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Good morning everybody, let me welcome the members of PCAST to this third from the last meeting of President Obama's PCAST, we will meet again in November and meet again in January. And after that there will be a new administration and presumably a new PCAST. But I would like to begin by observing a couple of milestones and one passing.

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Today the 30th of September happens to be the birthday of our colleague PCAST member Professor Rosina Bierbaum. Happy birthday Rosina. Today is also the final day in office of our member Dr. Wanda Austin who has been the chief

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executive officer of the Aerospace Corporation for the last eight years, an enormously important company, an enormously important role. She retires from that position at the end of the day today, she has chosen to spend her last two days in office with PCAST.

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I think that underscores the importance that PCAST has in the lives of all of us who are fortunate enough to be members. Dr. Austin was with the Aerospace Corporation I think for 37 years, is that right? And it's CEO for eight fabulous achievements, so congratulations Wanda.

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On a sadder note, I want to mention the passing of our former member, Dr. Ahmed Zawail, professor of chemistry at Caltech, PCAST member in the first term, Nobel laureate in chemistry, a real pillar of STEM education in developing countries, particularly in the Middle East. He was one of the first presidential science envoys, his mission was to the Middle East

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where he continued a long career of inspiring young people in building science education in developing countries and particularly in the Middle East and his home country originally of Egypt. He passed away on August 2nd since our last meeting obviously and I would suggest a moment

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of silence in memory of our late colleague. Thank you very much. We will now move into the agenda for the morning and I want to turn the microphone and the platform over to my distinguished co-chair, Dr. Eric Lander who also happened to be the

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chair of Ms. Fenney on forensic science that was recently completed, transmitted to the president and made public to talk a little bit about that forensic science report. Great. Well thank you, John.

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Let me add my welcome to John's, to everyone who's here in the room, everyone who's on the web and again my thanks to all the members of PCAST who have not let up one bit in the work that is going on with a study approved already in September, another study coming forward for approval today and more studies underway.

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I suspect PCAST will be working up until the very end of the administration as the president has requested and I just want to thank everybody for their continued service and energy. So I'd like to briefly, and if we can bring up those slides, that'd be great, I'd like to briefly review the report that we approved and released on forensic science.

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It's entitled Forensic Science and the Criminal Courts Ensuring Scientific Validity of Feature Comparison Methods. We've reported on this at public meetings of the PCAST on several occasions before and then let's see, I have the clicker right here.

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So I'm not going to go through all of the process and all of the background. It's all available on previous discussions on the PCAST website as well as in the report. I just want to briefly summarize where we are, what were the key points from the report and then the next steps going forward importantly at the end.

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So we started this work a little more than a year ago. We thought about doing it in spring of 2015, began to seriously get underway in about a year ago, September of 2015. On September 1st, the PCAST in a telephone meeting, public meeting, voted approval of

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the recommendations and the substance of the report and then we released the report on September 20th following our usual practice of clarifications and copy editing and things like that. I noted when through 125 drafts and in fact many sub drafts because there were decimal

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points attached to those things as well but 125 significant drafts. It weighs in at 173 pages which I think set a new record for PCAST, 399 footnotes which again set a new record for PCAST. It involved a review of 2100 scientific papers which I don't have an exact count but I don't

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think anyone will argue it too set a record and for the first time we opened to public comment early in the process last fall and we are tremendously grateful to the public for 70 really lengthy, thoughtful comments addressing questions that PCAST posed to the public at large and particularly intended to the scientific community and to the forensic

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science and law enforcement community and people took a lot of care to provide material to PCAST. Such report would not be possible without enormous help although the PCAST members themselves rolled up their sleeves and did a tremendous amount of work.

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I want to specifically acknowledge three people. We were enormously lucky to have the services of Tanya Simoncelli, Tanya is herself a world expert in the field of forensic evidence, has written a book on the subject and we're very lucky a former member of the staff of OSTP currently working with me on my PCAST

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work and was seconded to the PCAST working group for this purpose and being able to draw on her many, many years of experience, decades of experience in this field was invaluable. I want to thank Christian Zarelli who is an incredible researcher who went through very large numbers of these papers, synthesized them and prepared many notes along the way

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and made sure all of these drafts proceeded toward a final report, an amazing job of research there and then our own PCAST staff member Diana Pankovich who had no idea what she was signing up for when she got involved in this report and organized countless phone calls with members of the forensic science community, many meetings, went through all sorts of communications

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and it's really lucky we did not let Diana know in advance what this was going to entail but she was the one personally responsible for example corralling this online appendix of 2100 papers that were reviewed and so I want to give thanks to Tanya, to Kristin and to Diana for their amazing partnership in this.

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So at 100,000 pages and 399 footnotes you might think it's really complicated but the truth is the entire report can be described in three tweets. The tweet version of the report for the busy person today says as follows, tweet number one, for a forensic feature comparison method to be foundationally valid there needs to be actual empirical evidence of its reliability

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and estimates of its accuracy. Tweet number two, for a number of current methods there is little or no actual empirical evidence of reliability or accuracy. Tweet number three, some, not all, in the forensic science and law enforcement community see no need for empirical evidence. The report is the long form version of those three tweets but if

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you just want to take away those three tweets that pretty much says it. Forensic science is a science. It comes forward into the courtroom saying wearing the mantle of science we bring forward scientific evidence that should be taken very seriously. If it comes forward as a science it of course must meet the criteria of scientific validity for a science and for

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the last 400 years those criteria are you have empirical evidence to support your claim. There are many in the forensic science community who know this and absorb this and work toward this but historically this has not been the case always. Forensic science grew not in its earliest days from the scientific laboratory but rather from practitioners who in very good faith felt that

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by looking a lot of evidence they could draw meaningful and accurate conclusions. We have seen over the course of the last several decades a recognition that that is not a foundation for reliable scientific evidence being brought forward to the court and being treated that way. Now I want to underscore I've said court multiple times. There's a big distinction between scientific

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insights and ideas being used in the investigation of a crime. PCAST did not in any way look to the question of what should or shouldn't be used in an investigation. We very clearly said the report does not touch on that and we have said a much broader standard should be used for how you investigate. Just like in science nobody says what you're allowed to do to formulate a

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hypothesis. Hypotheses can come and if come famously in chemistry from a fever dream that's right of the benzene ring. Hypotheses can come from anywhere. What makes science great is you can come up with an idea hypothesis from any direction and then you must subject it to proof. So we do not in any way wish to limit how you might do an investigation, exonerate a subject, exclude a

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subject in advance, reach the judgment of what you wish to bring to court. We're only addressing the question of when you come to court you wish to prove something and the standard here is ultimately that the full package is proved beyond the reasonable doubt. What are the requirements for something to say it is scientifically valid? So that's been the issue and I've got to say there

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folks in the forensic science community have continued over the years to meet the call to go and collect evidence and find yes we can support that this method is valid and we can tell you how accurate it is. Something doesn't have to be perfectly accurate but you have to know how accurate it is. If something's wrong one in a million times or one in ten times that's pretty

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relevant you need to know. But there remain many people in the forensic science community who don't really yet get it. That you can't come with scientific evidence unless you can come with a demonstration of its accuracy and there's that tension playing out within the community. It's going in the right direction but it continues to need to be propelled by people saying things in

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the clearest simplest terms. The tweets should be kept in mind by everybody in that community. So that's really what we tried to focus on is where are they? Now we are not the first to touch this question. This was touched in the 1990s extensively by various national academy reports having to do with DNA and compositional bullet-led analysis and other such fields and reports in the past decade

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most notably an overall report by the National Academy in 2009 an NRC report about the overall state of forensic science which noted very clearly essentially these three tweets. It was a very influential report. It led to the Obama administration adopting various policies including creating a national commission on forensic science to NIST the National Institute of Standards and

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Technology creating a process for standards development. All very good. The president asked us last year to address the question what else is needed and that's what we sought to do in the report. So very briefly and we've covered this in our public phone call the PCAST made eight recommendations. I have not put the full text up there because we've already covered them and

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they're already in the public report. I'll just briefly say the first and perhaps most most foundational of it is that NIST should perform ongoing evaluations of scientific validity and reliability of forensic feature comparison methods. It's got to sit at a science-based agency. It's not appropriate or in any way for it to sit at a non-science-based agency. I think there were some

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who had previously said well the Department of Justice could do this. The answer is of course it can't do it. It's got to be a prosecutor. It's got to be a user of this and we need to separate the scientific evaluation from the people we give the responsibility to to use the evidence. You can't do both simultaneously. This in no way impunes the role of DOJ. In fact it I think

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elevates the role of DOJ. It must be an active user of these technologies which means it can't be the scientific evaluator of those technologies. NIST is the right place for the federal government to do it. NIST has an important role to move us from subjective methods to objective methods. Many of these methods today remain very subjective. An examiner sits there and compares

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patterns and says I think they match. There was a time that that was okay but technology has moved on. Image analyses are quite good now. We can do facial recognition. We ought to be applying it to latent fingerprints to firearms and we think it's a great time to move that forward and that will advance the cause of justice in being able to identify with higher accuracy and correctly

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identify perpetrators, exclude innocent people, raise the level of the science and NIST should play that role. NIST should also improve that standards development process I referred to and we make some specific recommendations about how that should be done. We think because there is this movement of forensic scientists toward a more and more scientific basis for forensic science

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we think it's important to have a national research strategy and we call an OSTP in collaboration with multiple agencies to lead the development of the strategy. We think the FBI has a very important role to play. They have been simply world leaders in their work on latent fingerprints. My hat is off and I think all of our hats are off to the FBI for a brilliant set of studies on

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latent fingerprints. What are called black box studies where you see whether or not they get the right answer however they get it and white box studies to ask what are examiners thinking when they compare things and you can learn a lot from that. They are simply brilliant studies. They are a model. The lead black box study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of

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Sciences. It is what needs to be done going forward. FBI has an important role to play. They need our support. They need increased funding to do that and we call for that. The next one is sort of I guess obvious but we say it anyway of course the Attorney General should ensure that the Department of Justice uses scientifically valid evidence. The responsibility

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of all prosecutors is not to win a prosecution it's to get the right answer. That's what we ask the government to do. The government's interest is in getting the right answer and the only way to get the right answer is to ensure you use scientifically valid evidence. It almost doesn't need to be stated but it should be stated that of course the Attorney General should only use

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scientifically valid evidence. We note that the Department of Justice in particular issued some guidelines about the testimony examiners can give and the guidelines do one very good thing. They forbid examiners from making the kind of inflated claims that had been made in the past that things were perfect zero error rates. You know there's a long history of examiners having

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told juries things that were just way beyond what the evidence supported and the Department of Justice rightly and we saluted says those kinds of over claims are not allowed. Unfortunately in writing their guidelines they went too far. They actually said accurate claims about the accuracy of a method are not allowed also. Indeed examiners are not allowed to make any

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statements about the accuracy of a method and that's simply not okay because you can't come in and support a scientific method unless you can actually state the accurate facts about its accuracy. So we recommend the Department of Justice withdraw and reissue those guidelines to be able to come down the middle correctly and then finally I note that we say judges should

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take account of the scientific criteria for scientific validity. It isn't Peacast's job to tell judges how to do their job but the law says judges are to act as gatekeepers with respect to the reliability of the methods that come before them and particularly the Supreme Court says the job the overarching subject of the judge's inquiry is scientific validity. If judges are

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to do their job the scientific community has a responsibility to make clear what does scientific validity mean. So we have tried to lay out clearly in the report so the judges may use it when they wish to make admissibility decisions the scientific criteria for scientific validity while respecting the line that the scientific community defines scientific validity and scientific criteria

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the legal the judges themselves define the legal application of these things and I think it's an important distinction we try to make clear in the report. In the report in addition to specific recommendations we make findings actually number eight is not a finding it's just a topic there we make findings with regard to seven topics we try to lay out what is scientific validity

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in terms that are clear and simple and useful there's no shocking news under what it is to have scientific validity it means empirical evidence if you want to claim that you're able to accurately tell whether a bullet came from a gun you got to show me you can do it. We write that it takes about a page to lay that out clearly to explain what are the components to know what are

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the things you have to measure it's kind of a form of metrology the science of measurement in comparison and I guess that's why NIST has been assigned the responsibility within the federal government because it's the world's leading metrological organization. We look at DNA analysis of single source and simple mixture samples complex mixtures bite marks latent fingerprints

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firearms and footwear and we examine which have evidence of adequate evidence of scientific validity and then we do not do a full analysis of hair analysis what we do is we examine a recent document released by the department of justice but we did not in the report do a full analysis of that subject and the details are all there. Now our report was released to the public

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on September 20th and we've been tracking reaction to it lots of people have said many things I wanted to highlight one in particular because I think it really underscores why people should read the report carefully. The National District Attorney's Association said in a statement that I might be allowed if I were to say is slightly hyperbolic that adopting any of PCAS

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recommendations would have a devastating effect on the ability of law enforcement prosecutors in the defense bar to fully investigate their cases exclude innocent subjects implicate the guilty and achieve true justice at trial. I just you know tend to want to keep things you know carefully laid out here. Any of PCAS recommendation seems a bit extreme we recommend increased funding for

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the FBI we recommend all sorts of things here I think that might be a bit extreme but far more important the devastating effect on the ability to investigate cases and exclude subjects I would ask people who are making statements like this to reread the report and it's very clear statements that we in no way are limiting what might be done in the form of an investigation or excluding

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subjects the report's really clear in fact it says the opposite so I want to put people at ease that the report makes no such claims we're merely saying when you want to come to court and you wish to call something scientific evidence you need empirical evidence that it's accurate it's nothing very controversial I think this is in a way the least controversial kind of

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conclusion you might imagine so the question then is you know what are real concerns about the report we noted that the Department of Justice said the following the report does not mention numerous published research studies which seem to meet PCAS criteria for appropriately design studies providing support for foundational validity now that is not a hyperbolic statement

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it's a measured scientific statement and the right response to a measured scientific statement is to look closely at it so we've asked the Department of Justice to please let us know what are the numerous published research studies that we might not have identified and might not have mentioned because it's very important that's what ongoing scientific evaluation is

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to be able to examine if there are such so we've contacted the DOJ the DOJ I think about a week and a half or so now has not had an opportunity to get back to us yet with with any of those studies but we are looking forward to that and we think because we take this all very seriously that we should take one further step and so phase two of the PCAST forensic study that we'll announce right

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now is that we'll issue next week an RFI or a quest for information that will hold open through sometime in mid-october where we're going to ask the public for each forensic feature comparison method the PCAST report found not yet to be foundationally valid please tell us if you can identify published appropriately designed research studies that were not mentioned in the report

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that provide empirical evidence of the foundational validity of the method by examining the reliability and estimating the accuracy of the method as it is currently practiced we will when that RFI closes review those studies and we will issue if necessary an appendix to the report that's how science works that's how scientific evaluation must

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proceed on an ongoing basis particularly with regard to these areas DNA beyond the stated limits that we thought were possible for DNA some things we said are clearly foundationally valid others have not yet been proven for example four-person mixtures there were some three-person mixtures with a very minor contributor bite marks we said really aren't foundationally valid the ability

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hasn't been shown to be foundationally valid and we expressed great great skepticism that it could be firearms with regard to whether you can individualize the source of a bullet not the class of the gun but the source of a bullet to an individual gun footwear we didn't fully analyze hair analysis we'd be glad to see any papers people have that that should be looked at although we didn't undertake

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a full study of that and we'll put up next week an RFI on that because we think it's really important that we as PCAST model the behavior of what scientific evaluation must look like to get forensic science to the high standard that we want it to be throughout our courts and for the country that's pretty much it it is an ongoing process it may be that any of those methods four years from

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now there's evidence for foundational validity that'd be great if that's your order maybe that those methods are discarded because it's recognized you can't get a valid method here but you could get it some other way like automated analysis of firearms ideally NIST should be continuing this that is the real responsibility as PCAST is not an ongoing mechanism to do it we will continue to

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do this while we are still here in this administration but it should be picked up in an ongoing fashion by NIST that's it I will at this point throw it open for discussion to PCAST I want to thank again the members of PCAST I want to thank the many many people in the forensic science community with whom we spoke who helped us along and particularly this whole movement of people

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within forensics who see the importance of empirical evidence and are pushing the field toward empirical evidence as happened with DNA some decades ago everything will get better once you turn the spotlight of science on it it can be uncomfortable because you find things aren't perfect nothing's perfect things only get better though when you note their imperfections and

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then you begin to go to work on them so I see a flag up from Chris Castle Thank you Eric I want to congratulate you and Tanya and all the and Diana and all the colleagues who work so hard on this I think it's a real important contribution I'm I just wanted to ask you about I think it's wonderful to do this RFI to really ask I mean you guys did

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extraordinary literature review unprecedented in PCAST history I think but I think that that's that's a really good idea so what do you have in mind given our sort of time frame what do you have in terms of being able to will there be an addendum to the report will there be another public report maybe so I will do a public addendum I think we'll open it for two weeks if if the

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folks have been reading the report for a while if there are numerous studies that in any way should still be read we'll open it for the next two weeks and then we'll spend the three weeks after that reading those studies and seeing which of them are empirical studies I must say since the FBI and many other groups sent us these lists over the course of the last year

