one my name is Tom believes I'm the director of
undergraduate research here. Hi, and I want to
welcome you to the final in our Research on the
Edge Series, which is a collaboration among um my
office, the university Libraries and the pioneering program,
which is an undergraduate research and interdisciplinary training program for
undergraduates. And you can think the the cyan hearing
program for the food and beverage. Um So the
purpose of this series was to introduce the community to
interdisciplinary research that's kind of on the edge of discovery
and really moving us forward and give folks the opportunity
not just to hear about the introduction to the scholarship
and discovery, but also to interact with the people
who are doing it in a more informal setting.
So that's why we are here. Today. We
have Roop Mahajan from the Institute for Critical Technology and
Applied Science. Um and he's here to talk about
the intersections between creativity and predicting the unpredictable um much
in the black swan theme um group has done many
things in mechanical engineering. He's worked in various sectors
, academics industry all over the place. So we're
looking forward to hearing what you have to tell us
. This is one of the most topics I think
as we're moving forward and introducing the idea of creativity
into stem fields and really, truly way. Well
, thank you very much for the kind introduction.
Just a brief introduction about my own background, I
joined Cornell in 1972 and my PhD was in mechanical
engineer and just to get into this kind of black
swans and creativity. So when I asked my advisor
, what is that I'm going to work on,
he was number one in the world in his field
. And he said, you know, son,
I'm going on sabbatical. I have written 154 papers
. Read everything I have done. And your psd
is what I haven't done in this feat. I
said, Oh, that's great. And then he
said that. So I said, you know,
after a while, six months or so, I
got sort of familiar with him. And then I
said, so what is your contribution? You know
, I'm doing all this work. He said,
well, you know, I'm going to let you
bang your head against the wall and I will let
you let you bruise, but I won't let you
bleed. So that was his contribution. He said
, I'll give you a long rope to hang yourself
, but I'll make sure you don't. Okay.
So, so that was the whole process of,
you know, getting to, getting into the process
of understanding and basic asking basic questions. And my
PhD work was, you know, most of you
are familiar with flows, laminar flows and turbulent flows
. And my PhD was why does the flow become
turbulent anyway, So why does it happen? Right
, so that that's what it was aboard. And
you know there I learned, you know, asking
that kind of a question typically leads you into different
directions, leads you to the math, leads you
to engineering, lead you to science. So there
are the seeds of basic interdisciplinary research were sown during
my studies at Cornell And then in 76 I joined
Bell Labs and my vice president for research was Arno
Penzias, the guy who got the Nobel Prize in
physics on the Big Bang Theory and his advice to
me, our 1st 1st sentence he spoke to me
was son, how we hire the best people,
we can, we let them do what they do
best. And once in a while we remind them
they work for a telecommunication company. Okay, so
the idea of unencumbered untargeted research and wherever it leads
you go there. However the most important thing that
he told me was if you're not in the top
three in what you do, you don't belong here
. Okay. So that's why we haven't since then
, you know trying to actually bring that piece of
that kind of culture here in our institute. So
I became a Bell Labs fellow in 1990 1989.
And then after the divestiture of A T. And
T. I knew it is not going to be
the same Bell labs. I went to University of
Colorado Boulder And there I worked for 15 years and
in 2006 I came here. So you will see
some ideas, some of the work I have done
in that lab also summer C. U. Boulder
. It will give you an idea how interdisciplinary research
played a role in my life. Okay, so
today's topic intersections, how intersections lead to creativity and
how intersections can also help us. She said uh
predicting the unpredictable. Now that seems like a contradiction
, but we'll see at least we can become the
breeding ground for the next blacks one. Okay.
All right now, I'm very fond of my own
code. You can see that there is no sense
of modesty here. Creative looms at the boundaries between
intersections and that has appeared in a number of books
. So I really believe in that one. So
what does it mean to be creative? I think
they are going to be first few slides on definitions
so that we are on the same page. And
well in general, new or different viewpoints on the
subject, you can already see where this interdisciplinary research
come into picture if you're talking with different viewpoints and
not just the mechanical engineer viewpoints. You're already talking
about interdisciplinary research. Okay, Breaking down and restructuring
our knowledge about these subjects so that we can gain
new insights into its nature. Getting to the bottom
of this, why does the flow become turbulent anyway
? Okay. And then we want to get into
create new things and when I say create new things
, I want to make sure that we are on
the same page, creativity, invention, innovation.
