active laboratory research program and you can see that on the areas listed to the right which just happened to match very well with the existing institutes that have been stood up forensic science i think the academy's issue report in 2009 that said in essence that we

01:11:22.600 - 01:11:49.080

needed to improve the science that underpinned the criminal the forensic evidence used in the courts on a regular basis to make guilty innocence decisions so we've done we've worked in three areas one we've worked with the department of justice to stand up the national commission on forensic science it's co-chaired by doj and this but actually this is a doj this is a the

01:11:49.080 - 01:12:23.160

commission is a faca to the department of justice and we are assisting them in that regard the commission consists of forensic science practitioners academic researchers like professor jim gates thank you jim he says i twisted his arm to do this but he really enjoys it he loves it so the commission is to sort of look at the issues surrounding forensic science and make

01:12:23.160 - 01:12:54.760

recommendations to the attorney general nist is taking the lead on setting up an organization of scientific area committees to basically identify the documentary standards needs and put those standards in place if you will and then we've also based on input we're getting from the commission and from the osaks have focused in on a very active scientific research

01:12:54.760 - 01:13:22.520

program in the areas that you see on the slides and you can see some of the recent accomplishments that we've had over the last couple of years in this area we've also established one of these centers of excellence and the idea is to improve the statistics so that you can provide probabilistic evidence in court for example we can say in the dna based human identification area you can say

01:13:23.240 - 01:13:51.480

to one part in several tens of millions that that was william a's blood left at the crime scene based on the science and we can say this with definition we can't say this about other pattern evidence uh areas like fingerprints firearms tool marks and so forth so the idea is to have work this group of universities and social universities work with us to provide that type of scientific

01:13:51.480 - 01:14:13.480

rigor to evidence that's used in court so that you don't have the situation where you have one piece of evidence and you have the defense team and the prosecuting team come in and have someone say in my 20 my 50 years of experience or whatever the number might be i can say definitively that this is that and they're saying just the opposite about the same piece of information so that's

01:14:13.480 - 01:14:36.520

what we are trying to eradicate in this area through this uh this center of excellence that we're establishing advanced communications uh we this is our newest technical laboratory at NIST uh will be marshal resources to support advanced communication put in one area and we're also doing a lot of hiring in this area there are three focus areas one is public safety communications

01:14:36.520 - 01:15:08.200

research uh working with uh to support a first net first net which is a private company that operates within the national telecommunications and information agency NTIA and we are provide to provide technical support of the build out of a nationwide LTE network for first responders uh that was that is being funded by the spectrum auction uh the spectrum auction was very successful

01:15:08.200 - 01:15:36.920

and this will get 300 million dollars to support this activity in addition to our appropriated funds and this money is can be spent uh from this year to 2022 i think the other is work with NTIA on developing the science to support more effective sharing of spectrum and finally to develop an active research program uh and the endpoint of that would be sort of the leading the U.S.

01:15:36.920 - 01:16:05.080

government's efforts for defining 5G uh we're actually well behind Europe and some of the Asian countries and so we're trying to pull together the resources to become active in this area uh quantum research obviously countries around the world are very very active in this area for obvious reasons

01:16:05.080 - 01:16:28.680

a large part of the NIST effort we have uh activities on our Boulder campus on our Gaithersburg campus and a large portion of that is in a collaboration we have with the University of Maryland and the NSA uh and now Lockheed uh at the University of Maryland in the Joint Quantum Institute which is a world-class institute uh in quantum science and we're all in this race to

01:16:28.680 - 01:17:00.360

develop the world's first really functioning quantum computer it's a major driver for us uh also both in our quantum program research program and in our cyber security program we're working on the tools to provide quantum resistant cryptography so that we can develop the CRIPS uh and Q management capabilities uh to defend against attacks uh in the uh once we're living in the quantum world

01:17:00.360 - 01:17:23.880

we have major responsibilities and improve cyber security infrastructure supporting national priorities and stakeholders the active research program and we have a responsibility through our national initiative on cyber security education in this area so quantum is cyber security is the fastest growing research area at NIST over the last 10 years

01:17:26.600 - 01:17:50.200

one of the things I'd like to highlight is the national cyber security central excellence that was established in 2012 that's essentially NIST and about 22 technology companies and in this case rather than just develop the standards we move off campus take our standards and work with companies in baking those into practice in a way so that they can participate

01:17:50.200 - 01:18:13.960

in this so that no one has a strategic advantage and we are able to leverage their resources with our resources to provide uh practical standards in this area and obviously we can't develop new standardization in this area like we do others things are moving too rapidly uh we are very active in the global cities area and we're primarily using our convening role here uh last year we had