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my guess is there aren't lots of additional studies that were not already caught by the Department of Justice and others and sent along so it could be that we get none but nonetheless the fact that we are as PCAST open to hearing those things models what we must do in science and you know if if appropriate it won't be hard for us to prepare an addendum to or an appendix

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to the report that we can we can present at a future meeting bill no Jim thank you Eric well thank you Eric first of all I'd like to in this public session recognize the extraordinary leadership that you and Dr. Holdren have shown throughout this process as many of the people in this room know I've actually been embedded in the National Commission on Forensic Science for

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about two years and I'm sorry as I mentioned as many people in the room know I've been embedded in the National Commission on Forensic Science for two years and so I've watched this problem I can't say at ground level but at the level of the commission and the report that PCAST has put together responds to one of the challenges that I've recognized in in the forensic science community

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the community as Eric quite properly described is variegated it's not of a single opinion and in fact there are forensic scientists who do heroic work in delivering a higher quality of scientific evidence to the courtroom and as Eric said I commend these folks they are doing work that is just like the work of doctors doctors medicine also has a similar history for those members of

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the forensic science community it's in a state of ferment some of the quotes that Eric illustrated for us show that ferment but in fact it's an ongoing ferment and the most important thing that this report does is to answer a challenge that I described in a paper that was published in a national institute of justice piece about a year ago and in fact I claim this was a meta

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challenge namely shall the standards and practice of forensic science be aligned with those of other sciences or not I think that we in this report have in complete and strong terms said the answer has to be yes that the that when you were to use the word science there's no special dispensation that will be given to the community of forensic science in the commission I've actually made

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this statement that if it's not science then don't call it science this doesn't necessarily win one bunch of friends but the report I think it does a remarkable service in enunciating this in play in a limited way where we are confident about how the science would play out if it's given a chance so that's my first statement is that I just find extraordinary and I'm grateful

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I'm going to continue to engage with the forensic science community I've just taken on a responsibility to join the OSAC process with NIST as you properly recognize the scientific agency in government that is probably best situated in order to continue to drive this process this process is not going to be done in a decade it's in my opinion this is at least a decadal process and so that brings me

00:30:56.400 - 00:31:22.880

to the other thing that I think is an implicit message of our report that the larger scientific community has got to engage forensic science itself we cannot sit back outside of the playing field if I may use that analogy and simply lob in criticism we have to engage forensic scientists and I can tell you from my interactions with the community there are forensic scientists there who

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would love to have the stove pipe comes down and so it's incumbent on us I think is a challenge that we didn't state it in the report explicitly but I think this report really emphasizes that we who are scientists outside of the discipline cannot remain silent so that's the other point that I wanted to make that's great we'll press the last comment here thanks so so Eric you didn't note

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that immediately after our report was issued the attorney general issued a fairly negative comment at least as reported in the wall street journal in which she said that the department of justice would not be adopting the recommendations related to the admissibility of forensic science evidence I think we all saw that were rather disappointed in it as a kind of snap judgment because it didn't

00:32:10.560 - 00:32:39.040

seem likely that the attorney general or or anyone really would have had time to to study our study in any detail but that's actually not not my question my question is do you think that a statement like that coming from the top sends a chill down the organization in DOJ and FBI that will affect exactly the forward-looking forensic scientists that we hope will implement some of our recommendations

00:32:39.040 - 00:33:01.360

or do the research necessary to implement some of our that's a great question I didn't really raise the attorney general's statement of that saying that they were not going to adopt the recommendation to the department of justice on the admissibility of evidence because I think somebody simply in haste misread the recommendation the recommendation doesn't say anything about admissibility

00:33:01.360 - 00:33:23.680

the recommendation to the attorney general is that the department of justice use scientifically valid evidence I can't imagine that the department of justice could in any way reject the idea that they should use scientifically valid evidence and support the idea that they should use scientifically invalid evidence that would have to be the conclusion so I'm simply guessing that somebody

00:33:23.680 - 00:33:43.840

reacting quickly and having to react to some newspaper reporter issued a statement that the attorney general is rejecting the idea the recommendation about admissibility misreading that there is no recommendation about admissibility we'll reach out to the department of justice but I would be shocked if the department of justice took the position that they believe they should

00:33:43.840 - 00:34:04.800

use scientifically invalid evidence so I just to spend judgment on it and we'll have some back and forth so that's why pgas isn't dropping the topic like I said that recommendation six about the need to use scientifically valid evidence is the the greatest no-brainer in the report how could you do otherwise so anyway I'm sure we'll clear that up all right we should move on I want

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to thank everybody and let us turn to our next topic pgas is busily at work on water particularly following flint michigan and the very troubling events in flint we found that there was the president asked us to look at the much broader situation of safety of american drinking water and this report is in process we're not ready to have a report and recommendations filtered on but

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we're going to get a short update from chris castle and from rosina beerbound and i'm going to turn to chris first and then rosina to tell us where you are and what kind of questions you're looking into thank you eric and thanks for this opportunity to give pcast an update on this important work we will make this brief because we have not concluded the recommendations yet and because

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we want to make sure to have time for our distinguished guests following but I do want in this public session to let people know that we've been hard at work in response to the president's questions I think quite vividly in response to what we all witnessed in flint michigan concern about the broader issues drinking water and drinking water safety in our country

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we put together rosina and I have been cheering this working group rosina with the background of environmental scientists me as a physician so bringing those different perspectives we also are very pleased that we have four p cast members who've been very active including the president's science advisor john holter who's been deeply involved in

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this and made enormous contributions to it ed panhaut who's a biologist and also public health expert maxine savas from engineering and dash rag also from earth sciences so we have we have I think a really good sort of broad and broad based interdisciplinary team we've been supported by terrific staff diana pankovich especially p cast staff who amazingly while she was doing this

00:36:28.560 - 00:36:55.520

incredibly heavy lifting on the forensic science report in somewhere in her spare time was finding time to help move this water study along and bruce rodent from ostp the working group members are really drawn from a group of people who are real experts in drinking water and water science and policy um matthew davis who's listed there as at lury children's

00:36:55.520 - 00:37:28.720

hospital at northwestern um actually at the time we he started working with us and initially was at the university of michigan and was the chair and led the government mandated local mandated review of the situation in flint and a really um excellent publicly available report i recommend to anyone where he really outlined he and his committee really outlined

00:37:28.720 - 00:37:54.880

the situation there he interestingly is a pediatrician as well as public health expert and then bob pergis seppy who's all former epa water administrator oran schneider from american water chad seidel from the university of colorado nancy subtly also previously with epa but now with the los angeles department of water uh nancy hosted a meeting for our p cast group

00:37:55.600 - 00:38:28.880

in los angeles and paul westerhoff from arizona state we've had uh several meetings both in person and by telephone and i want to thank the uh the working group members for a lot of work including preparing of documents writing of text and uh so finding and soliciting important information for us these were the questions that we were asked um to address there are i think

00:38:28.880 - 00:38:57.520

i want to point out perhaps the obvious that there are a number of activities going on about drinking water safety many of them in response to the um uh events in flint many federal agencies are hard at work on this as well as state and local authorities and public health philanthropies academic groups and others are um working in these areas so you know our focus as always is very

00:38:57.520 - 00:39:23.520

much on what is what can science and technology do and particularly at the federal level um to help this situation so the questions include um what is the current state of scientific understanding of the risks associated with contaminants and drinking water one of the unfortunate things that's happened in in response to the appropriate um and widespread news coverage

00:39:23.520 - 00:39:49.760

of the situation in flint um is that a lot of americans are very nervous about their water and don't want to drink water and go to bottled water all the time um when in fact most um publicly provided drinking water in the country is quite safe and actually quite good um but the question that the public wants to know is what about my water and what about the water coming out of my tap

00:39:49.760 - 00:40:13.120

and we don't by and large have a good answer for that so that's um part of uh what our study is looking at is how can we get better information to the public um and then the fact is that drinking water has lots of different things in it not all of them are dangerous some of them are actually quite healthy minerals and things um at and when something is considered a contaminant

00:40:13.920 - 00:40:37.120

what is the relative risk of that contaminant because there are many times you people have hard water that's drinking water that has more of certain uh minerals in it it's not dangerous it just maybe doesn't soap up as well when you're trying to wash stuff or things like that so we really need to know not only chemicals the comparative risks of chemicals but also biological

00:40:37.120 - 00:41:04.480

agents there are waterborne illnesses probably Legionella is one of the most um uh well known and how how are those determined one of the reasons to understand comparative risk is to understand a priority list for public health and policy actions and then the third is improvement needed in monitoring data collection and data analysis on the contamination and drinking water

00:41:04.480 - 00:41:33.520

and the factors that contribute to it I think without even going back to our committee we can tell you yes in answer to that question and so we're really looking at this question of what what sort of scientific methods can be applied to monitoring and within the source within every aspect I think you know just let me say that it's important for people who are listening to understand that

00:41:34.240 - 00:42:02.480

unlike a lot of public health issues water is really terribly complicated and the distribution system there are four different places where you need to study the quality of water one is where it comes from the source which is of course now dramatically affected with climate change and drought in many areas reducing and changing the sources of water then there are treatment plants

00:42:02.560 - 00:42:24.080

and there's a whole set of issues about what kinds of treatments and and and how those are used then there are distribution the pipes that go under the street and take the water to your house and then there's the premise plumbing what happens in your house each one of those is regulated by different authorities some like what's in your house hardly at all and then 50 million

00:42:24.080 - 00:42:52.480

people get their water from wells which is not regulated in any of those traditional ways so there's a lot of different factors making it a very complex regulatory environment that doesn't have a single sort of leverage point that from the policy perspective would be easy to look at so we also are looking at what kind of technology could be easily and quickly

00:42:53.120 - 00:43:21.680

implemented that could help with risk assessment as well as with reducing the risk and also with helping with communication in these areas so we're looking at all the technology implications in that question and then of course what additional research and development is needed to contribute both to better understanding better monitoring and also reducing what risks there are in the

00:43:21.680 - 00:43:46.400

nation's drinking water so I'm going to just stop there and ask Rosina to just summarize kind of the areas that we're looking at for recommendations thanks for that Chris yes as Chris intimated we're busily getting our arms around all the other ongoing relevant activities so that we can really offer value added options and although as we both answered question three yep lots more need

00:43:46.400 - 00:44:08.320

it I do want to say that there are lots of things to build on and just to give you an example in this year's budget alone the Department of Energy is starting a desalination hub that NOAA is trying to develop an integrated water prediction capability for harmful algal bloom detections which was so important in Toledo the Bureau of Reclamation has initiated a water technology

00:44:08.320 - 00:44:39.360

solution challenge so lots of thoughtful things going on but we are PCAST and so we're thinking about the SNT particularly so we will have a sharp focus on how well coordinated the federal R&D effort is to deliver on all of these needs and it turns out there are actually three interagency committees working on various aspects of water one actually on water availability and quality

00:44:39.360 - 00:45:03.600

one on water technologies and one on water issues that intersect agriculture and energy so we're trying to get our arms around these three committees what are they already doing and does this add up to a true water strategy for the nation so a lot of focus on that we do want to be sure that the next generation technologies are actually being developed and going to come online and there are

00:45:03.600 - 00:45:29.280

a number of very exciting areas including things like the microbiome of water systems if you think of that from the source to TAP can we do more with different sensors to tell about water quality problems quickly how can we enable potable reuse so we'll have a class of categories that we think need to be begun and furthered quickly so that they can be demonstrated and deployed but similarly

00:45:29.280 - 00:45:52.720

there's a lot of tried and true technologies that may not be used as well as they could so we'll have recommendations in that arena one thing we've learned is that there are very exciting experiments going on in cities around the country and so we would like to highlight some of these sort of model cities if you will and especially in three categories that would be prevalent so we're thinking

00:45:52.720 - 00:46:19.200

we would focus on an inland arid city that has unique water problems a city that's totally dependent on groundwater which offers its own problems and then of course an industrial midwestern city would also provide interesting possibilities and as we highlight best practices within those kinds of places we would also like to talk about how those new technologies that we think need to come

00:46:19.200 - 00:46:46.320

online can be eventually demonstrated in those cities we'll talk about data we can't help but talk about data and some interesting ideas about perhaps developing geocoded databases or data layers where you could identify vulnerable populations and vulnerable regions quickly so we're trying to develop a recommendation in that area and then the workforce obviously the workforce

00:46:46.320 - 00:47:12.000

for the the water systems of tomorrow need to be different than those of today there's a massive retirement in water system operators about to happen EPA is thinking about perhaps revising their guidelines for operator certification which we think would be a good idea it's been 16 years since that's been revisited and so making sure that we have a trained workforce will be a part of

00:47:12.000 - 00:47:37.520

our recommendation suite we're pretty sure and then we want to make use of an initiative that Dr. Holdren started a year ago today which is citizen science and all sorts of very interesting citizen science efforts have sprung up but we're not sure there's actually one going on in the drinking water arena but there could and so we're looking into that we will certainly also as Chris

00:47:37.520 - 00:48:07.120

said be thinking about how the federal government can better communicate water safety and water risks and then finally since I think we're out of time we will be making some recommendations on how the federal government can undertake human health and water quality risk assessments as well as the water utility system vulnerability assessments and as we look at all of these recommendations

00:48:07.120 - 00:48:30.560

we will be keeping the vulnerable populations front and center and we'll be looking at whether there are existing programs in the federal government that can be used to perhaps test and identify the most vulnerable populations along the way so that just gives you a flavor of our ferment and foment stage that we're at and we certainly hope to have the report finished and

00:48:30.560 - 00:48:56.400

for review by the time we next meet excellent all right well thank you for sharing the ferment and the foment and the the roiling and bubbling waters of your group this is great I you know we we would have time for one brief question if anyone has one but since it's a report that's still very much in progress I don't know if there's anything that's very much on people's minds

00:48:57.680 - 00:49:23.440

right if not keep going I think this is just fantastic that you guys are going to get this done in the couple of months ahead and we'll bring this forward to a p-cast for a review and consideration and a potential vote for for a report with these recommendations because it is an incredibly important topic and I know as we've begun digging into it it is more daunting than many people

00:49:23.440 - 00:49:52.240

may realize on on first notice but so important because I suppose there's no other product other than air that you can say all Americans use in the way that all Americans use water and so thank you very much for for these efforts we're going to turn now to a panel on agricultural preparedness and soil science I'm going to invite our three panelists to come up and I'm going to turn to

00:49:52.240 - 00:50:20.160

our co-vice chair Maxine Savitz who is going to chair this portion of our session Maxine. Thank you Eric and we'll wait till our panel gets settled and while they're getting settled I'll just give a little preliminary several years ago a p-cast issue to report about agriculture R&D and as part of our charge and by the president is to periodically consider the implementation

00:50:20.160 - 00:51:09.040

that has occurred doing this report and as we were doing that report which was co-chaired by Barbara Schell and Dan Shragg Kathy Woteki was very helpful as we went and prepared that report and so she's here today as the undersecretary for research education in economics to talk first about the give us an update I guess Anne is here to help answer the

00:51:09.040 - 00:51:37.440

questions or make other comments and then you said air it's important soil it's equally important how are you going to grow your products and be able to live and Joe Handelsson is going to tell us about it as a renewable resource and Joe is the social director for science at OSTP so Kathy is going first. Great well thanks Maxine and good morning everyone it's a delight to be

00:51:37.440 - 00:52:09.440

able to come back and give you a second update on the implementation that we've made on the recommendations from your report that report Maxine did a real nice job in kind of summarizing it addressed the the challenges that's facing our food and agricultural system both domestically and internationally assessed whether the R&D programs that we have underway in the department

00:52:10.000 - 00:52:48.320

and also looked a bit more broadly across other agencies that are also engaged in various aspects of agriculture related research whether those were up to the challenges that we're facing again domestically and internationally and called for a new ecosystem for research in support of sustainable agricultural systems the what I'd like to do today is give you an update on what we

00:52:48.320 - 00:53:28.480

have done in further implementing the recommendations in that report and also to let you know about a another circumstance that I think is very much in the spirit of amplifying and creating that that new ecosystem for agricultural research and and that was in the 2014 Farm Bill which is the legislation that periodically authorizes and reauthorizes our research programs in 2014 that

00:53:28.480 - 00:53:56.880

Farm Bill called for the establishment of a foundation for food and agriculture research and congress provided some seed money for that research 200 million dollars to be used in the support of research and related activities including some educational related activities that could only be expended though if it was matched by non-federal funds so essentially calling

00:53:56.880 - 00:54:28.480

for establishment of partnerships in support of agricultural research the mission that's described for the foundation is that it is to advance the research mission of the department of agriculture but the work that it supports should be complementary and not duplicative of the ongoing research programs in the department and it focuses the research efforts the mission of

00:54:28.480 - 00:54:58.160

this foundation along the priority areas that are also authorized for the department plant and animal health and production and products food safety nutrition and health renewable energy natural resources in the environment agriculture and food security agricultural systems and technology and agricultural economics and rural communities the foundation is up and operational they managed