And there are a few more definitions on distinguishing innovation
from invention. Okay, well, so what one
is logical thinking? Which engineers are very good at
a series of steps each depending on the last one
plus two is three. That's a fact. And
we believe in that. All right, creative thinking
is what we can use our imagination and we can
invent and innovate new things. Yes, there is
internet and yes, there was shopping and Ebay is
a new idea. How can we combine them together
. Okay, so I, as I mentioned earlier
, I would like to at least have the stage
set for what is difference between innovation and invention.
I'm sure most of you know, but let's be
on the same page, invention is some the first
occurrence of an idea first time the new product appears
, first time the new process appears and it is
really creating something new. But innovation is what engineers
do. You know? If you ask me,
what is the difference between a physicist and engineer in
physics? We try to understand the laws of nature
as they are okay as engineers, we harness the
laws of nature and try to do something useful for
society. So we take intervention and innovate so that
we can do something useful for society. Uh I
was just mentioning earlier, I said, no slide
presentation can be complete when we talk about creativity invention
, innovation without Einstein's picture, So innovation is not
the product of logical thought one plus two equal to
three, but the result is light to the logical
structure, we will see later on, but it
sometimes it is just that intuitive feeling that you get
uh the Eureka moment that you get I think,
and I guess I should definitely have thomas Edison when
we talk about the innovation, I never perfected an
invention that I did not think about it in terms
of service it provides to others. So I think
I'm sure alla Fassa together now in the definition of
invention and innovation, I want to take something,
a new idea and harness it to do something useful
for society. Okay, so now these days you
hear so much, well, you know, we're
trying to place a lot of emphasis on creativity,
invention, innovation, so why there is so much
emphasis on that one? Well, I'm going to
go back way bad and if you look at what
happens, uh well there were neanderthals and then there
are human beings. They started from the same stock
And the 900,000 went, they left Africa went to
Europe and they survived there for 200,000 years and then
they became extinct. But the human beings are the
folks who are left behind. They were very good
at innovating. Okay, so it is the innovation
that allowed the folks who are left behind to become
the modern human species. Okay, so this is
a nice documentary actually, a PBS documentary narrated by
Alan Alda and if you really have time to listen
to it, it's a great, great documentary and
about innovation. Again, just as energy is the
basis of life ideas, the source of innovation.
Innovation is the vital spark for human chain. We
just talked about that in the previous slide. And
without this improvement, progress will not take place.
We can't be static, we can't be stationary.
We have to move as a civilization and innovation in
this park. So there are three kinds of innovation
that I think in my own mind. This is
not a classic textbook classification, but that's how I
feel about this. One is a linear innovation and
we were so good at one part of a TNT
Western Electric which used to make phones. And we
will just come up say, okay, you know
this is we are making this as X dollars per
phone. We want to make it tomorrow. 0.9
expert phone. So you guys engineers. What can
you do to bring down the cost? And many
times that was a linear incremental election. So this
is some work that I did when I was in
Bell Laboratories. So this is a reactor. Let's
think about this chemical vapor deposition reactor. And what
you do is you take the silicon wafers which formed
the chips which went into the phones. And we
were able to process two rows of papers. Okay
. And it turned out there was a temperature non
uniformity along the height of the reactor. And if
if we could manage that non uniformity, we could
actually process three rows of efforts, 50 increase in
the output. So that like holidays, a linear
implement. You know, I mean we already have
the process. We modified it, we change it
. The second one is what I call is a
non linear innovation out of the box thinking big impact
. But if you look at the impact, normally
it is related to one field is not universal.
It doesn't change a number of its for example,
another something that I didn't Bell Laboratories On the right
hand side is what we used there for making sordid
joints on printing warring boards. So you have a
huge electronic switching system, printing wiring board with 10,000
pains and you would make the joints and we will
use infrared heating to make the joint. The yield
was 97.5%,, So 2.5 defect. And at the
end of the line, our workers are sitting there
. They are actually inspecting every joint and then taking
a shorting oil and making the joint. Well that
was not in such a great thing to do.
Coming back from Chicago ill lyle, where our plant
was somebody you know, we came up with the
idea why don't we do something on the left hand
side, create a body of hot, saturated vapor
and the temperature is higher than the melting temperature of
shorter. And if we emerged our emerged, our
big component are part into this. Vapours are going
to go everywhere, disorder joints are going to be
made this year will be 100%. Okay, so
this overnight change the whole sorting process in the electronics
industry had a huge impact. We actually licensed five
companies to make these machines and we started keeping track
of the number of sorted joints made per day using
our technology. At the same time, if you
you may recall some of you may recall Mcdonald's used
to post it, how many burgers sold and you
know, pretty soon we overtook them in terms of
billions of joints made. So I call this a
non linear innovation. Okay. And it had a
huge impact, but only in one industry. The
electronics industry are disorder industry, some other examples of
non inventions. I just picked it up for 11
decade fiber optics cellar telephone. Uh the first I
? Ve IVF pregnancy computer tomography. And you know
, you can actually go to that site which is
mentioned here. Uh There are a number of inventions
mentioned decade by decade. So you know, you
can get an idea of that one. Mhm.