01:18:14.680 - 01:18:40.280

global cities competition 64 teams from 50 governments from around the world on the picture you can see me standing there smiling with the king and queen of the Netherlands uh they attended the Netherlands is very very very active in this role and they actually dropped by the expo right after having uh lunch with the president and we are in the process now uh working with a consortium

01:18:40.280 - 01:19:12.120

with the team to begin launch the next round of global city team challenge uh community resilience we uh were engaged because of uh a response in response to the president's climate action plan we were to develop a community resilience framework we've completed that uh the framework has two uh two volumes uh this out for public review one sort of talks about the methodology that we used

01:19:12.120 - 01:19:42.680

and actually how that methodology can be used in a hypothetical small town so how you actually can take this methodology and use it and then the second volume has all of the metadata and all of the raw data that supports the uh original one and finally bio uh NIST asks historically I've been on physical sciences in an engineering laboratory uh back in the late 80s we established

01:19:42.680 - 01:20:03.160

the center for advanced research and biotechnology between NIST and the university of Maryland college park we were supposed to teach the folks at college park about measurement science and they were supposed to teach us about about biology because we had two biologists on the staff and they really went practicing biology at the time uh over the years uh we sort of played

01:20:03.160 - 01:20:34.280

with this and in the uh mid where the early 2000s uh our director sort of challenged me with uh putting together a strategic a strategic plan for our bio program to either get real about it or get out and part of that was to develop a plan but also an elevator speech that was able to distinguish our role from that of NIH and from uh FDA and as I recall the elevator speech went something like

01:20:35.640 - 01:21:01.160

NIH is responsible for providing the basic research the research and supporting research conducting and supporting research to address the prevention diagnosis and treatment of disease our role is to provide the underpinning measurement science to allow them to carry out that mission and with the director's support we began getting resources to build our program and we've gone

01:21:01.160 - 01:21:25.400

from maybe two biologists in the late 1980s to probably I would say we have at least uh 75 to 100 uh PhD biologists on our staff now but that's not enough we're never going to develop the presence of the biology that we've developed in the physical sciences that's not the resources so strategically we've decided to build that program also by very aggressive partnerships

01:21:26.840 - 01:21:49.240

the Center for Advanced Research in Biotechnology a car that was started in the mid-80s has grown to the and I know this is a mouthful Institute for Bioscience and Biotechnological Research at BBR and we're probably going to change that but that's a partnership between NIST the University of Maryland College Park and the University of Maryland's Med School

01:21:49.240 - 01:22:20.520

it focuses on advanced therapeutics uh biologic drugs and vaccines and we've started a joint initiative on metrology and biology to address this biological irreproducibility issue we have 50 faculty at and it's between the med school and the school of engineering at Stanford NIST has about 12 staff embedded there plan to grow that by 10 over the next several years and again the

01:22:20.520 - 01:22:44.360

focus there would be genomics and synthetic biology so again finding the right partnerships to leverage our areas the direction that we've decided to go to really be able to deliver the standards and the measurement science needed in this area and this is just a quote uh from at least excerpt from a note that we got from a member of the evaluation panel for our material measurement

01:22:44.360 - 01:23:06.680

laboratory that's our laboratory that deals with the chemistry biology uh and material science function at NIST uh and basically uh most folks NIST doesn't do biology and there's no way can have an impact this is just typical of the feedback we got the NIST labs reminded me of one of my favorite places the heart west store where you can go in and get the stuff you need uh the

01:23:06.680 - 01:23:34.040

greatest news for us this has decided now to help in the area of designing standards for biology and you can feed it and that really the efforts that we've started so far really beginning to make a difference in that community so thank you for your attention and try to entertain any questions well thank you willy for that uh great overview of the terrain uh it's now uh this topic's now

01:23:34.040 - 01:24:01.240

open for comment by p-cast members uh wanda i see your sign up uh year first uh thank you john thank you dr may appreciate your comments this morning i had a question about spectrum sharing and recognize the the value of establishing standards at a time when everybody wants access to spectrum i mean we all are walking around trying to get a few bars uh my my my question to you is

01:24:01.240 - 01:24:27.720

how are we uh going about testing the effectiveness of those standards with respect to uh potential for interference with existing systems well obviously i'm sorry i'm not an expert in this area but we actually have set up a test bit out in our boulder laboratory and we're working with uh uh a we formed a consortium called naston where the military is involved in tia is involved and we're

01:24:27.720 - 01:24:51.640

involved when we're actually developing a test bit so as we develop these technologies we actually perform simulations at that facility at other facilities uh in the country a lot out in the midwest where we can actually test these to make sure that the theory uh uh actually does perform in the real world