00:54:58.160 - 00:55:28.640

to lure Dr. Sally Rocky from NIH to be the first executive director for the foundation it has a very active board and on that board are currently I believe it's 20 members five of which are ex officio members the secretary of agriculture myself in the undersecretary for research education and economics role at USDA the director of our extramural research

00:55:28.640 - 00:55:58.240

program the national institute of food and agriculture and the administrator of the intramural research program at the agricultural research service and also the director of the national science foundation so they have so far established a competitive grants programs to support new investigators as well as a program for rapid response to emerging problems in agriculture

00:55:58.240 - 00:56:28.640

and also with the national academies established a new prize for agricultural science so they're up and operational and we're very much engaged in identifying what are new ways that we can be working with other colleagues again with non federal funds and the match that's made available through these seed funds provided by by the authorizing legislation

00:56:30.720 - 00:57:04.480

about a year after the report came out I met with you and indicated that we had implemented almost all of the recommendations and one that was still on the to-do list was establishing a science advisory council to advise me and the chief scientist under secretary role and the secretary we have done that we have established this science advisory council under our existing

00:57:05.920 - 00:57:37.360

mandated federal advisory committee that's called the national agricultural research extension education and economics there's lots of ease in this advisory board is so we call it the neary board for short so we've established this science council it is chaired by a member of the neary board and several others on the board with strong scientific credentials

00:57:37.360 - 00:58:08.880

and they are able as the they take on different projects to bring in additional scientific expertise from the broader community so they're able to amplify their own scientific backgrounds depending on on what the project is they're undertaking they are at this point have completed and are going through the final review of a report to us on rigor and reproducibility in the

00:58:08.880 - 00:58:45.120

science that we support through through our research programs they're beginning work on a project on gene editing and new plant breeding techniques and also picking up on the comment just made about crowdsourcing in citizen science we've also asked them to take a look at what we are currently doing in this area and to make some recommendations about additional approaches we can

00:58:45.840 - 00:59:20.560

implement that will still that will will be complimentary and bring in these new ways to get more public involvement in our science so with that we have I think pretty much within the funding that we've had available responded to all of the recommendations that were made in the initial report there was a theme that ran through your report and it had to do with

00:59:21.280 - 00:59:51.040

what should the federal government be doing as opposed to the private sector in our support of agricultural research and although there wasn't a specific recommendation in the report about this we have asked the NERI board three years ago actually shortly after your report was published to review and to recommend to us what we should be doing with respect to rebalancing

00:59:51.040 - 01:00:30.400

our portfolio taking in mind what the private sector is is undertaking and the NERI board recommended that we commission a set of studies to continue to provide additional new information about the private sector funding of agricultural science that we host a continuing set of listening sessions to assess public opinion about this rebalancing and also to host an annual meeting

01:00:30.480 - 01:01:04.240

a research roundtable bringing in private sector to have those conversations we have moved forward on the first of these with the economic research service and they have considered how they will continue to monitor the private sector investment in agricultural science we have under the NERI board a mechanism for holding listening sessions and have been particularly focusing on fruits and

01:01:04.240 - 01:01:37.840

vegetables and how holding listening sessions in various parts of the country and lastly we're currently in discussions with the national academy of sciences about establishing a research roundtable and we'll be holding a scoping session in about a month's time on that so that will be ongoing work finally I thought I would share with you two pieces of information

01:01:37.840 - 01:02:20.000

about the current status of our research investment in agricultural science this slide shows you the appropriations for our mission area from 2010 to 2017 the 2010 through 2016 numbers are the enacted and as you can see we had a dramatic decline in 2011 2012 and in 2013 across all four of the agencies that are within this mission area partial recovery in 2014 2015 and 2016 the 2017

01:02:20.000 - 01:02:55.520

numbers are the ones that are in the ag appropriations bill as as it currently stands it's not not been enacted and as you all know we're on a continuing resolution but in essence what this shows is that we have made a partial recovery but the the investment that's being made currently in our domestic research is below the level of 2010 and these are in inflation adjusted dollars

01:02:55.520 - 01:03:29.040

all of all of these figures lastly I there was a really interesting article that appeared in the September 15th issue of nature by Phil Partey and some of these colleagues at the University of Minnesota and what they have done is to collect 50 years of information from 158 countries around the world about their public as well as the private level investment in agricultural research

01:03:29.920 - 01:04:09.040

the bar if you look at the two big bars on the left of this slide the bar on the far left shows the public sector investment in all 158 countries in 1960 and that was a total of 6.2 billion dollars and the bar on the right reflects the 2011 investment public sector again and it had grown to 38.1 billion dollars these bars show the proportionate investment by high income

01:04:09.040 - 01:04:37.680

countries that's the ones in pink the middle income countries in blue and the low income countries you probably can't see from the back of the room it's the thin green line across the bottom three observations on these two bars on the left the middle income countries the one shown in blue are investing at this point more than the high income countries and a lot of that

01:04:37.680 - 01:05:10.240

growth is attributable to investments that China and India have been making and appropriately so to feed their growing populations the U.S. role is shown in the the bottom right hand corner of the pink part of both of these bars and the U.S. proportionate contribution has shrunk considerably over that 50-year point of period of time and lastly the thin green line across the bottom

01:05:10.240 - 01:05:42.080

shows that the low income countries where the greatest expectation would be of increases in agricultural productivity from research and the transfer of that information and technology would make the biggest difference are just woefully small proportion of the overall global investment if you turn to the right hand panel in the center of that are two bars that again compare on the

01:05:42.080 - 01:06:10.880

top 1980 on the bottom 2011 that show the the public versus the private so the cross hatched parts of the bars on the left hand side represent the public investment the solid ones on the right hand side of the bars the private investment and what this shows is that the increase that's happened in the middle income countries is largely attributable to the private sector investment

01:06:11.840 - 01:06:46.960

and lastly at the bottom of the the chart it shows the gap between the investment in the rich countries in the poor countries in 1960 that gap was seven to one on a per capita investment basis and in 2011 it was 12-fold so I again want to thank all all of the members of PCAST who were involved in doing the initial report on the challenges that are facing our food and agricultural

01:06:46.960 - 01:07:22.400

system and as I said I'm really pleased to say I think we've done the the best that we possibly could within our resource constraints to be as responsive to those recommendations and the president's budget has each year been very very supportive of the recommendations both with respect to the research funding in the department and also in encouraging

01:07:22.400 - 01:07:52.080

other departments to focus appropriately within their mission on some of the more fundamental questions that we can build on in in our programs so we very much appreciate that strong support the 2017 budget was for us a huge breakthrough the president's budget for the first time requested the fully authorized level of his support for our competitive grants program 700 million

01:07:53.840 - 01:08:21.200

we hope that when we get a full appropriation for 2017 congress might go back and reconsider that but as you could see in this slide that I showed previously the work that's been done so far on on our appropriations bill does not reflect that so that's it for me and I do you want to take questions now or do you want to have Joe talk even though they're okay complimentary but a related

01:08:21.200 - 01:08:55.920

then well thanks Kathy and thanks Maxine for chairing this session and having a part of it dedicated to soil I was going to talk about our efforts in OSTP on a new soil initiative well it's not new anymore but it was new a few years ago and the progress that we've made and what we can expect by the end of the administration I wanted to start by introducing my collaborators on

01:08:55.920 - 01:09:25.200

soil Parker Leo Toad and Rich Poyat who I'm not sure have been introduced to PCAST so perhaps you could just stand up two really important members of the OSTP team Parker is in the science division and Rich is in E&E and Tammy Dickinson has been kind enough to share him with us because he's a soil expert so this group has been working on trying to ask what we need to sustain soil and

01:09:25.200 - 01:09:53.440

it's interesting you know as you as you watch PCAST and just about every other scientific group that talks about environmental issues how infrequently soil is mentioned in everything from food to climate change to water purity to ecosystem services to the necessary features of life on earth and soil is as fundamental as anything else including water to our existence but it's something that

01:09:53.440 - 01:10:23.520

we literally walk on and disrespect by calling it dirt and rarely appreciate for its richness and importance in human existence and the stability of the earth so just for those who are less familiar with soil I think it's worth reviewing what it is it's one of the most complex systems on earth some people have argued that biologically it's the poor man's rainforest because it's so

01:10:23.520 - 01:10:55.200

biologically diverse it's a mixture of pulverized bedrock so it's very ancient in some ways more modern and weathered minerals that have been worked over by the environment climate and the biological environment of microbes animals and plants for millennia and it can take as much as 500 years to form even a couple of centimeters of topsoil so this is a very slow to form

01:10:57.120 - 01:11:24.160

product of very long geologic processes but that process can also be sped up and I'll just mention that a little bit at the at the end the richness of biological life lies largely in the microbial world there are about a billion cells at minimum for every gram of soil and the estimates of the number of species in each gram range from a few thousand to 40 thousand there was one estimate

01:11:24.160 - 01:11:52.560

of upwards of a million but I think that may have been an overestimate it's always in a dynamic state soil is never stable or static the water content is changing constantly in the daytime plants take water out of the soil at night there's a gush of water from the plants into the soil the temperature is constantly changing microbial life changes the chemistry and of course the rest

01:11:52.560 - 01:12:25.680

of the environment changes it on a regular basis and so the combination of the plants animals microbes and minerals give us this complex and very rich source of sustenance on earth it is critical for food security obviously we we grow our crops in soil NASA has taken a very strong interest in soil as you might have seen in a recent film that NASA collaborated on soil was the star of the Martian

01:12:26.720 - 01:12:56.080

and the reason is of course that to sustain life in a long-term sense on Mars we need a medium for growing plants and food climate mitigation is is also an important role of soil that's very often ignored it's one of the largest carbon storage bodies on earth it holds about 1500 gigatons of carbon across the earth there's a range of estimates but all of them exceed the estimates

01:12:56.080 - 01:13:22.640

of what is in the atmosphere in terms of carbon and how much carbon is in the earth's vegetation water quality is dictated by soil because soil is the biggest filter that we have on earth we would all be drinking gasoline from buried oil tanks across the country if we didn't have soil to filter the water and many other surface contaminants are removed by the time the water gets to our

01:13:22.640 - 01:13:52.400

groundwater and aquifers water manages soil manages the movement of water when it's healthy it keeps water moving downwards or into appropriate pathways when it's unhealthy water moves across its surfaces and is much less well managed for human uses under those circumstances and water availability is dramatically affected by soil healthy soil holds water and releases water in a

01:13:52.400 - 01:14:25.600

very regular pattern unhealthy soil has much less water holding capacity and has less of a modulating effect on local weather we depend on soil for bioenergy fuel production drugs for humans most of our antibiotics come from soil bacteria and for a constant stream of discovery of biodiversity which continues so some of the challenges for soil are that we don't manage it in a sustainable way

01:14:25.600 - 01:14:57.280

and so there is ongoing degradation and erosion of soil salinization and desertification across the world are ongoing issues of ways that we're losing productive soil land use has of course eroded our our amount of soil through urbanization and deforestation which are both extremely damaging to soil and can cause the entire loss of the the health of soil we've contaminated a lot

01:14:57.280 - 01:15:28.160

of our soils with heavy metals and other kinds of contaminants that the bacteria can't keep up with and have not yet remediated but over time they often will acid deposition from acid rain rain and eutrophication have been two outcomes of human activity with regard to soil climate change has been probably has become the greatest threat to soil and I think this is where

01:15:28.720 - 01:15:54.960

we need a particular amount of attention in the future because this is where we're seeing the most rapid change in soil stability one effect is the heavy rains that we see associated with climate change particularly in the Midwest and that can result in the movement of soil the erosion into for example the Mississippi River which then takes it down to the Gulf of Mexico causing the

01:15:54.960 - 01:16:19.200

dead zone in the Gulf and that can often lead to as much as 50% of the carbon from the soil being released to the atmosphere and that varies depending upon the soil how it's moved and how wet it is but this is just an example which is probably no surprise to this group of the effect of the increase in the extremely heavy precipitation that we see with climate change and so this is

01:16:19.200 - 01:16:49.360

a decadal portrait of the the frequency of very heavy precipitation events and you can see that since the 60s there's been a very steady increase in the frequency of these events in the 2000s we've heard quite a bit about these and particularly in sloped agricultural areas in the Midwest we see tremendous damage to the soil as a result the velocity of raindrops is one of the key elements

01:16:49.360 - 01:17:14.720

that that affects the frequency of erosion and the movement of soil these are some photographs from Iowa where soil and soil conservation are probably the best studied in the country and the top photograph where you see each of those little light spots the whitish yellowish spots those are areas where the soil is entirely eroded and it's down to subsoil and bedrock and so that

01:17:14.720 - 01:17:39.280

those points are complete exposure of what's supposed to be under the soil with no coverage there are a number of elements of these photographs that are disturbing one is how much soil is left exposed and you can see that this shouldn't happen but this is what a lot of the Midwest looks like for about eight months of the year and that leads to a very free movement of soil by wind and water

01:17:39.280 - 01:18:07.280

erosion but the the outcome of the damage is probably the most disturbing aspect we see an average soil loss in the country and across Iowa for example of about five tons per acre which while it's not devastating is not really sustainable because soil is recreated at less than about a half a ton per acre so the math isn't very hard to do there but that's getting to be a

01:18:07.280 - 01:18:33.120

serious average because although it may average five tons per acre there are areas that are being dramatically eroded at a much much higher rate in 2007 which is one of the years in recent years where we had some of those very very heavy rainstorms in the Midwest there were areas large areas of Iowa where soil was removed at a hundred tons per acre in one rainstorm so not in a in a year which

01:18:33.200 - 01:19:04.080

is the five ton per acre but in one rainstorm in one day and I'll show you some numbers on the next slide but that was thought to happen in about 138,000 acres across Iowa so that's a vast land mass that lost a hundred tons per acre in one rainstorm the loss of crop yield is estimated in many states to be quite high there are parts of Ohio that have estimated at 40% reduction in crop yield

01:19:04.880 - 01:19:31.280

and in Iowa it's estimated to be about a billion dollar loss across the state this is a projection that we developed looking at basically asking the question how long would our soil last at different rates of erosion and the top line you see is the the blue line is the average rate across the country of five tons per acre per year and you can see that we would still have a

01:19:31.280 - 01:19:56.640

fair amount of soil left by about a hundred years from now but eventually of course it would approach zero but it's unlikely that soil loss will continue at an average of five tons per acre and in some areas it will approach a hundred tons per acre per year and that's the most severe drop with the steepest slope that you see in the first curve first line which

01:19:56.640 - 01:20:23.360

shows that we wouldn't have any soil left by 2025 in those areas so that's pretty near term and I think is one of the greatest threats of climate change because although we don't expect all of our soil by any means to be eroding at a hundred tons per acre the land mass that is eroding at that rate is expanding across the country so these are the basic concerns and the question is what

01:20:23.360 - 01:20:52.000

can we do about it and we have a lot of tools to protect our soil a large amount of research over the last century has gone into understanding soil and a lot of technology over millennia in fact has gone into preserving and protecting soil we use incentives to farmers to practice good soil management and there's a lot of interesting research at USDA going on right now about

01:20:52.640 - 01:21:20.080

in behavioral economics looking at what does it take for farmers to adopt practices that protect the soil some have suggested consumer pressure we've been in conversations with some of the consumer advocacy groups that are thinking about labels and that kind of thing for safe soil practices applied to food education and training and publicizing the message about soil that it's an

01:21:20.080 - 01:21:48.800

important resource that's under threat I think is an important means to engage the public and citizen science research has become an important part of our research enterprise in soil partly because soil is so heterogeneous and we need such a fine-grained sampling strategy in order to get a complete picture of soil citizen science and using kids and students to sample soil much more

01:21:50.400 - 01:22:20.000

intensively than we could do from a scientific standard scientific way can be really important for gathering data data sharing is becoming a large issue because the size of the databases that are needed to maintain soil data are enormous and sharing the data has become a political and privacy issue because a lot of the data are collected on private farms and in some cases

01:22:20.000 - 01:22:45.840

by farmers and it's not clear that all of them want to share their data or clear to them why they should and then we have policies regulations and legislation that have been absolutely critical to the health of our soil and I just wanted to spend just a minute reviewing some of those one of the most important acts well that's not on here was 1936 President Roosevelt signed the

01:22:45.840 - 01:23:13.520

legislation that started the soil conservation service but more recently in 1985 the Food Security Act reduced erosion it's thought to have reduced erosion about 40 percent in its first seven to ten years after being enacted the 1990 amendments to the Clean Air Act also had a big effect largely because of the reduction in acid rain damage under Secretary Vilsack the Farm Bill

01:23:13.520 - 01:23:39.920

conservation programs have vastly increased the number of acres that are in conservation between the beginning of his tenure and this year and but the problem is that the federal government's authority is limited by many many aspects of the legislation and and the fierce independence of our farmers and many of the legislation has been changed over the years so that it's now up to

01:23:39.920 - 01:24:07.120

farmers to self-certify and there's very little outside accountability and that has created a problem because we don't know the quality of the soil preservation methods that many are using so the bottom line is that soil is eroding across our country at 10 times the rate that it's produced in other countries like China and India these numbers are 30 and 40 fold greater

01:24:07.920 - 01:24:38.400

and so this is a global issue and one that we need to pay attention to before it's too late so we in OSTP developed a soil workshop that provided the basis for a new interagency working group that is focusing on soil science and the workshop in August focused on identifying some of the strategies that we could use to study soil and inventory where it is and where it's

01:24:39.120 - 01:25:07.360

where we're losing it how we're managing it and methods to sustain it and then we obtained very broad input from an extremely diverse group of stakeholders one member of the community garden community said that and he's been in a lot of meetings about soil and about many other things he said he had never seen such an eclectic group brought together to discuss soil and it was

01:25:08.160 - 01:25:34.880

very very stimulating and productive process and we've been reviewing the products of that and passing those on to our new working groups so that they can begin to think about the role of the federal government in the future of soil we focused in that group on all kinds of soil this was not just agricultural we focused on urban soils and the so-called vulnerable soils and forest

01:25:34.880 - 01:26:01.920

and range and range land some of the opportunities that were identified in the workshop were new incentives for example the idea of consumer driven food labels that would tell consumers that soil friendly practices had been used in the production of their food developing a messaging campaign for example the extending the concept of tree cities which are across the United States

01:26:01.920 - 01:26:29.440

to develop earth cities where cities could sign up to become earth cities if they met a number of criteria and then working on entrepreneurs this is an ongoing discussion with entrepreneurs who develop composting companies locally and developing more of a network of those replicating them across the country and then finally galvanizing the research community to develop even more innovative

01:26:29.440 - 01:26:55.520

and creative ideas for preserving soil and hopefully building soil so that we can increase the rate at which soil is produced I thought I would just end on the idea that soil has been considered a precious and determining resource for a very long time long before 1936 but one quote that I think is worth remembering from President Roosevelt as he signed the legislation

01:26:55.520 - 01:27:18.240

that created the soil conservation service in USDA he said the history of every nation is eventually written in the way in which it cares for its soil the United States is now emerging from its youthful stage of heedless exploitation this is just following the dustball and is beginning to realize the supreme importance of treating the soil well and here we are

01:27:19.360 - 01:27:43.520

most of the way through another century and I think we need to consider those words as we go forward with not only agriculture but the rest of our environmental management strategies I want to thank you both we're going to run another 15 minutes so that we have chance for questions and we'll shorten the break a little I want to thank you about Kathy's

01:27:44.720 - 01:28:11.760

conversation with sort of more uplifting because she's been implementing this research and then we hear this the soil had very very scary and and your action needed now so well so Jim gate you were up before and put it down so I'll go first with you and thank you very much I have to first of all commend all the briefers because as Catherine was speaking I had a question

01:28:11.760 - 01:28:40.400

about the interplay between this new foundation and agribusiness and you dispensed with that question and then I a second question came to mind about as you know PCAST has done a report on cities and so that naturally raised my mind a question about urban agriculture and then at the end of Joe's presentation I heard her also mention that there was this workshop so let me go to the second

01:28:40.400 - 01:28:59.040

question which is on urban agriculture to in my mind they're you know urban agriculture to me looks a little bit like distributive generation of power you know it's one of these things that people talk about and it's out there but do you really think it's going to play a substantial role in meeting the needs for food security into the future?

01:29:02.320 - 01:29:26.640

I can start and Kathy can pick it up when you look at the numbers of in terms of the proportion of food that was provided by the victory gardens of World War II it's actually quite remarkable I think at some points people estimated it was 40 percent of the food consumed so yeah I think local agriculture and very small-scale agriculture intensive agriculture can be really important

01:29:26.640 - 01:29:51.200

as we begin to see more modern techniques like vertical agriculture and using land in completely new ways I think that productivity will increase and I think the intensive interest in this in urban environments partly for improving local nutrition has really sparked some some interest so yeah I think this is a very very important area and as we heard about yesterday land use is

01:29:51.200 - 01:30:21.200

changing in urban environments in so many ways you know what if we turn some of those parking ramps we talked about into agricultural production sites. So I would echo what Joe has just said and amplify it by saying urban agriculture is already making a contribution to food security here in the United States and through our statistical agency the National Agricultural

01:30:21.200 - 01:30:54.480

Statistics Service they are attempting to develop the sampling frames so that we can actually begin printing reliable statistics about how much food is being produced in urban areas and coming into into the food supply and it turns out to be a very considerable sampling challenge so it it's a research project at this point to develop that sampling frame

01:30:55.200 - 01:31:25.440

and then I regret that I didn't introduce Dr. Bartuska to you at the beginning of the panel Anne is deputy undersecretary in the department my really very relied upon deputy and she has been working with a working group on urban agriculture that we've established within the department and you might talk a little bit about that. I'm always pleased to talk about urban agriculture

01:31:25.440 - 01:31:48.640

it's it's one of these actually urban systems in general from an ecological perspective has just really taken off and those of us involved in ecosystem research have seen the resurgence of looking at urban systems in an integrated way. In urban ag space one of the things I've been privileged to do is get out and about over the last six years to a lot of our funded projects

01:31:48.640 - 01:32:12.800

and in the community foods program this is my long introduction to the answer. In the community foods program sponsored by NIFA I've had a chance to to see a lot of different community agriculture activities and it has been clear that urban ag is just blossoming everywhere and all sorts of manifestations a lot of it to do with community security and this is one of the

01:32:12.800 - 01:32:35.200

things that is really when we since we were talking about social science earlier there's a very strong tie to social sciences in urban ag they don't see in rural ag and it's a very different manifestation of how food brings people together. It really hits the sweet spot in nutritional security and addressing food deserts and I think Kathy is right we really need to get the data

01:32:35.200 - 01:33:00.080

because right now it's very anecdotal. I was at a farm in Cleveland that is one of 40 urban farms that produced 22,000 pounds last year well how does that contribute to the overall production in the Cleveland City itself? This is the long introduction to what USDA ended up doing and because many of these county extension agents I would meet out there would

01:33:00.080 - 01:33:25.360

say so what does urban is there an urban ag program at USDA? No there's not however every single agency has urban agriculture activities and we have produced a toolkit called the Urban Agriculture Toolkit. It is really accessible we've validated it with people who are in communities and it tries to convey all the different questions somebody might have in venturing into urban ag

01:33:25.360 - 01:33:51.840

how do I set up a farm stand? How do I get access to composting? We are new and emerging composting research which we actually have a unit at ARS in Beltsville that's doing that. How do I start an urban farm? Where are the financial mechanisms? How do the conservation practices? So I think we have in truthfully in less than two years gone from a not talking about urban ag to fully embracing

01:33:51.840 - 01:34:15.360

urban ag to the point where we now have there's been an urban ag piece of legislation introduced to set up an office of urban agriculture at USDA. I don't know if we need that because I know that we've got a lot of programs but it is I think it is an incredibly powerful growth area which gets to my last point and that in touching where Americans learn it is in urban areas because

01:34:15.360 - 01:34:37.680

that's where 80 percent of American people are. This whole vast pipeline that we've been struggling with if we can touch urban youth through agriculture and these kinds of food production systems then that actually helps contribute to our overall pipeline and then since I have the microphone I did want to add throw in one little bit of factoid for the water piece that 85 percent of the service

01:34:37.680 - 01:35:00.320

derived drinking water of this country comes from our agricultural lands and forests for the 2005 RPA assessment analysis. We have a role in sustainability of water through our sustainable agricultural and forestry practices so it's a the connections are really really strong. Thank you for the question. Thank you and interesting the British you have these local

01:35:00.320 - 01:35:22.880

settlements all the time for farming they decrease now they're back again and it's the same same kind of cycling. John jump the line has that. Yeah I just have two quick comments one I wanted everyone to know that Dr. Bartuska in addition to her extensive responsibilities in USDA has now taken on the chairmanship of the subcommittee on global change research

01:35:23.760 - 01:35:47.040

under the Committee on Environment Natural Resources and Sustainability of the National Science and Technology Council and that in that role she is overseeing the whole U.S. global change research program a 13 agency 2.7 billion dollar operation so I just wanted to thank Anne publicly for taking on that very important responsibility she is the first

01:35:47.040 - 01:36:12.720

biologist to chair that very important committee. My second observation is I was just struck by Dr. Handelsman's initial description of how complex soil is I remembered being in the audience for a lecture on soil and sustainability by a very distinguished biologist 48 years ago when I was a graduate student at Stanford and this distinguished biologist began his remarks by

01:36:12.720 - 01:36:39.520

saying too many people imagine that soil is just a collection of crushed rock that keeps plants from blowing away in the wind and anyway and then he said it is not and proceeded to give remarks about the complexity and importance of the soil ecosystem much along the lines of what Joe just delivered although much less informed by details that soil science has produced in between so thank you Joe

01:36:39.520 - 01:37:08.160

for that very informative presentation. And how much more erosion in the 50 year 48 years has occurred since that talk started then. Barbara. Well thank you for the presentation. When we initially worked on the agriculture project for for PCAST we had a number of workshops and one of the most interesting was something that you touched on Dr. Wotecki and that was the

01:37:08.160 - 01:37:35.920

relationship between basic research and applied research and the relative roles of the academic sector and extension agents and research stations and the private sector. And one of the most remarkable moments to me at that one of those meetings was the statement from folks from some very large corporations and their comment was that they no longer do basic research that

01:37:35.920 - 01:38:01.840

they rely on the research operations of the government and of universities. And of course what they do superbly is some of the breeding studies and some of the applications. We had just talked earlier this morning about the the challenges of moving basic science through into practice and of course when you've got different actors doing these two different things

01:38:01.840 - 01:38:25.040

that becomes even more of a challenge. And so one of the things that we talked about was the public private partnerships. Now we see that in FFAR's work where you have the private sector supporting agriculture research in some very interesting areas. But that really doesn't get at this moving the basics from basic science to practice. So I wonder if you could comment on that.

01:38:25.760 - 01:38:58.880

I certainly can. And as you were talking what I immediately thought about was with respect to agricultural science the United States traditionally has been where that fundamental science is done by and large. Northern Europe another major contributor. And if you looked closely at those two big bars that showed the the the wealthy countries contributions

01:38:59.600 - 01:39:33.600

the places where that fundamental science and agriculture and its immediate applications at the beginning of the applied part of the pipeline have been made have been in Europe and in the United States. And that is where the investment has has gone down. I about a year ago OECD asked if we would be volunteer to be the subjects of a study. They've been doing a series of case

01:39:33.600 - 01:40:05.200

studies of agricultural research in different countries. And we agreed to do that their report is going to be coming out in November. And this question of fundamental science in agriculture and how it gets applied is one of the things that they've looked at now in six different countries. So you ask Canada Australia China they're going to be finishing up a couple of other countries.

01:40:05.920 - 01:40:42.960

And for me a big question and going to the really the thrust of your report is you know where is that fundamental science for for agriculture going to be coming from in the future because most of the other countries are more in the applied locally adapting plants animal and systems to their local conditions. So I think that is is a challenge for us. Domestically we have established

01:40:42.960 - 01:41:12.160

and really strengthened building on existing working relationships both with the National Science Foundation and with the Department of Energy on the plant sciences and with NIH on on the animal sciences. So there's a very strong collaborative research community in a set of programs. And I think that transfer of the fundamental science like the Department of Energy

01:41:12.160 - 01:41:43.920

and RPE has been funding and we they we actually meet with them regularly about the transfer of the findings from that into our own research programs and then then building on those. So I think that's strong and ongoing with the private sector they're built into our planning programs both for the competitive side of the house and the intramural side of the house

01:41:43.920 - 01:42:13.440

are regular consultations as those programs are reviewed and evaluated on about a five-year basis. I know that that that is ongoing but I mean to the roundtable that we're talking about setting up I think this questions of where should the federal USDA research investment on the more fundamental side go is going to be one of those key questions for that further discussion.

01:42:14.320 - 01:42:37.440

We have sort of less than five minutes and we have three questions coming. So each of the people would ask their questions quickly and then answer them all. Thank you. I just want to quickly follow up on Barbara's question. Kathy when when we work together first of all when we did work together as co-chairs of the

01:42:37.440 - 01:43:01.680

agriculture report I've got to say you were just an incredible partner in that effort and really a model for how PCAST could work effectively with the departments to really figure out how to make the report best received by the agricultural community because I think you used the word tough love for our report. There were there were some you know there were some tough things we had some

01:43:01.680 - 01:43:25.360

carrots but some but it was some tough recommendations and you really helped us make that translate that to be able to be heard in an effective way. My question really is about the agricultural research community. One of the challenges we saw was the what we call the balkanization of agriculture in this country that the the agricultural research communities generally are separated from

01:43:25.360 - 01:43:47.680

the rest of the sciences. There are different institutions even when they're at the same institutions there are different parts of campuses and our hope was that the among other things we didn't have any specific recommendations for that although certainly the increase in competitive funding which we thought was critical could help that provided it didn't all get scuttled to the

01:43:48.400 - 01:44:15.360

existing community. The question is over the last several years now have you seen any progress in that in that the recognition that the broader chemistry biology or science communities have gotten more engaged in agricultural science viewing it as a as a as a fundamental area. Just hold the question because we'll get to Mario. Okay thanks a lot for the presentations.

01:44:15.360 - 01:44:41.280

My question has to do with part of a Joseph presentation on the effect of climate change on agriculture but there is the other side which is the potential for agriculture to capture carbon and that that's something potentially very important in fact it came out in in the Paris Accord as you know last December and the United States made commitments related to that.

01:44:41.280 - 01:45:06.720

So my question is to what extent is that really part of the research agenda because it's not obvious that the carbon will stay there and so yet the potential is enormous and a related question is there's another worry with agriculture and climate which is emissions of nitrous oxide which could be also limited quite a bit they come from excessive use of fertilizers that also have

01:45:08.160 - 01:45:34.800

pollute water and so on but then there are these other connections which I believe are a very important component of the research agenda so I'm just wondering whether to what extent is that actually happening. Bill, next question. So my question is also to Joe. It sounds like soil is in some sense nature's original smart material and I wonder in that sense has there been any attempt

01:45:34.800 - 01:46:06.480

to interest material scientists in interventions in soil that one might make to improve the smart properties of it as you've discussed you know absorbing releasing water erosion erosion ability and so on and so forth. Okay so Kathy you want John I assume that you asked major comment. So Kathy you want to answer Dan? Yeah so quick quick response. I think that yes there has been

01:46:06.480 - 01:46:41.280

progress made on breaking down some of those barriers. I can point to specific campuses where that is occurring and largely it is being driven by the emergence of agriculture and food systems as being critical in long-term sustainability of the planet you know it just keeps emerging over and over and in getting more and more public scrutiny so I think that is definitely

01:46:41.280 - 01:47:10.800

happening. There remains one key barrier to non-langrant universities participating in our competitive programs and that is the cap that's imposed by the Congress on indirect costs so we have a cap at 30% and there are many universities as I understand it who say that they don't want their faculty applying under those terms. Interesting I didn't know that there was a difference

01:47:10.800 - 01:47:40.480

among departments but Joe wants the two. So on the COP 21 agreement as you know France introduced the idea of this four per thousand that we all increase the carbon content of soil across the world by 0.4% which would mitigate all of our emissions. The US did not sign on to that because there's concern that it would not be measurable it would not be we couldn't hold ourselves accountable

01:47:40.480 - 01:48:05.920

and we couldn't study progress but that doesn't mean that we're not committed to the basic concept there's an enormous amount of research going on in that area personally of course I think there should be more but that's an area both the emission of greenhouse gases as well as carbon capture. One of the I think the happy coincidences is that things that help with soil protection

01:48:05.920 - 01:48:30.160

are also the very practices that will increase carbon capture such as using cover crops and you know having more photosynthesis going on overall so I think that's an area of interest and Anne might want to add something to that and then the material science I think that's a very rich area Bill. There's a lot of new nanotechnology looking at how to recreate the best properties of

01:48:30.240 - 01:48:55.120

soil more rapidly and that's one of the goals that we've set in the discussion of our working group is how can we or can we create soil and is that a reasonable grand challenge for example to speed up the rate of soil production which can be done with compost and other substances that are much you know older but nanotechnology in particular and other material sciences I think

01:48:55.120 - 01:49:21.280

are going to be critical. Anne did you want to Anna? I just the one thing I might add to it answers a couple of the questions or contributes to that is USDA our secretary charged us to establish the building blocks for greenhouse gas emissions mitigation which are 10 building blocks a couple of them have to do with science but a lot of it has to do with carbon carbon smart practices

01:49:21.280 - 01:49:46.400

in agriculture and forestry. I think the building blocks is actually online at the USDA site but it is stimulating additional research in carbon capture in soils including biochar and the potential for biochar and there have been some polymer biopolymers that have been looked at from some material scientists as a mechanism to enhance the biochar so it actually has a cumulative

01:49:46.400 - 01:50:09.280

processes so I think we're trying to hit it at various places and of course then it comes back to how do we inform our conservation programs to then make sure that the users of conservation programs apply those practices which gets to our earlier discussion on this translation so but the building blocks I think gives us a really good framework on greenhouse gas mitigation and that's

01:50:09.280 - 01:50:37.440

balanced I think by our climate change research portfolio. Well I want to thank the three of you for all the work you're doing and also the excellent treatment. We'll take a break and we'll be back let's say about 10-12 minutes and we'll be back for the second part of this meeting. So I'd like to welcome everybody back. The next part of our meeting we're going to address

01:50:38.080 - 01:51:04.560

a topic of biodefense biosecurity. PCAST has had a working group addressing this topic and it has been co-chaired by Wanda Austin and Chris Chiba who I believe are ready to bring us some recommendations to PCAST for consideration. I'm going to turn it over to Wanda and Chris to lead us through a brief reminder and then tell us about the recommendations coming forward.