01:24:52.440 - 01:25:35.160

so i was struck by uh the remarks you made at the beginning that um virtually all of the growth and nist has been from uh including people from outside of the the two centers um you said that you had three thousand people you're thirty three hundred yeah um when in yeah 1901 you have three thousand now and yet you have roughly doubled because of the people that are that come from outside

01:25:35.160 - 01:26:02.040

so so my question is how do you um figure out what you do in house and what you do with the larger community especially when it comes to new areas okay well i guess that growth in that manner uh was by design not a mistake uh in order for us to be as agile as we need to do well uh those of you who worked in the government realizes that it's not

01:26:03.320 - 01:26:30.520

the the the personnel rules don't allow you to be as agile as maybe you should be so we've tried to minimize the growth of our uh permanent fed staff and bring people and i think the fact that we have 3,500 people who work with us on problems or mutual interests on their nickel as being a an exemplar the fact that people it means that we're working on the right types of things so most of

01:26:30.520 - 01:26:57.560

that work take that those numbers were people who work on our campus these were not contractors offsite these are people who work on our campus on an ongoing basis so we've actually double staff what i did include in their sort of way we count the numbers we also have about a hundred new postdocs that come each year and a hundred minus 30 to 40 percent leave so we are growing

01:26:57.560 - 01:27:27.320

so we have folks having someone work at NIST for if you get past the three years the first three years you use that for 30 or longer the way that we make sure that we have fresh ideas energetic people it's this postdoc program hundred new people at least every year and we sort of cherry pick those based obviously on our perception of their competence but also match to any either

01:27:27.320 - 01:27:55.960

retirement or an area that we're moving into for example we're heavily invested in postdocs in bio and advanced communications and growing in the uh quantum uh area and cryptography so thank you dr may for such a rich and broad description of so many topics near and dear to us so perhaps like Wanda it's unfair for me to focus in on one of the issues that you brought

01:27:55.960 - 01:28:18.120

up but PCAST has been thinking for a long time about climate change and resilience and you mentioned your response to the task force how you have your now two volume report out and you know i want to commend you because in our work we found that it's really the small communities that have no resources to win their way through the data sets and tools and all that and so i think that's a very valuable

01:28:18.120 - 01:28:38.680

addition and will really be helpful because my question is in that same vein are you thinking are are you working on uh areas that would help the private sector consider resilience obviously you focused on infrastructure and there's infrastructure in the private sector as well but the issues are different when you think about supply chains and and just wondered if

01:28:38.680 - 01:29:00.760

you were working in that arena well obviously when you say resilience it means different things to different people and there are very few agencies that don't have programs in resilience just in the department of commerce i pulled together a meeting about two year about a year and a half ago i think it was heather just so that we within the department of commerce understood

01:29:00.760 - 01:29:26.120

what is your little saying by resilience and we were meaning different things so we have a very broad at least narrow mandate and it is to look at uh public at least critical infrastructure and particularly the built environment is where we're focusing but there's but obviously if there is a disruption in the built environment you know it impacts the private sector so this isn't for

01:29:26.120 - 01:29:53.800

government this is for community resilience and communities are composed of people government activities private sector so it's to how do we measure the how do we provide tools that will allow the built environment to recover from things that we can't control so we can't control the climate yet and you mentioned climate we have another activity i didn't put that we have a major

01:29:53.800 - 01:30:20.440

program in greenhouse gas measurements well we're providing the measurement science that will allow that to be done very very robustly and just next week uh i i'm signing an agreement with the chinese to since we are the two larger polluters to actually for their equivalence of this to work together on the measurement technology and standards and use those as tools for the decision makers to

01:30:20.440 - 01:30:49.000

use if they wish in this area the other area that we're going to work on with them is standards to support personalized or precision medicine by the way and that will be signed on the 22nd well like my colleagues i'd like to thank dr may for the briefing um i also uh in response to your comment about the enjoyable experience i've had on the national commission i have a

01:30:49.720 - 01:31:17.240

basically i'd like to invite you to give uh to do one or two things to either give your perspective to p cast about the operation of the national national commission of forensic science and the second part of that is uh what ask might you make of p cast in that particular domain well progress uh we got off to a slow start because we were starting from zero and obviously

01:31:17.880 - 01:31:44.360

with some of the uh advice given in the academy report uh it wasn't taken as well as it could be by some people so part of it was bringing together this group and us getting to trust each other and that uh took place over the first few meetings as you were aware jim and i'm sure tonia is over there uh also um i think that there is i've seen a true commitment from the department of justice