01:51:05.520 - 01:51:30.000

Good morning and thank you Eric. Chris and I have divided the labor here so I'm going to get us started and then Chris is going to back clean up. So let me just remind PCAST that we started this working group about a year ago with a focus on trying to identify what actions are needed to protect against biological attack and the working group was focused on trying to decrease

01:51:30.000 - 01:51:55.680

the probability of or be able to preempt that biological attack and to understand what we could do from an S&T perspective in this area. So our charts show the formal list of members. There are a lot of covert members who have been extremely helpful on this effort. Specifically on PCAST both John Holdren and you Eric have been extremely helpful as we've been

01:51:55.680 - 01:52:17.840

going through this process and understanding you know what would be what kinds of recommendations we could bring forward that would be actionable and move the ball forward in terms of our accomplishment here. I also want to acknowledge the PCAST staff members, the White House staff members. Joe Handelsman is another person who really contributed quite a bit to our progress on

01:52:17.840 - 01:52:45.280

this and there were just many many people over a hundred interactions phone calls meetings that were held with quite a few different agencies including DHS, HHS, the Department of Agriculture, the Office of the DNI, the DOD, the NSC in addition to the organizations that you might anticipate. Plus we had a session with the United Kingdom Prime Ministers Council of

01:52:45.280 - 01:53:06.400

Science and Technology Advisors and so this is a global issue that we are trying to get our arms around. The specific working group members are highlighted here. They did an outstanding job even beyond the point where we stopped our formal working group meetings. They have been actively engaged by email with helping the edits and write-ups that have been required. So special

01:53:06.400 - 01:53:31.600

thanks to Roger Brent, Mark Buller, Tom Inglesby, David Railman and Tim Stearns. So I couldn't have done it without them and and of course Jerry Epstein has been a done a yeoman's job for us from the staff perspective. I just want to remind PCAST of the study goals. There were two primary goals that we focused on. The decrease in the probability of an attack and also decreasing

01:53:31.600 - 01:54:00.000

the probability of or preempting a biological attack not only within the U.S. but worldwide because as I mentioned this is a problem that crosses boundaries very easily. The challenge here is naturally occurring infectious disease, accidental releases or intentional attacks and as you think about our current approaches either of stop piling vaccines given today's technology

01:54:00.000 - 01:54:25.440

we realize this may not continue to be an effective approach considering when you look at the technology available in bioengineering for genome editing there are lots of things that can be done that are beneficial to the country but there's also the potential for misuse and so we had a lot of interesting discussions about the range of possibilities there.

01:54:25.440 - 01:54:51.200

We also had the opportunity to observe some recent outbreaks and how it was addressed specifically if you look at Ebola influenza even Zika and the impact that it can have and how it can undermine the trust of the public you can understand why this is a really critical issue at this point today. So what I'd like to do now really is focus on describing the

01:54:51.200 - 01:55:16.320

recommendations. I will describe the first three. Chris is going to describe the subsequent recommendations and then the PCAST will see a full report right up on this before the next meeting but today we want to focus and ask for approval on the recommendations themselves. We've had a lot of comment and feedback from the team in the last I would say a couple of months

01:55:16.320 - 01:55:41.600

and we think we've reflected those changes in the words that you see represented on the charts today. So recommendation one is a near-term recommendation and it's focused on the creation of a new interagency entity that would be charged with the planning coordination and oversight of our national biodefense activities. This would be across the intelligence community and the DOD

01:55:42.160 - 01:56:02.640

departments of Homeland Security health and human services and agriculture. Other agencies could obviously and would obviously be drawn in as needed. The key thing here is on the leadership of this effort we would expect and suggest that it be co-led by the assistant to the president for Homeland Security and counterterrorism, the assistant to the president for science and

01:56:02.640 - 01:56:29.440

technology and the chair of the domestic policy council. This would be senior level representation that could would also tap resources from agencies including HSS, the center for disease control and prevention and BARDA, the biomedical advanced research projects administration and the national institutes of health. The things that this entity would be charged with doing

01:56:31.280 - 01:56:56.880

first we're asking that within six months they would develop a national biodefense strategy which would have both short, medium and long-term components to really think forward about how to anticipate, prepare for and respond to the issues that would arise from the biotechnology that continues to advance. And one of the things that we really want to stress here is that this landscape

01:56:56.880 - 01:57:25.920

is changing dramatically on a very short timeline. So the second action here is to suggest that there be annual public updates which could be in the form of a report and that would necessarily include a classified annex because what we don't want to do is provide a recipe here for someone with nefarious intentions and the intent would be to present that to the president so that we could track and measure

01:57:25.920 - 01:57:51.440

the progress to achieving that strategy and as necessary update that strategy. Also this entity would be charged with overseeing the execution of the national biodefense strategy and holding all the agencies accountable for progress. I would refer to the fact that we did present in a classified form some classified recommendations that also align with the recommendations that we're presenting

01:57:51.440 - 01:58:14.960

today. Specifically there are some guiding requirements and taskings for the intelligence community and they too would be held accountable for adequate collection and analysis of the current and future biological threats and have the right expertise to do that. And then the final element of this first recommendation is to ensure the coordination of the efforts against new and

01:58:14.960 - 01:58:41.120

emerging infectious disease antibiotic resistance and intentional bio threats including through the development of biosurveillance systems and new medical countermeasures. This is something that we recognize that as this entity is formed and coordinates with all the relevant entities that they will have some specific suggestions on how to begin to get their arms around this very

01:58:41.120 - 01:59:08.160

significant challenge. So that's recommendation one. Recommendation two is focused on the establishment of a public health emergency response fund of at least two billion dollars. And the purpose of the fund would be to support the mobilization of rapid federal responses to serious rapidly emerging natural or intentional disease events. Public health interventions,

01:59:08.160 - 01:59:33.200

scientific research, regulatory activities and global response. So when I think of this a good analogy is the FEMA disaster relief fund and the expectation would be that these funds would carry over across years and could easily be replenished through routine and emergency appropriations. The access to the funds would be contingent upon the express authorization of the president or a

01:59:33.200 - 01:59:57.280

joint agreement of the secretaries of health and human services and the department of Homeland Security. So as we've seen and learned from recent outbreaks, one of the challenges that we have as a nation is being able to fund the relief and emergency response efforts in order to get on top of the issue as quickly as we can. And then quickly let me turn to the third recommendation. Now this

01:59:57.280 - 02:00:21.520

recommendation is viewed as something that's more in the medium term in terms of a recommendation where the two earlier ones were more near-term things that could be accomplished. But this is focused on development of a capability for disease surveillance. And what we recommend is that the White House should act to substantially strengthen federal, state and local public health infrastructure

02:00:21.520 - 02:00:44.400

for disease surveillance, as well as promote a stronger international system of disease surveillance. And so the point here is that, you know, when disease spreads, it really doesn't carry a passport. It's free to go wherever it wants to go and can migrate very quickly. In the same sense, and if you take the flip side of that, the indications in warning that you have a problem or

02:00:44.400 - 02:01:06.800

even something like fevers of unknown origin, that you want to have those sensors out very broadly looking for those indications so that you can respond in a timely manner. So the point here is that disease surveillance and maturing the capability to do that is something that's really important. So there's two aspects of this recommendation. One is the laboratory networks

02:01:06.800 - 02:01:30.640

in the U.S. and abroad with the capability for early detection and rapid monitoring of both the man-made and the naturally occurring infectious agents. And the second one is to rapidly be able to employ advanced biological tools. The details of those recommendations are included. With that, let me turn control of the charts over to Chris. Thank you. Thank you, Wanda.

02:01:31.440 - 02:01:53.920

The final three recommendations are medium and long-term recommendations, and all of them have to do with medical countermeasures. What I want to do is describe those last three recommendations and then make a few concluding remarks. So our fourth recommendation is for the White House to set an ambitious 10-year goal, and we recognize and the individuals and the agencies with whom

02:01:53.920 - 02:02:20.320

we've spoken to about this recognize how ambitious this goal is, but we think it's necessary as a 10-year objective. It's a goal for medical countermeasures preparedness, and it has two parts. One is that for infectious organisms through which there exist effective approaches to creating vaccines, we want to be in a position in a decade to have the ability to complete the development,

02:02:20.320 - 02:02:45.120

manufacture, clinical testing, and licensure of a vaccine on a six-month time scale, a radically different position than the one we're in today. And the second objective is that for infectious organisms that we can reasonably anticipate could lead to a sudden epidemic spread to the United States. We want to have pre-tested vaccine candidates up through safety and immunogenicity

02:02:45.120 - 02:03:15.360

studies. As a form of accountability, the Secretary of Health and Human Services and the Secretary of Defense should report annually to the White House on progress towards this goal. Our fifth recommendation is one that reaches back to PCAS 2014 antimicrobial resistance report, our report on combating antimicrobial resistance, which this group will remember was released

02:03:15.360 - 02:03:38.800

along with an executive order by the President on combating antibiotic resistant bacteria and a national strategy and ultimately national action plan. So the recommendation begins by calling for the full implementation of the recommendations PCAS made in that report with respect to combating antimicrobial resistance in particular for antibiotic development to expand fundamental

02:03:38.800 - 02:04:00.720

research, to establish a robust national infrastructure to support clinical trials, to strengthen and expand the existing regulatory efforts and to significantly increase economic incentives for antibiotics. In addition to reiterating those goals for antibiotics, there is a kind of parallel set of goals for antivirals that would address the viral part

02:04:00.720 - 02:04:27.360

of the problem that we did not speak to obviously in the antibiotic resistance report that could only address bacteria and fungi, but we're now expanding that to look at viruses. In addition, we call for the United States to support the development of platform technologies that could allow rapid response to agents of biological attack through a variety of

02:04:27.360 - 02:04:55.520

technologies that we identify that should be examined, including, for example, engineered antibiotics. So again, an effort towards increasing the rapidity of our response in the event that we do face an outbreak. Recommendation six is our single long-term recommendation in the study. And you can think of it as, in one sense, a kind of call to the scientific community. It's a call

02:04:55.520 - 02:05:19.600

for basic and applied research, for the government to support basic and applied research, and as with recommendation four, we have a suggestion on the amount of funds that should be made available to support this work. But this is really with the intention of taking us into an altogether different realm as a long-term objective. Maybe this is two decades in the future.

02:05:19.600 - 02:05:41.200

But down the road in the future, given what we may be facing, both with respect to emerging infectious diseases, which seem, you know, this is a drumbeat that seems to get ever more insistent, but also with respect to this explosion of capabilities for the intentional manipulation of microorganisms, given what may be coming at us down the road, we want to have the ability to

02:05:43.520 - 02:06:07.840

we want to put in place new types of countermeasures that will give us the ability to deliver those countermeasures within days of identifying, of detecting and identifying or characterizing in a disease agent. That's a, you know, at this point, I don't know that we, that PCS can even say what the approach would be to take to such a capability. We list a number of approaches that

02:06:07.840 - 02:06:28.960

should be explored, but that is after all the point of a basic research program. Those are our six recommendations. I'd like to make a final set of comments, and then they may be that other members of the working group or PCS leadership would like to add some remarks, and we can open it for questions. You know, our first recommendation that Wanda highlighted

02:06:28.960 - 02:06:49.200

calls for a national biodefense strategy, and that has to be a living document with metrics and accountability. What PCS report is, is obviously not meant to be that comprehensive strategy. Our group was too small in our time, was too limited. But our report, if you look, look at our recommendations, you see that our report has the representative elements

02:06:49.200 - 02:07:11.120

of such a comprehensive strategy, right? It has to look at short-term, medium-term, and long-term issues. It has to understand the kinds of evolution of biotechnological capabilities that we're facing, and that we might face in the future as those technologies continue to evolve. It has to look at preventing attack and understanding what capabilities of

02:07:11.120 - 02:07:33.920

adversaries may be, what their intentions and motives might be, for the prevention of attack, but also in the event that we do face an attack or a natural disease outbreak. It has to address countermeasures to such an event. And it has to think seriously about the connection between addressing a natural disease outbreak and learning from addressing natural

02:07:33.920 - 02:07:58.800

disease outbreaks to help us better prepare for the next natural disease outbreak, or should it happen to dealing with a human-engineered attack. So our recommendations can't be as complete as would need to be those of a comprehensive strategy, but they span what's needed in that strategy. They address threat awareness so that we can improve our ability to see what might be coming,

02:07:58.880 - 02:08:21.760

and also that we have a greater opportunity to prevent, interdict, or deter such an attack. They address surveillance so that if an outbreak occurs, natural or human-engineered, we detect it as quickly as possible so that we can mount as quick a response as possible. They address, as I've already said, learning from infectious disease outbreaks.

02:08:22.320 - 02:08:42.080

And then they address the need for a response capability, both this fund, so when there's a flood in the United States, FEMA doesn't have to go to Congress and apply for funds to address the flood. We want a comparable capability so that the next time there is a serious outbreak, the relevant agencies can move out immediately to address that outbreak.

02:08:42.080 - 02:08:58.480

And what are they going to move out with? Well, those will be medical countermeasures. And we list, as you just saw, a set of areas where we think there's a need for improvement and looking into the future, where there's a need for substantial improvement if we're going to meet the future that may be coming at us.

02:09:02.160 - 02:09:25.520

Above all, perhaps, though, what's needed is leadership, leadership, accountability, and planning. That planning needs to take into account the trajectory of the technology, but I think this is the most challenging aspect of it. It needs somehow to maintain focus on this issue, even if, as we all hope, we continue to move in a future in which attacks keep not

02:09:25.520 - 02:09:45.760

happening, in which attentional attacks don't happen, but nevertheless the focus is maintained because the capabilities have to be advanced and have to be ready. Those are my final comments on what has been a challenging year and a half, and I'd like to ask other members of the working group or PCAS leadership if they have comments

02:09:45.760 - 02:10:08.080

to make. I want to thank both of you, Wanda and Chris, for your leadership on this. It's a complex topic, and yes, you haven't laid out a whole national strategy, but what I think you've done is you've really identified that the landscape has continued to develop and that we're going to need to think differently about a national strategy and provided the elements

02:10:08.080 - 02:10:29.360

for that and provided a framework for ensuring that we do that in a thoughtful and ongoing way. So I think that's a major contribution there. I would turn to PCAS for questions. I see that Bill has his flag up and Susan has her flag up, Bill. Thanks, Chris, and thanks, Wanda, especially for your leadership on this.

02:10:30.480 - 02:11:00.960

It seems to me that the headline or at least a headline of your recommendations in the sense of being what's unexpected is your recommendation that a strategic plan incorporate both natural outbreaks and attacks against the United States. And I understand that the biology is closely related in the same and that there are synergies there, but it's also true that the way our

02:11:00.960 - 02:11:31.920

government is organized is not along those lines. It's organized so that public health is in one set of stovepipes and fence is in another set of stovepipes. So I wonder if you could comment on the difficulties that you could foresee in trying to bring those stovepipes together to reach this kind of unified approach. So one aspect of this, Bill, that we had some presentations on,

02:11:31.920 - 02:11:56.720

which I thought was very insightful, is that one of the things that we're charged with is protecting the health of our warfighters, who would be logically maybe the first line of attack here in terms of being exposed to some horrible agent. So I think it's in the interest of being effective on both sides of that ledger that we figure this out, because it isn't going to be

02:11:56.720 - 02:12:17.600

a serial process that we potentially are exposed in. I think that the natural occurring diseases is something that we worry about as we send soldiers into harm's way in foreign areas, and also the fact that if someone were looking to, you know, how could they have a significant impact again, it might be our Department of Defense that would be front and center on that.

02:12:17.600 - 02:12:37.600

So I think that there are some forcing functions that would say that everybody needs to come to the play and have a vested interest in addressing this issue, because it is not going to be compartmentalized in a way that says that you get a pass. I might add just a few comments to that. The first is, I think it's important, well,

02:12:37.600 - 02:13:02.960

well, clearly this report is informed by a sense that we need to learn everything we can from dealing with infectious disease outbreaks, both for the next outbreak, of which there will certainly be one, or for preparing for a human-made event. I think everyone also recognizes that a human-made attack could be very different from a naturally occurring outbreak, in particular with respect

02:13:02.960 - 02:13:25.760

to the rapidity with which it could develop, the possibility that it could be launched in many locations simultaneously. And frankly, the way the disease would progress could be quite different, even if it was a naturally occurring organism, because of the way the disease would be deployed. So there are important differences, but nevertheless, as you say, all of this needs

02:13:25.760 - 02:13:45.600

to be brought together somehow into a comprehensive approach. And I think that's one of the the challenge there is one of the reasons that the recommendation, the first recommendation that Dr. Austin presented talks about the need for this entity that combines the assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, the assistance of the President for Science

02:13:45.600 - 02:14:05.520

and Technology, and the Chair of the Domestic Policy Council, because all three of those prongs have to be well coordinated. You know, if you go down into the weeds, the coordination continues. Somehow the strategy has to look both towards counter-proliferation and also towards counter terrorism. There are many pieces of the security puzzle that have to be brought together,

02:14:06.400 - 02:14:28.240

which means that there is going to need to be some kind of dedicated staff. This is now me speaking beyond what's in the text of this recommendation. I want to be clear about that. There needs to be a dedicated staff at the White House that spans, that either spans that range or if they're in separate places, are in regular frequent communication,

02:14:30.160 - 02:14:57.920

and that are primarily committed to this set of studies. Another challenge we face is that because fortunately intentional attacks don't happen frequently, anyone addressing these issues is naturally going to be pulled off into other crises that are occurring. And yet that risks removing the ability to maintain a kind of strategic focus

02:14:57.920 - 02:15:25.360

to continue the kind of tech awareness on the way the evolution of the technology is proceeding and so on. So I think that there will also need to be a dedicated staff that supports this triumvirate of people that span the agencies. You've talked some in the report about and in the recommendations about the longer term

02:15:26.800 - 02:15:55.440

and thinking about 10 years out at least. And I'm thinking about the pipeline. Do we have the right educational programs in place so that we'll have a continuing supply of people with the expertise we need? So our report did not address pipeline issues, although there are several reports by this body

02:15:55.440 - 02:16:21.760

that have looked at significant pipeline issues and it may be the gym gates or others around the table should also chime in. You know, we heard a, PCAST has had just a recent briefing on the importance of ensuring that our scientific pipeline takes advantage of everyone in the country, including underrepresented groups and women. And there are some areas in science

02:16:21.760 - 02:16:41.600

that do a better job with that than others. But clearly, if we're going to mount the most competent national response to this challenge, we need to take advantage of everybody in the United States and ensure that we are not leaking out of that pipeline individuals that have, you know, every bit as much capability as the more traditional people in those fields,

02:16:41.680 - 02:17:02.320

but for some reason or for a variety of reasons, some of which we can already well identify are not always making it through to the end of your pipeline. So that's one topic. You know, if I could, I'd expand out just a little bit and ask whether people that are coming through a traditional education in molecular biology or microbiology

02:17:02.880 - 02:17:25.840

or any of the associated disciplines are along the way being tuned into these issues or being taught to think about these topics and at least mentally prepare themselves. I think we're doing a bit better for that now than we used to. And I think there's an enormous, this is now a personal comment from what I've seen. I think there's an enormous hunger for that. When we ran a seminar

02:17:25.840 - 02:17:48.640

series at Princeton on these topics, we ran it in the genomics building. Every seminar we held was packed and packed out. The room was overflowing. And that started with the undergraduates all the way up. In fact, I wound up being invited by the professor who gives the big undergraduate introductory biology course to come and give one of the lectures on this set of topics.

02:17:49.440 - 02:18:11.520

There's a clear hunger. I don't know whether it's always broken through to the faculty, though it's clearly broken through to some of them. But the students, I think, this is, my anecdotal impression, are seized with some of these issues. They recognize. I think there's a thirst for more knowledge. Joe Handelsman. Does your group envision the same office handling

02:18:11.520 - 02:18:43.840

agricultural biosecurity as well as medical? So there's not really an office. What we propose in recommendation is, one, it's a three-headed structure. But it's not, as apparent in the recommendations, the report, and Barbara Shaw can speak to this, the report does contain some discussion of the agricultural challenge. And the potential for an agricultural attack would

02:18:43.840 - 02:19:09.360

certainly need to be included in the purview of this group. I would just jump in and note that the recommendation one also includes explicitly the secretary of agriculture as a member of the group. Yeah. I think the agriculture challenge, or maybe Barbara's about to chime in here, is really key to the biosurveillance as well. If I could comment. Yeah, the agriculture is very

02:19:09.360 - 02:19:35.120

much represented in the biosurveillance. The nature of an agricultural attack would be quite different, and the consequences are quite different. And this report focuses a lot on human health, but there are some very interesting issues. And I think in a committee where you have the secretary of agriculture, those would be very easily brought out. Indeed. I think what you're doing, if I

02:19:35.120 - 02:20:01.920

understand the recommendations correctly, is setting us on a course that we're going to continue to be able each year to assess how things are changing, see the development of the science, see the spread of ideas and information, see the potential issues that arise in human health, both in disease and in intentional uses and in agriculture. And I think there's a long future

02:20:01.920 - 02:20:26.080

ahead. Most of these technologies have tremendous uses for human benefit, for health and food. And you're prudently telling us that we have to have a mechanism in place to continue to watch it as it evolves and develop clear national strategies to make sure we know what's going on and we could respond if we needed to. And the added benefit will be that in some cases

02:20:26.080 - 02:20:50.560

we'll be able to respond to naturally occurring outbreaks, some of which may be far cleverer than man-made outbreaks, because nature tends to have had a lot more experience in this game. If I may, I might just add to that that I think this issue of accountability, having metrics, accountability and reporting is essential. That is true not only within the

02:20:50.560 - 02:21:14.560

government. It will never be the case that the government, however dedicated its efforts are in this area, is going to be able to stay on top of a field that's moving as fast as molecular biology is by itself. And so this is also, Eric, I mean, your comments are also a call to the community. There has to be some element of the community outside the government that is well

02:21:14.560 - 02:21:33.840

plugged in, that pays attention to what is happening and helps make sure that the government's thinking about the evolution of these technologies is wise and prudent and on track. Indeed, it is a call to the rest of the scientific community. All right, I see no further flags up. I'm going to take that as a sign that we're ready to call

02:21:33.840 - 02:21:58.800

the question and ask, are we prepared to vote on these recommendations and an underlying report in substance? As always, once we voted on a report, we go back to make sure it's clear and we copy at it. And so my guess is it'll be several weeks before the process of getting the final report out there is completed. But we want to vote on these recommendations today and on the basic

02:21:58.800 - 02:22:28.800

substance of the report. So if there are no objections, I'm going to ask for someone to move the report. And a second, all in favor? Any opposed? It is approved unanimously with our thanks and congratulations to Wanda and to Chris for guiding us through this lengthy process. Well done. We are going to move very briskly to the last main section of our meeting today on

02:22:28.800 - 02:22:58.880

data, technology and justice. I'm going to invite the panel members to come up if they would right now and the flags at the front to be changed to reflect the new panel members. So in all areas of human life, it's important to be able to use data to improve outcomes. We think about it in medicine, we'll think about it in aspects of our economy, obviously there are many, many places. I think

02:22:58.880 - 02:23:26.800

we don't think about it with respect to justice as much as we should, the role of data and technology in justice to gather information, to make more perfect our process of protecting the safety of the American people and along the way respecting the American people. Balancing all that with information that can be gathered by police departments is a very important thing, so that

02:23:26.800 - 02:23:54.320

one can learn what works, one can learn how to be effective in protecting communities. And so I'm thrilled that we have three speakers today who are different than the speakers we usually get. We have Brandon Buye and if you haven't read his bio sketch you should. I won't read the whole thing but it does talk about driving all the way across the country to work with this awesome

02:23:54.320 - 02:24:15.440

group of extremely smart and motivated people here at the U.S. Digital Service and the other end of the country from which he was driving was Seattle where he was the lead GIS analyst for the Seattle Police Department. We have Maggie Goodrich who is the Chief Information Officer of the Los Angeles Police Department which is a very large police department and I bet most of us don't

02:24:15.440 - 02:24:35.440

think about its Chief Information Officer. We always have other faces that we may attach to police departments and it's going to be very exciting to hear about the way that you're thinking about using information. And we have Luke Larson the President of Taser. I think we all do think about Taser because everybody knows the word Taser but I don't think that's what Luke's going to

02:24:35.440 - 02:24:57.840

talk about. I think he's going to talk about other things that a technology-based company that works with the policing function in the United States is thinking about in terms of being able to capture and provide information that will help us improve the function of protecting public safety. I don't know the order in which you guys have chosen to go but our usual

02:24:57.840 - 02:25:19.360

process is to have some brief presentations and then really throw it open to a discussion so I'll ask you to keep it brisk because I think the discussion will be very good. Are we going to go starting from the left by left and moving to the right? So I'll ask Luke Larson to start us off. Great. Good morning. My name is Luke Larson. I'm the President of Taser International. Taser's

02:25:19.360 - 02:25:43.920

most well-known for our smart weapons. We're 95% of police agencies but over the last eight years we've become the market leader in wearable video cameras and digital evidence management software that I'm going to talk about today. A few weeks ago we started a discussion with some of the folks at PCAST and specifically with Dr. Gates you know shared some of his personal experiences growing up

02:25:44.880 - 02:26:15.120

you know and and his interactions with law enforcement and he you know tied that to what's going on in society today and you cannot open up a newspaper and see some of the events that have been happening over the last weeks and really the last two years since Ferguson and we see a couple key themes that's going on. The first is we've got this societal distrust of police and communities

02:26:15.120 - 02:26:41.520

and that's something that we need to address and underneath that we have the police community are being very very underserved from a technology perspective. They have extremely antiquated systems. One of the largest police agencies in the country up to two years ago is still using typewriters and so when we look at you know this scenario we ask ourselves you know what can we do

02:26:41.520 - 02:27:11.040

and at Taser and Axon we think we can do much better and the question is how can technology affect this. Eric Schmidt who sits on the PCAST with you all in his book How Google Works identified three key technology trends that have driven transformational change in a lot of industries and he talks about the convergence of the internet where you have ubiquitous access to information

02:27:11.040 - 02:27:36.240

mobile you now have to set your fingertips on on a handheld device and then cloud computing where you've got massive computational and storage power and when you bring all these things together you give humans almost superpowers that they didn't have before if i'm on my way to the airport i can get an update on what seat i'm in what what is the weather like in the in the city that i'm

02:27:36.240 - 02:28:00.960

going to go to if i hear a song that i like i can hold the mobile phone up and and identify it and these are literally things that probably even you know six seven years ago would have been un unthinkable and we've seen these massively transform our personal lives as well as enterprise software but we haven't seen that same adoption of technology in the government space and so what we've been

02:28:00.960 - 02:28:24.080

focused on at Taser and Axon the last eight years or so really the last 20 years with our smart weapons in the last eight years with our new division is how can we use technology to help solve this problem and it's something that we're extremely passionate about and so over the last eight years we've built up a network that we call axon and axon is a network where we connect

02:28:24.640 - 02:28:53.120

smart devices cameras and smart weapons that are gathering information to applications mobile and cloud based application systems and really we want to use this information and serve it back to both police officers and communities so they can create safer communities on our devices we have really really intelligent wearable cameras these actually have uh microprocessors processors

02:28:53.120 - 02:29:13.440

inside of them they're capturing lots of information it's a closed loop where we're updating the firmware on a regular basis and today we've got over a hundred thousand cameras in the field and I'm going to talk about the results of that a little later and we've built up a great team one of the questions that Dr. Gates asked us on the call is how do you get the best minds in tech

02:29:13.440 - 02:29:36.160

working on this and we've really built a phenomenal team at axon we've got some really phenomenal top grads from stanford anti-peabody is one of our product managers working on the devices axon fleet is a new product that we've launched where we we are really focused on how do we make the police car smarter we've got a great engineer ray fortna who comes from the consumer's tech

02:29:36.160 - 02:30:00.400

space helping us on that and on our smart weapons we've got a brilliant electrical engineering expert max nerheim who came to us to intona and i say those names because we're really proud of the team that we've assembled but i also want to highlight that we're bringing the best minds in tech to challenge to tackle these challenges and on the software side we built an incredible team

02:30:00.400 - 02:30:28.800

in seattle led by marcus wilmack and jay rides who also come come from consumer tech backgrounds and today we've collected over 4.6 petabytes of data on evidence.com which is a massive amount of information and to put that into perspective netflix today we have more data on evidence.com than netflix has on their entire streaming catalog and so i think today we're just accessing the

02:30:28.800 - 02:30:57.120

veneer of what is capable with all of that information we also have millions of videos and photos and then finally you know the whole purpose of using this technology is to bring it back to the frontline officers and the community so they can use it in intelligent ways we've got over 50 percent of the major cities 34 of the major cities think major metropolitan areas in the united states

02:30:57.120 - 02:31:22.720

the majority of them that have adopted the technology like la pd with our our friend mangi goodrich um have gone with the axon network and the reason that they have is with a network you you can imagine uh the value that families get being on facebook and twitter being able to share photos of their children to family and friends uh that same power of technology can be used in a

02:31:22.800 - 02:31:50.160

secure way in law enforcement to move around secure digital information so the results today have just been really phenomenal just yesterday the university of cambridge released the most comprehensive scientific study on the impact of body cameras to date they studied thousands of police officers wearing the cameras in a controlled study and they found

02:31:50.240 - 02:32:17.120

93 percent fewer complaints when officers wear the camera which is a great statistic and even more important statistic is out of a 2012 university of cambridge study done with realto pd where they found a 60 drop in use of force a 60 drop of use of force and we know when video is present it improves behavior on both sides and then with our smart weapons this is

02:32:17.120 - 02:32:40.400

the most effective use of force that's out there and we actually are long-term vision at tazers we want to make the bullet obsolete and we're not anti-gun and we're not anti-nra but we think we can make a device that's so good that's so effective that law enforcement would say why would ever why would i ever go for a lethal device when we say that people usually think that we're crazy

02:32:40.960 - 02:33:02.800

but i use an analogy and and our co and founder who's actually here with us via robot if you want to talk with them later you know talks about five six hundred years ago if we were in a bar in london you might see somebody you know most of the men would be carrying swords and technology pushes you know these these weapons and in everything we do it advances and we believe in the next

02:33:02.800 - 02:33:28.480

50 hundred years the thought of using a lead bullet to kill somebody will seem barbaric and archaic and we want to be the company to push that technology forward so where is the future going we believe these devices will help us collect information the software will help us analyze that and serve it back to communities and the future possibilities are really there's a lot

02:33:28.480 - 02:33:54.400

of low-hanging fruit in law enforcement today because of the amount of paperwork that they do and so if you ask police officers around the country and there's data that shows they spend more time doing paperwork than they do doing police work and we think with these new technology advancements in wearable sensors and machine learning we can reduce that paperwork by 35

02:33:54.400 - 02:34:19.040

percent now if you think about that that's going to double the amount of police that we can put on the street and we we you heard one of the speakers talk earlier today about a moonshot a 10-year old vision our bold vision in the next 10 years to reduce that paperwork is by 80 percent and it might sound like a mundane task until you start to think about what can be freed up when we give

02:34:19.040 - 02:34:47.360

these officers more time and the White House issued a paper where the 21st century policing committee said we really need to shift the mindset of law enforcement from warriors to guardians and one of their key themes was technology technology is not a silver bullet it's not going to solve everything it's technology combined with training and so if we can free up these officers from doing paperwork

02:34:47.360 - 02:35:09.280

we'll give them more time to do training and things like unconscious bias and how to de-escalate situations and also be out in the streets interacting with their communities which is something that technology is not going to solve but it can help them enable that and so this is a topic that we're really passionate about today and look forward to having a great discussion with

02:35:09.280 - 02:35:33.520

you all thank you thank you those that was very interesting indeed and i'm sure there'll be a lot of questions on that let's go here from each of the panelists and then we'll do one discussion together tonight turn turn to brandon buye oh yeah hi can everyone hear me all right thank you for having me here i really appreciate you guys giving me the opportunity to speak my name is brandon

02:35:33.520 - 02:35:54.240

buye i'm currently an engineer with the defense digital service which is an officer of the united states digital service prior to that i was a lead gs analyst for the seattle police department for almost seven years i have a bit of a unique perspective on police and technology and i'm glad to be able to share something with you so i want to talk to you a little bit today about technology

02:35:54.240 - 02:36:21.120

and public safety specifically the police department and some of the technology tools that we've looked at and used and some that we would like to be able to use if available going forward in the seattle police department as a gis analyst and the data analyst i've had the opportunity to look at a lot of data related to police interactions with the public and how that data gets back out to

02:36:21.120 - 02:36:48.320

officers and how that that circle the circle of data collection and use of the data works and one of the things i can definitely say is that while the data itself and by data also include the transparency of that data to the public is very important the context in which that data is sits in is even more important i can't tell you the number of times i've seen instances where advanced

02:36:48.320 - 02:37:11.520

tools or algorithms for processing data have been used yet the simple context of how the data was collected or what is being used for was lost and i can tell you if someone who's done this work the best tool sets in the world will not help you if you don't understand the data that you're working with so as far as dealing with technology in relation to patrol officers themselves i put

02:37:11.520 - 02:37:29.920

together what i consider to be the core four things that patrol officers are really looking for obviously the devil's in the details but when you break it out to a high level these are four main things number one officer typically wants to know where they need to go and then they want to know where when they do they need to be there because they have an area to patrol so if you if you say

02:37:29.920 - 02:37:52.720

you need to go to a specific area they like to know when they need to be there when they get there they want to know who do i need to be looking for whether it's a victim a suspect potential suspect a witness anything they need to know who they're looking for and additionally which has become more and more prevalent in recent years what precautions do i need to take each one of these