01:31:44.360 - 01:32:13.160

to invest in this uh sally eights is a pleasure to work with uh we are both committed to making this work so the only ask i would have a p cast is your continued support through ostp and and individually and jim certainly we want you to stay on the commission and if i could follow up i'm going to call on iraq land yeah so very far just very briefly with regard to to that kind of work

01:32:14.280 - 01:32:42.440

forensics involves comparisons of patterns and asking are they the same against some larger database i'm curious if you could point to areas outside of forensics where nist does similar things what are the best analogies to the rigorous comparisons of of patterns uh you know could be well could be forensic identification of you know chemical materials or nuclear explosions or

01:32:42.440 - 01:33:01.800

maybe some other place but this whole pattern matching business is different maybe than kilograms and seconds and what could you tell us about the the many corners of nist that have insight into that well you asked me a difficult question because i'm getting more senior and can't bring stuff back as quickly as i used to certainly you mentioned one the area of chemical identification

01:33:01.880 - 01:33:25.880

we've been doing this for years we maintain uh the mass spectral database that's used probably in more than 90 percent of the mass spectrometers that are sold in the world and that's essentially a pattern recognition so we do this and so and we have a major program in reference data and this data in many ways is used for pattern recognition to some extent so that's been a

01:33:26.280 - 01:33:53.960

hallmark of our management services programs for well for years for a long time that's great and maybe maybe offline we can we can learn more about these programs on reference data thank you okay well very good with no more flags up we have come virtually exactly to the end of the allotted time so let me again thank dr may for a terrific presentation and and a good q and a we are now

01:33:54.040 - 01:34:27.000

going to move into the part of our agenda we are now going to move into the part of our agenda that is reserved for public comment and presiding over the public comment session will be our vice chair bill press thank you john we have three public comments presented today in the open meeting i want to mention that the presentations are only the tip of the iceberg of the way

01:34:27.000 - 01:34:54.680

p-cast gets input from the public it's also possible to send written input to p-cast before meeting and this is all described in the federal register and as the p-cast members all know we received more than 50 pages of public comment prior to this meeting and that was distributed to all of you in the presentations here we customarily allow each speaker two minutes

01:34:54.680 - 01:35:19.080

to make a presentation and i'll give a 30 second i'll give a warning when there's 30 seconds left the first speaker will be tom powers who represents the hearing industries association um tom are you here maybe take a seat right at the front and when you feel like starting i'll start my clock

01:35:28.360 - 01:35:53.320

started yeah please thank you for the opportunity to speak to you today on behalf of the hearing industries association we just completed a white paper on hearing loss which we will be sending to to p-cast in the next few days i'm currently employed by savantos which is formally seen in saudiology and today i am speaking however on behalf of the hearing industries association

01:35:53.320 - 01:36:16.520

as we stated this morning hearing loss is a critical aspect of of public health untreated hearing loss can have a significant impact on people's lives their communication abilities and their families so for many of these folks about 95 percent of them hearing aids are the way that they find a solution to this hearing hearing loss problem fda has made it clear

01:36:17.640 - 01:36:41.880

that there's a clear distinction a clear distinction between hearing aids and psap's based on performance claims i think this is an important distinction between those two devices the sale of psap's um over the counter would allow basically patients to self diagnose and self treat some degrees of hearing loss we've also had some test results that were just presented

01:36:41.880 - 01:37:04.920

at the iom that showed that many of these devices do have outputs that are in excess of allowable limits currently allowed by the fda which is 132 db so by creating the ability to take these these devices for mild hearing loss you may be creating more severe hearing loss which is sort of contrary to the original solution um and also the analogy i think between eyeglasses

01:37:04.920 - 01:37:27.800

and hearing loss may be a little simplistic in the fact that if you use readers that may solve one particular one particular problem but maybe not the extent of the rest of them hearing aids are dispensed by professionals who are at various locations for the accessibility part of this hearing aids can cost between 500 and 3000 dollars as was mentioned earlier but

01:37:27.800 - 01:37:47.160

there are a number of devices at the low end of that spectrum which include by the way the professional fitting fees which is a major component of the total cost of buying hearing aids in the market today red flags are also an important part of this and while the detection of acoustic neurome is one of them you see the rest of them here uh earwax is a treatable condition which

01:37:47.160 - 01:38:10.040

a lot of people have two large chains just reported for i wonder if you could finish up now okay yep 250 000 people that came to the large chains about four to five percent of them demonstrated one or more of these red flags um which accounts for about four to five percent of their referral base so in summary hearing aids are affordable devices they're available at many locations which