02:37:52.720 - 02:38:15.680

core four have technology and tools that can be used to aid in uh effectively and efficiently answering each one of these particular questions for example with where to go it really starts with the 911 call takers and dispatchers who are receiving the 911 calls and dispatching that information out to officers they are you know the true first line so to speak as far as collecting

02:38:15.680 - 02:38:35.520

that information and making sure it's out to the officers and they usually dispatch the officers this is where the call came from this is where you need to go and they are crucial so the technology for their computer aided dispatch systems CAD systems for example for example is extremely necessary and extremely useful it's also in most police departments relatively archaic

02:38:35.520 - 02:38:56.560

and needs the need of upgrades in many instances in addition to that there are additional tools that have been making their way into police departments over the years such as advanced analytical tools and real-time tools using places like real-time crime centers and things like that that can help detectives crime and out crime analysts units commanders identify where things

02:38:56.560 - 02:39:19.920

are occurring and where they need to be in a near real-time basis without having to go through the 911 call takes and dispatchers who are already busy answering 911 calls and so for example on the left side you have a interactive mapping tool that's showing updates of locations as they come in in real time on the upper right you have a social media tool that's used to allow the public

02:39:19.920 - 02:39:40.160

through social media to be able to identify and communicate with the police departments as what's going on in a particular neighborhood and if you have public media relations folks within the police department which Seattle was fortunate to have they can identify that and get that information out the officers as well on the bottom right there you have an application that's used in Seattle

02:39:40.160 - 02:39:59.840

that identifies locations of where calls and incidents took place so that the public themselves now has awareness of what was going on in their area it's been very useful and very well received by the public it provides brief information to allow the public to have that context as needed not just make not just scaring everyone send there's a lot of stuff going on but here's the

02:39:59.840 - 02:40:20.800

exact things that were going on and when they occurred now as far as when to go there that's where the more is stronger analytical tools start to come into play and Seattle and most of the major cities are usually fortunate to have dedicated analysts on staff that can analyze the historical information in the records management systems to disduse patterns and identify trends

02:40:20.800 - 02:40:40.960

over time to help aid the question of when they need to be there especially when officers are patrolling in between calls and so you have a combination of a commercial off the shelf and also homegrown systems that are used to analyze and provide visualizations that range from technical visualizations for the actual crime analysts themselves all the way up to more

02:40:42.160 - 02:41:02.160

user specific visualizations for officers out in the field and that can help officers and the detectives from a tactical all the way to a strategic level know when they need to be available when is an officer himself need to be in a certain area or around a certain area or and when do does the department as a whole need to staff up their staff or reduce their staff for when

02:41:02.240 - 02:41:25.440

things are going on now as far as who to look for that's the magic bullet that's what really kind of separates you know reality from say minority before for example who to look for is who to look for is in a situation where you usually start delving into the records management systems when you've made contact with individuals and that information gets stored in the record

02:41:25.440 - 02:41:45.680

management systems having an easy ability whether it's through the records management system itself or through additional systems that hook into that that data having the easy ability to refer back to that information to provide that context preferably in real time to officers while they're on the field is crucial that's a large part of reason why if you ever see a patrol car

02:41:45.680 - 02:42:05.520

officers have those mobile data terminals in their units is so they can retrieve that information to give them a better understanding of who it is they need to contact and it provides that additional context this is where in some instances the technology that currently exists still has a lot of room for improvement because most of the technology that makes it really

02:42:05.520 - 02:42:25.840

easy and effective to do that so like for example the bottom picture that shows that type of link analysis is and to a large degree outside the grasp of a lot of police departments for various reasons not the least of which being usually there aren't that many people with the expertise and the time to go in and do that type of work because it takes work to do so

02:42:26.400 - 02:42:49.760

and in Seattle and in other places the ideal scenario will be what you see on the far right there where you have that information at a fingertip easy interface easy to use out there for the officers out in the field there are uh in places like Seattle and other places technology like that is in place um whether it's exactly like you see there or in some form but the idea of

02:42:49.760 - 02:43:10.240

making it more ubiquitous and what it takes on the back end to get that working is uh a undertaking to say the least now here's where things get interesting when it comes to okay if i know where to go when to be there who look for what precautions do i need to take there's a difference for example between telling the officer to go to a certain location say a certain residence

02:43:10.240 - 02:43:39.280

at say 11 am um on a tuesday and look for a person named steve well the officer will like to know is steve say a witness or is steve a single person who is just there to provide some basic information or does steve have a known history of being very antagonistic towards police officers that type of information uh can de-escalate a situation well before an officer even gets to

02:43:39.280 - 02:43:58.080

the location and the technology that can allow us things like that to happen would be very useful and they're it's great to see that there are inroads towards that type of that type of technology being made available it can be as simple as just making the basic records management information available like what you see in the upper right there available to the officers in their mobile

02:43:58.080 - 02:44:16.560

data terminals to more advanced tools taking advantage of things like machine learning and other things that can provide that kind of trend especially towards relatively newer encounters with people um that can make it easier for an officer to recognize whether or not should i know enough i'm not going to do it myself or should i wait for backup to arrive

02:44:16.560 - 02:44:38.080

or so on and so forth um or should i not show up with three or four police vehicles and just show up with single public information officer to diffuse the situation earlier um that type of information is is critical and to a large degree a lot of that in most police agencies is still being performed as you see in the upper left there by the 911 dispatchers who have access to a good

02:44:38.080 - 02:44:59.600

chunk of this information when it's available to them and try to make that available to the officers over the radio what you see in the bottom left there is this is a difference is a situation where by increasing community engagement officers uh being in communities um just to engage with the the public and in non uh legal situations so to speak can go a long way towards

02:44:59.600 - 02:45:26.320

building up that trust to make it easier for an officer to understand when they arrive in a situation what they're arriving into in addition the use of body worn video cameras um has uh been a from my standpoint at least a double edged sword on one hand it's been a huge towards as was explained earlier reducing um complaints and issues over time however on the other hand from a technological

02:45:26.320 - 02:45:47.280

standpoint in many agencies Seattle being one of them it's been a bit of a nightmare trying to handle and deal with this data and figure out how to handle it especially and I've been involved in this when I was there how do you manage privacy when you're dealing with this video there was a strong push to make this available in all officers it still is but when an officer has a video camera

02:45:47.280 - 02:46:08.000

and he shows up to a home and he walks inside he now has video of the home and everyone in it those are privacy concerns so of course the natural reaction is let's redact the video blur faces of people who aren't the officer example like that but when you're dealing with as much videos we're talking about and you're dealing with police departments not huge IT

02:46:08.000 - 02:46:31.840

organizations how do you make that work who's going to watch all this video and who's going to redact all of this video that's a lot of work in the Seattle alone there's approximately two million videos that Seattle alone is dealing with it's over a petabyte just in Seattle I bet LAPD and other agencies have even more and growing in Seattle through the technology that we currently

02:46:31.840 - 02:46:55.760

have in place it takes roughly four hours to redact every single hour of video and that's what dedicated to staff and technology currently in place and we're fortunate that we have dedicated staff to work on this most police departments do not and oftentimes the body-worn video systems and I know this is improving but oftentimes the body-worn video systems are not tied very easily

02:46:55.760 - 02:47:16.400

with the current CAD and RMS systems and that's usually due to the fact that the CAD and RMS systems themselves are legacy and were invented and put in place long before body-worn video came into place tying those together that integration is key but it's also very hard and the process of automatically redacting video quite frankly is hard it's not really a solved problem yet it's been

02:47:16.400 - 02:47:36.480

easier to do with steady cam video like the cameras you see here that are steady and identifying faces and pictures and video and blurring that but when the camera itself is also moving so now you have a moving frame of reference with moving people in it you've just exponentially increased the difficulty of problem and I know this firsthand so in addition to all of this

02:47:36.480 - 02:47:57.840

how can you go about bringing more tech talent into the justice space how do you convince the people who work at the high-tech organizations that are so easily going to places like taser and everything which is fantastic but how do you also convince them to make a commitment to work in the public sector I have a few recommendations first work to strengthen connections between

02:47:57.840 - 02:48:16.000

the public sector and the academic institutions oftentimes people in my generation and people who do this tech stuff for a living are simply unaware of the opportunities that present themselves in the public space that's one of the things that makes the work I'm currently doing with defenseless service so engaging I'm working with people in the public sector who literally come

02:48:16.000 - 02:48:37.840

to me and say I didn't know that this stuff was available to us and it's great have interesting challenges to work on oftentimes people in the private sector in the tech world don't think that cool technology problems exist in the public sector they think it's boring bureaucratic stuff I have to upgrade this HR system for example instead of you know creating the next great app I know

02:48:37.840 - 02:48:55.920

from personal experience that that it could be nothing could be further from the truth there are serious challenges all over the public sector that can make this really available a third thing which is difficult but very important is to provide autonomy when you get that tech talent if you are lucky enough to get that tech talent in place to come in and work on your public

02:48:55.920 - 02:49:17.840

sector and public environment work give them the autonomy to get that work done don't layer them in bureaucracy which they are not accustomed to trust me and have and expect that to be super effective tell them what you need and then let them tell you how it's going to be done you will be surprised and amazed at the results you get and meet the tech community on their terms and I

02:49:17.840 - 02:49:36.880

mean this from a basic technical standpoint if the technical community as at large is using certain technologies or certain communication systems to get their work done maybe open source tools and things like that allow that to happen if they have comfortable tool sets that they're familiar with in the public sector environment they're much more likely to get great workout

02:49:36.880 - 02:49:57.040

very fast and the last one and it's the biggest figure out how you're going to be able to change the culture and not just the culture itself but the perception that culture and you know outside looking in the perception of culture is that governments are big stuff in bureaucratic and that culture and the perception needs to change and so I want to leave you with one last

02:49:57.040 - 02:50:18.960

thing hackathons don't hurt they're actually pretty awesome in Seattle in 2014 we had a hackathon to try to solve the very problem of redacting video we got very good responses there and we continue to work with some of those people to this very day and here at defense digital service we're also working with not necessarily a hackathon more of a bug bounty with hack the Pentagon

02:50:19.520 - 02:50:42.800

by it's the first federal bug bounty in the U.S. government where we actually allow the public sector to authorize them to hack and find vulnerabilities in certain government websites including DoD.gov and they found more vulnerabilities in a shorter period of time than professional organizations did that took a lot more money so don't be afraid to reach out this is also a great

02:50:42.800 - 02:51:01.840

way to reach out to that tech community and meet them on their terms so I really want to leave you with that last question is how do you change a culture because the one interesting thing I found is someone who's delves into the tech and the data is that the most important thing to really make these changes persist is the cultural change how do you convince these organizations especially

02:51:01.840 - 02:51:29.520

police departments that this is the direction to go and this will be beneficial in the longer term so thank you all for letting me speak if we can turn finally to Maggie Goodrich look forward to your comments thank you for having me I'm Maggie Goodrich I'm the chief information officer for the Los Angeles police department I'll just give you a little bit of perspective of technology

02:51:29.520 - 02:51:54.640

the use of data and where we'd like to see it go in terms of our experiences at the LAPD first and foremost I think we all have to recognize that policing is changing we're at a critical juncture I think where the idea of what a police officer is responsible for is transforming and you know police officers are not really seeing justice first responders anymore as I think they

02:51:54.640 - 02:52:20.480

were many many years ago they they're providing a service to the community they're often responsible for engaging in other services that you wouldn't necessarily have thought of maybe 20 or 30 years ago in policing when you were just responding to those calls for service and the technology the hope is that technology can really serve as a force multiplier for officers who have limited

02:52:20.480 - 02:52:46.080

resources but you know we have to recognize the challenges of implementing technology and I think Brandon just articulated them very well the the focus for us at LAPD number one is about going digital you know Luke mentioned a large agency using typewriters I'm proud to say that's not the LAPD but we are using a 30 year old mainframe as a records management system today

02:52:46.080 - 02:53:11.200

and it's been years in the making to get us to the point where we're just to the point where we can start implementing some modern technology in that regard and there are a lot of challenges that have you know basically led us to to where we are today which I will get to but the reality is is that you know more and more data is coming in every day I have a good friend who likes to joke

02:53:11.200 - 02:53:39.280

that I actually work for a big data company that's disguised as a law enforcement agency the amount of data that we collect is really incredible on a on a daily basis and you know video and the and the advent of the body camera has really just in multiplied that by x but the the amount of data coming in and how we handle it and how we

02:53:39.280 - 02:54:06.240

leverage it is really a challenge for us and the other challenge is that we're doing this in a mobile environment we're how this is you know a mobile environment of officers in a vehicle on a motorcycle on a bicycle on a horseback and and on foot and so how do you make technology available to an officer how do you not only collect the data that is out there as an officer does

02:54:06.240 - 02:54:26.960

his or her job but how do you also get office data into the officer's hands and I think Brandon spoke to that very well in terms of you know officers want that information on what they're coming upon and they need the right data at the right time right we don't want to flood it it flood them with data we don't want to turn it into white noise we need to figure out how

02:54:26.960 - 02:54:55.440

to get them the right data at the right time to help them do their job and to help them serve the community here's a little bit of information on on data in the LAPD so we've had an in-car video since 2010 we've got 1.8 million dollars million videos stored today body cameras we've got a lot about 1100 cameras out they've been out for about a year and that's 83 terabytes of data

02:54:56.000 - 02:55:19.920

we're about to begin in another week the deployment of another 6000 cameras so this issue is only going to grow we're you know talking about all the CCTV out there license plate recognition systems and then something else we're we're diving into is telematics on the police vehicles there's a lot of information stored in that black box in the car and the computer in the

02:55:19.920 - 02:55:47.360

car that can tell us a lot about how an officer is driving that can lead us to things like how can we improve driving so we can improve officer safety you know more officers die in vehicle crashes than they do from bullet wounds how can we make it safer for the officer as they do their job in that mobile environment it's one of the things we've struggled with and and are really tackling today

02:55:48.400 - 02:56:15.200

and then how can we make the data available to the public in a useful way and again in context the you know we've been a early adopter of the White House police data initiative we've made our data available via an open data portal keeping that up putting it in context and making it available public we think is really important to to have individuals out there who are not necessarily

02:56:15.200 - 02:56:41.120

in public safety participating as well the other thing we've really looked toward is the analytics models out there machine learning predictive analytics how can we take what's happening in tech out there in areas such as media with Netflix or whomever it may be and apply it in public safety and I think one of the the struggles is is that so many times the the leaders

02:56:41.120 - 02:57:08.560

and technology out there are focused on sort of the commercial market and don't have an understanding of how their technology may apply in a public safety environment the the challenges of all of this I think are pretty apparent but I'll I'll hit on a few of them just I always refer to the confines of the government and how we innovate within it

02:57:09.520 - 02:57:29.600

dealing with acceptance and adoption of the technology we're talking about officers who range in years of experience we're talking about officers who are 21 years old and and expect to have that mobile device in their hand and expect it to do everything for them because that's what they've grown up with and they're coming into what is then a very antiquated environment in

02:57:29.600 - 02:57:54.160

terms of in terms of technology and then you're dealing with officers who have 30 plus years on and maybe you're wondering why you're handing them that that mobile device so you know our audience is very wide the other thing I'll I'll hit on and it's not necessarily a technological issue but it is a huge barrier to implementing modern technology and that is just the procurement

02:57:54.160 - 02:58:18.880

process itself and the procurement process as it stands today in government effectively takes a good 12 months to get through from RFP to selection to contract negotiation to actually getting approvals through the various government entities that have to make those approvals by the time we're implementing we're talking about an RFP that was issued a year ago and was

02:58:18.880 - 02:58:44.640

probably soliciting technology that was created a couple years before that so in many times you know we're implementing the last great version not today's great version unfortunately coming up with a better way to procure that allows the leaders in the market to come in and prove it not on paper with written we always start with written specs and I completely agree

02:58:44.640 - 02:59:08.400

that that's where you start but they've got to come in and show us that the technology works and and I'm a big believer in bringing them in and doing proof of concepts and and letting the market really compete compete against each other and and walk the walk and that's just a huge challenge for us and then you know the other thing is with the advent of new technology the the discussion

02:59:08.400 - 02:59:34.800

we don't always have is what about the resources to support it and you know Brandon mentioned redaction and the the privacy issues and I'll go back to something even more fundamental before we get there and that is who's watching the video on a regular basis when it's a routine public encounter maybe you know if it's a use of force if it's a complaint against an officer someone watches that

02:59:34.800 - 02:59:56.080

video someone is doing an investigation and that video is being looked at but think about all of the other routine vehicle stops or commute interactions with the community that just aren't being watched because the resources aren't there you know Luke mentioned intelligence in the camera and I agree there's intelligence in the camera but what I want is a smart camera right I want a

02:59:56.080 - 03:00:18.000

camera that knows when to turn itself on so that the officer doesn't have to worry about when to turn it on I want a camera that can tell me when a use of force happens in front of it when a pursuit happens in front of it right and and I know we're not there yet but I think that we should be pushing the the technology providers out there to think about those analytics today

03:00:18.720 - 03:00:51.520

a a let's call it a routine vehicle pursuit with a and a routine say use of cameras would be an officer goes to make to pull over a vehicle that vehicle decides it's not going to stop a routine pursuit means you've got that vehicle that police officer that's trying to stop the car you've got probably one more in backup following that patrol car so you've got two patrol units now

03:00:51.520 - 03:01:16.800

and then you have a supervisor that typically comes on as well so in those three patrol vehicles that are now in pursuit you have an in-car camera in each of those cars and you have a body camera on each of those officers and we we patrol with two to a to a vehicle so you can see very quickly that even in a routine instance and I'm using a real-life example where we just had in car video

03:01:16.800 - 03:01:42.880

we didn't even have body cameras on everybody yet we had a hundred hours of video in a routine pursuit that had to be reviewed and and that you know was a pursuit that was reported and we know about and we have to you know we have to investigate it the routine just average community interaction that is you know maybe 15 minutes and thank you ma'am or sir and and move on with your day

03:01:43.520 - 03:02:03.520

that video has to be watched as well because we have to ensure that officers are complying with the policy they're turning the cameras on when they're supposed to be that they're turning them off when they're supposed to be and that they're you know behaving inappropriately in between and the the person power it takes just to watch that routine video outside of all of those specialized

03:02:03.520 - 03:02:29.760

investigations where you have a hundred hours of video to watch is is really you know just tasking on resources the other thing that I'll mention is that it particularly at LAPD but I think really across the country now the push is to not only implement technology but then to measure the outcomes we feel strongly that anytime we implement a new technology we involve a third

03:02:29.760 - 03:02:58.880

party research partner who can help us study this properly do some sort of controlled implementation and controlled tests so that we understand those results we're doing that now with body cameras we'll have results out probably in the early part of 2017 to understand the impact of those body cameras on our officers on the department and also on the community we are doing that as well

03:02:58.960 - 03:03:22.560

in terms of risk data all of the data that presents risk and liability to the city whether it be a use of force a pursuit or complaint or a claimer lawsuit understanding what that data means and how technology that we've implemented to mitigate some of that is going to help us is really important and I think also bringing in third party researchers to help us do that I think brings

03:03:23.200 - 03:03:44.960

sort of credibility to the message and the outcome provides another voice to the community that isn't just from the law enforcement agency and so I think that's important as well and thank you for having me today great all right we are really grateful to this review for just an eye-opening set of presentations we've not heard about any of this in the course of our

03:03:44.960 - 03:04:05.840

PCAST work before and and it's just great to hear about the depth with which these ideas are penetrating within police departments we don't have that much time for questions but I do want to make sure we get some time for discussion at PCAST we've got Jim Gates with his flag up and I'm going to look around if other people are going to be Bill Press putting his flag up

03:04:05.840 - 03:04:33.520

because I think this is really interesting to get into thank you Jim thank you Eric and thank you Luke and Brandon and Maggie for being willing to come before our group and inform the rest of the group of the things that I heard about on our call on September 20th as our briefers have indicated there are I think a lot of opportunities in this space for using data to reach better outcomes

03:04:33.520 - 03:04:58.480

in law enforcement and so I'm very enthusiastic now we have a constraint and I have to tell you folks about our constraint it's called time this administration will run out shortly so what we what I've suggested to the pan to the PCAST and what we haven't actually decided is that the most effective way to us to leverage the expertise that you represent and of course

03:04:58.480 - 03:05:19.920

I don't know if you've met our colleague Megan Smith who's sitting here right but the most effective way I think that we might proceed which I suggested yesterday is to model this after report that we did earlier on big data and privacy which some of you folks mentioned because there were actually two such reports and PCAST provided the technical sort of foundation

03:05:19.920 - 03:05:44.640

to the other report which was non-technical so I think that that may be a model that we might be able to squeeze and under the finish line as it's a rapidly approaching us so I just wanted to again thank you and also wanted to ask you well let me make a statement on the call I explained to you how we got here namely that I had an encounter with a police officer many years ago that could

03:05:44.640 - 03:06:07.760

mean I would not be here today but I also have a brother-in-law who's in been in law enforcement for about 15 years so I understand the duality of this from very personal viewpoint about I don't want anything to happen to my brother-in-law but thank goodness I'm here to say this right so these are things that are I'm rather passionate about and I my colleagues have empowered us to go into

03:06:07.760 - 03:06:31.760

this domain and I'm very hopeful that even though time is short and resources are short and banned with this limited that we can get a very good short report that will try to move this issue forward so that's my that's my comment there thank you and Bill Press thanks yeah let me just repeat the thanks that you've already heard I think there's a very interesting set of talks my question I guess

03:06:31.760 - 03:06:59.200

is about procurement but more generally it's about the marketplace for this kind of technology for law enforcement a good friend of mine I live in Austin Texas did the 60 hour civilian police academy training which is really an outreach by the Austin police so that people in the community know what it is they do really at some level of detail and she was struck in many different

03:06:59.200 - 03:07:25.520

presentations about technology that either they have or they'd like to have that it's very hard for them and they admit this it's very hard for them to be smart consumers and at the sort of shady end it's consumer electronics that somebody slaps a law enforcement label on and sells for 10 times what you could buy it for in the consumer marketplace and they know they're getting taken now we're

03:07:25.520 - 03:07:49.280

hearing from taser which is you know the elite highest end tech in law enforcement but I wonder if there are things that could be taken for the benefit of law enforcement to make that a more informed marketplace with you know less shady stuff and more real stuff in it absolutely I think you know I call it the shiny object syndrome I mean there are a lot of vendors out there that are

03:07:49.280 - 03:08:11.120

good at coming up with something that looks and sounds like magic and it's going to work for you and they've slapped something related to public safety on top of it and then when you get it in the hands of the officers it's practically not going to work or it may get you 75 percent of the way there but how do you close that gap one of the things we do in LA is I have a group of sworn

03:08:12.080 - 03:08:34.720

who are responsible for nothing but research and evaluation of new technology and we do outreach to the vendors on a regular basis in various areas of technology not in not necessarily in public safety we look at the financial industries we look at healthcare industries any industry where they also have security concerns the sort of wraparound technology as well and and see what

03:08:34.720 - 03:08:58.400

they're doing and we really encourage vendors to come in early before they've produced whatever it is they're they're going to sell us and and not just drop it on the table and say here you know you can use it but talk to us very early on about how we would use it what are the use cases practically how it would work um ui is very important when you're talking about an officer

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in a vehicle they don't have a lot of time to be looking at something or grabbing something or pushing buttons or whatever it may be right so we have those conversations very early on in fact uh I mean our first meeting with with taser on the body camera the body camera was essentially a paperweight I mean they put it on I put a plastic box on the table and said would

03:09:16.080 - 03:09:41.680

you wear that um and our response was no right with the first version sorry Luke um but but it came a long way in a quick time because um taser and and there are a number of other vendors who are very willing to participate very early on with us in those conversations so that we get something ultimately that works for us um and and we have sworn officers participate in that

03:09:41.680 - 03:10:07.680

process um very early on and I think um at LAPD I'm fortunate enough to have a dozen or so individuals who participate in that process really um in a full-time capacity other agencies that aren't as large as LAPD are not going to have those type of resources and those type of capabilities so coming up with maybe a a national model that could look at technology and participate

03:10:07.680 - 03:10:28.000

in these partnerships with vendors early on um so that even the small agencies out there that were mid-sized that don't have the resources to partner with with those in the private sector have the opportunity to have a voice in in that I I want to second what Maggie's saying because I've dealt with this as well at the Seattle police department and one of the things I kept trying to

03:10:28.000 - 03:10:48.160

stress and that we did to a good extent was to make sure that uh when we are looking at procuring a piece of software and let me just walk you through the basics of how this usually happens uh the police chief goes to a conference and comes back and says we're going to use this software um and so we have to figure out how to make it work um what usually ends up happening is

03:10:48.160 - 03:11:12.240

we ask that the vendors not only demonstrate their software ahead of time but what we've tried to do in recent years is actually provide them with a sample of our actual data um because we've seen many cases in the past where the vendors show their uh software using this perfectly just absolutely immaculate set of data in a perfect system where everything's just perfect and it's

03:11:12.240 - 03:11:32.640

not like that at all in the real world and when you go to implement it you end up with issues so we usually have them uh use a sample of our actual data and we give them some context and we say now show us in a certain amount of time come back and demonstrate your software working with this stuff and we have prepared questions we have dedicated IT staff and we will sit there in a demo

03:11:32.640 - 03:11:54.480

and actually evaluate them because uh for the to try to mitigate that whole shiny object syndrome Maggie was talking about it's worked out very well um you get to quickly separate the wheat from the chaff so to speak and you do those type of processes um now for those agencies that aren't fortunate enough to have the dedicated staff that we do um partnering with local uh universities

03:11:54.480 - 03:12:16.960

or colleges um to bring in their technical expertise um maybe even their students for example can go a long way um and just getting more hands on with uh those members of the civic tech community can also be very useful in these regards it's great one final comment from me on that with advancements in technology like cloud computing what we've seen in the enterprise

03:12:16.960 - 03:12:42.960

space has a large corporation you know we're buying software from companies like Salesforce and Marketo and others and uh we basically adopt some of those best practices from enterprise and try to introduce them into the government space so with the cloud application you don't have to do a huge um implementation on day one with a smaller subset maybe five ten officers you can go live on

03:12:42.960 - 03:13:07.680

a trial much quicker and that way the agency can actually see is there there there is is the technology actually working the way that they say great we've really come to the end of our time so I'm going to ask uh Dan and Megan if they very quickly if they want to say something uh and we'll get very quick answers yeah just very very quickly I want to I want to you know ask drill down a little

03:13:07.680 - 03:13:29.680

bit following Jim's question and Jim's experience a lot of the work on body cameras and and monitoring it's been really important and unfortunately what we've learned is that people uh without uh monitoring don't always behave the way we hope they would you know we wish that everybody would always behave the same whether they were being monitored or not and

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we've discovered that that's not true and that's a shame uh but uh what about on the weapon side you know we have the the gun the taser which is 20 you know it's been improved but it's it's old technology and we have a night stick and you know the the reality is most officers um and when we read about these descriptions of these terrible situations that are occurring all over

03:13:57.520 - 03:14:26.320

the country uh there's there's the officer feels threatened and their only choice is to then shoot with lethal force and they empty their revolver into the the the suspect um surely it's not clear the technology is coming to bear on the non-lethal weapon development side and the question is how do you increase the market forces that encourage investment in r&d in that space because because

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it seems like that would change the nature of this problem profoundly I certainly agree I mean I don't think there is any officer in this country that wakes up in the morning thinking I'm going to take a life today and I think the officers welcome the introduction of of less lethal weapons I think the reality is is that there aren't many others in the market that are focused on this you know

03:14:57.520 - 03:15:24.800

we evaluate tasers on a regular basis basis the taser weapon itself and taser international comes out ahead because they really are you know the the product out there and so you know I think there has to be a call nationally to push the the technology industry out there to to understand that this is important that there's a large market for it and get some talent on it maybe

03:15:24.800 - 03:15:52.880

out of other industries to help us start focusing on on how we could develop other solutions I would just comment at taser has introduced different variations of the taser over the years and we spend millions of dollars in r&d improving those products our last product is called the x2s so we now have dual shots and we also have a warning arc so we're improving the technology technology

03:15:52.880 - 03:16:19.280

is not a silver bullet though it's it's you're going to have physical limitations you're going to have the limit environmental limitations and so we've kind of identified four or five key areas that we think we can improve on multi-shot distance effectiveness safety the ability to measure data and we're advancing all of those technologies I would just want to reiterate technology is

03:16:19.280 - 03:16:44.560

one component the other component is training and so today the way a lot of our law enforcement officers are trained is in kind of a binary response mode so I go into a simulator I go on to a rifle range I go on to a pistol range the name of the game is if some I feel threatened that person wins or I went it's binary and the reality is that's not the situation it's very

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dynamic and so I think we need to address the technology and we also need to address the training and give them the right tools for that it's great thank you I know that we this could go on because it's such an amazingly interesting topic but we're going to have to call it to a close now I want to really thank our three speakers for some pretty fascinating presentations

03:17:06.480 - 03:17:37.920

all right our last order of business is public comment I believe we have one public commenter and Maxine will one public commenter we have Kaye Shopford Cone from Executive Director of the National District Attorney's Association it's going to speak on forensic evidence in the courtroom and all you're taking your seat let you that you have two minutes to talk and we'll give you a

03:17:38.000 - 03:18:05.120

30-second warning before the end of the two minutes thank you and we did receive some written comments from you thank you Co-Chairman Holdren, Co-Chairman Lander and members of the Council the National District Attorney's Association has significant disagreement with the logic

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and manner in which the PCAST report portrayed the pattern analysis and comparison disciplines of bite marks firearms tool marks tire tread shoe prints and DNA complex mixtures first we are concerned about the pervasive bias apparent throughout the report the majority of the working group is composed of well-known critics of forensic science and of the pattern

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analysis and matching methods in particular second it must be pointed out that the working group and PCAST at large contains not a single working forensic scientist and this lack of scientists with real-world experience is shown throughout the report third PCAST without a single citation to scientific authority unilaterally declares that forensic feature comparison

03:18:55.040 - 03:19:20.400

methods belong to the scientific field of metrology including statistics it should be noted that no metrologists were included on PCAST working group PCAST urges courts to exclude important forensic evidence by appealing to its own authority however PCAST is merely a temporary advisory body whose existence expires at the end of this administration it should be noted that

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daubart and fry evidentiary hearings remain the legal standard upon which judges acting as gate keepers determine the immiscibility of scientific evidence with well-trained and experienced advocates 30 seconds experts on each side of an issue prosecutors ultimately serve the criminal justice system and the public at large forensic evidence and forensic experts are called to testify

03:19:45.040 - 03:20:09.920

by prosecutors and members of the defense bar every day both to exonerate the innocent and prosecute the guilty judges have the ultimate authority to determine whether or not a forensic discipline is valid or lacks the requisite foundation not the PCAST report thank you thank you i mean we do oh please simply remain seated because we can go beyond the two minutes if

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two questions first i wanted to very much thank the national district attorney's association for its interest in the topic and for actually managing to release a statement about the PCAST report uh earlier in september so we thank you for your interest in that very much it was the eagerness of doing it even three weeks before we released the report was appreciated we had some

03:20:35.520 - 03:21:00.160

particular points that i did want to raise because this morning uh in a session you may not have heard there's a second phase of the work where we are putting out an rfi asking for now any further comments and things about studies that might have been missed so we very much would love if the district attorney's association would point out scientific studies that you think were missed

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in some way it's the way science works in so i mean i'm hoping that the ndaa would be willing to to write to us and let us know would that be something you guys would want to do absolutely fantastic we started on something like not not knowing you're gonna do that no no this is how science works we we want to hear if you think that there are specific so i noted in your

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written statement you noted that even highly complex dna mixtures can be interpreted by lots of computer programs i was wondering if if you had any scientific evidence to support that claim i didn't come prepared to answer okay then i would ask you to write to us but i certainly no please if you have scientific papers published papers we want to hear them so that's number one

03:21:46.720 - 03:22:09.360

number two on bite marks do you think bite marks are scientifically valid have they been scientifically validated again i'm sorry i didn't okay it'd be great if you would write to us and tell us that and we have some information on fabulous we're looking forward to hearing about that we did note in your statement that you said the pcast report made it difficult to do criminal investigation

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and i would ask you to go back and look carefully at the report i think we were very clear to say in not in your statement here in the statement that was published about three weeks before we released our report it noted that you you said that it would affect criminal investigation i'd ask you to go back and figure out why you think that since the report says the opposite

03:22:30.080 - 03:22:50.160

that we are really not talking about criminal investigation while i'm just taking off things because we're eager to hear from you um you mentioned that the pcast urges the courts to exclude evidence and it would be great if you could point to places in the report where we say that since i think what we spoke only about was foundational validity we agree that judges are

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the ones who exclude evidence but that that would be awesome and then finally in your written statement use you mentioned that pcast made statements about cognitive bias sweeping broad statements be great if you could point them out to us because in the report i think what we say is that cognitive bias may be a problem which seems very different than the idea that that it is a

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sweeping problem across the whole discipline so as i think it's fantastic that you're coming and you're disagreeing and you're criticizing that is the basis of science we're thrilled you're here i'm pressing you because we want to know if you have real scientific answers for those things we're eager to hear them and we will be producing an addendum to the report based on it it'll be about

03:23:32.560 - 03:23:55.840

a two-week turnaround period do you think you'll be able to do that in the next two weeks is what you're hoping for i think we can fantastic we've started work already fantastic we look forward to getting the scientific input from the ndaa and appreciate your being here thank you thank you very much and i turn it over to john all right well my thanks as well to our most recent presenter

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but also to everybody who presented and engaged in discussion at this pcast meeting as always we're grateful for the wider interest in the community represented by people who are watching on the web and by people from the wider community who took the trouble actually to be with us in the room and again i thank the members of pcast and the staff of ostp and the secretary of the

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pcast for their continued engagement and incredibly hard work it is a continuing pleasure to work with all of you we are now adjourned