01:38:10.040 - 01:38:34.280

were mentioned earlier Costco and others which again provides accessibility as well as low cost from 500 up to about 3000 dollars more details will be in our white paper which will be provided to the PCAST shortly thank you for your time thank you very much the next comment on a related subject is by Lisa Hamlin who represents the hearing loss

01:38:34.280 - 01:39:07.640

association of America Lisa okay thank you um i am the director of public policy at hearing loss association of America i depend on technology where a cochlear implant and a hearing aid so the the fact is though that many people with hearing loss do not know about the technology or they can't afford it so as as

01:39:07.640 - 01:39:29.320

Dr. Castle was saying there are many people who could benefit from hearing aids that just don't have them now i also distributed we have provided a number of papers that will be posted and one has been passed out i'm just going to focus on the recommendation in my very brief two minutes here what we think would be really helpful to people with hearing loss like myself

01:39:29.880 - 01:39:53.880

is for the federal government to launch a campaign that highlights hearing loss as a public health issue we also think that the statutory we should that the federal government should support this removal of the statutory denial of services under Medicare we think that it should be amended it should include hearing aids examinations for hearing aids all rehabilitation

01:39:53.880 - 01:40:17.880

and not only that assisted listening devices which we didn't discuss but a hearing aid doesn't work well on its own it needs other devices and those aren't covered either we support cms and other third-party payers reimbursing primary care providers to include standardized hearing screenings doctors do not screen for hearing loss you go to your primary care and you don't know

01:40:18.440 - 01:40:39.240

and people do respond when their doctor tells them as opposed to their spouse thirty seconds please charge uh we thought and we put this in before a new nister is showing up today but we think that nist or another federal agency should start looking at standards for things like pseps so that we have we know what the good standards are and they come up to standard

01:40:39.240 - 01:41:01.320

when you're making new products that are not quite hearing aids but something that could help people getting hearing aid getting who need who have hearing loss and need it um we also think that data should be gathered to across the disability spectrum cdc has gathered data recently and they did not include people with hearing loss data should be caught whenever data is collected it

01:41:01.320 - 01:41:29.240

should include people with hearing loss and we should promote hearing friendly environments in federal buildings in the built environment so that they're installed hearing assistive devices such as loops or other devices that will help people with hearing loss and i see i've run out of time yes so thank you very much for allowing me to speak to you thank you very much our third

01:41:29.240 - 01:41:56.120

and last comment today is on a different subject um and is by anthony nuniez who is the ceo of infamous robotics llc thank you uh my name is anthony nuniez i'm the ceo and also an instructor at infamous robotics based in arlington virginia we have developed a unique curriculum and approach to teaching

01:41:56.120 - 01:42:17.320

children about the robotics field our curriculum incorporates many aspects from design engineering art and also entrepreneurship graduates of our core programs go into an eight-month long process known as the robotics inventors club at infamous robotics students are engaged by an innovative and unique curriculum designed to challenge students by increasing rigor in the classroom

01:42:17.880 - 01:42:37.720

and produce high levels of achievement not only in critical need areas of stem subjects but also core content areas of english language arts and social studies this ambitious approach is accomplished by the delivery of the robotics inventors curriculum we have developed we recently conducted a study for a period of four months that evaluated 110 of our students

01:42:37.720 - 01:43:01.480

before and after participating in our curriculum the results showed prior to the instruction of the curriculum the average score of all the students was five out of 100 and this is on subject matter related to robotics and engineering following the assessment of of our curriculum students scored an average of 99 out of 100 these these students came from all different

01:43:01.480 - 01:43:21.560

types of background students with no exposure to robotics students from magnet schools in the area and also students who have taken all other enrichment style robotics programs the future jobs for this country will be in high-tech engineering and robotics as a nation we must do a better job repairing our children for this global competition for robotics jobs

01:43:22.200 - 01:43:43.800

pcast has made many strides in this area we ask that we infamous robotics be involved in these discussions so that we can bring our expertise and experience to the table to help assist in this national effort thank you infamous robotics looks forward to working with the administration to ensure children of our nation will be at the forefront and the line of robotics jobs and robotics

01:43:43.800 - 01:44:17.400

innovation thank you very much and john this concludes our public comments terrific well the public session of this bi-monthly pcast meeting has run its course i thank the pcast members for their attention the presenters for their content the audience for their interest the senior ostp staff here for their continued engagement and support of pcast activities and

01:44:17.400 - 01:44:45.800

of course i thank the pcast executive secretariat in particular for the work that they always do at these meetings before these meetings and in between these meetings we look forward to seeing you all next time and again thanks to the audience both in the room and on the web eric do you have any closing thoughts just again my thanks to the pcast for their continued

01:44:45.800 - 01:44:57.320

energies and efforts thanks