So the last one is what I call is a
black swan or disruptive innovation. Again the impact is
huge, but it is broad. It is more
than just one discipline or one field, like it's
ordering. We had. Okay. And there is
an element of unpredictability. Okay. So if you
go by the definition uh Nassim Taleb, you know
, he wrote that book called the Black swan and
he said it's an outlier, but when it happens
it carries an extreme impact. Okay. And it
has a retrospective predictability when it happened. Oh yeah
, we should have seen it coming all right.
But at that time we didn't. And examples in
the technology business, the internet, the computer,
the laser. All these three were unplanned, unpredicted
and unappreciated. Even when they were discovered, you
might recall the uh comment made by IBM Ceo.
That yeah, there will be a few pieces that
he will be able to count on fingers as we
move forward. Okay. So even when they were
invented, there was not that big and appreciation.
Okay. So they play a pretty big role.
Uh they supposed to be by definition rare events,
but I don't think they are anymore. Uh for
example, I just picked up three uh recent events
, the real estate meltdown collapse of the stock market
in late 2008. Arab Spring in January 2011.
And the earthquake tsunami, tsunami, nuclear accident that
happened in Japan. Okay. So these things are
many time unpredictable. There are outliers, but when
they happen they have a huge impact. And of
course we can go back and how we should have
seen the stock market collapse coming. We should have
seen the housing bubble coming right, but that's not
always true. So the next question that was the
title of the presentation. How do intersections promote creativity
, innovation, which could be linear, nonlinear or
black swan? Okay, so let's look at that
. Yeah, I think if you bring researchers from
different disciplines, it opened doors for questions beyond the
well trodden groups. If mechanical engineers sitting among mechanical
engineers were trying to solve a problem, A new
problem. We just started to keep on thinking the
way we have been thinking about it. We don't
bring a new perspective to that one. Okay.
But when you bring people from different disciplines together,
some magic happens. Okay. Because what happens is
if I'm sitting with and that's the next example.
If you know, we formed the center called Medica
, which is the microelectronic devices in cardiovascular applications.
Okay, so we were dealing with these micro devices
and we said, how can we solve some of
the problems of the cardiovascular disease? For example,
when you are putting stent in the body in some
cases, in a few weeks distance, they get
rich and worst again again, the deposition takes place
and it's very difficult at that time to take care
of the stance. Okay. So the question is
how can we sort of prevent that? We said
we are putting the strands anyway, coming from the
engine inside. You're putting the stands anyway, why
don't you put some nano sensors on that one and
through wireless inflammatory. I can access them. So
as soon as the deposition restenosis starts, I will
get to know it and then I can at that
time and the artists are closed only by 5% or
so. I can at that time put a drop
off anti quadrant material. And I'm done. I
don't have to wait when the artists are clouded by
90 Because our body is built that way. You
know, we can actually have our artists cloud by
90 and we still survive and then bank just we
got a stroke right? So the idea was ugly
detection and it came from bringing doctors and engineers together
. Okay. And actually what happened was, we
actually formed the cardiac assist device and we actually spun
off a new company. And the idea of this
company was to distinguish innocent murmurs in Children from the
pathological murmurs, uh, in Children. What happens
is, you know, one of the Children are
, so they have these murmurs, heart murmurs,
90 of those are innocent. Okay? But if
you go to your pediatric off doctor's office and he
tells you or she tells you that your daughter or
son has a heart murmur, I don't know about
the kid, but the parents do have a heart
murmur at that time, right? And the first
, the first instinct is, let's go and get
the Echo done. Let's find out, right?
But keep in mind 90 of them are innocent and
it's pretty costly actually to go through the Dakotas.
Right? So we said, oh, let's find
out how we can do it. So I had
a pediatric surgeon who happened to have actually, uh
, masters in electrical engineering and he also used to
work at Bell labs at one time. So we
sort of worked together and we said, let's look
at the signature electronic, electrical or electronic signature of
a heart murmur. And maybe the signature of an
innocent murmur is different than that of pathological murmur.
Okay, So if you look at the heart,
you know, the bells are there and in some
cases the Children, they have a hole in the
hole in their heart. And if that hole is
there, the blood flow is going to be different
. So the noise or the sounds created by that
are going to be different. Okay. So fundamentally
, you know that the sounds created by a pathological
heart and an innocent are hard with innocent murmur.
They're going to be different. So we said,
ok, you're putting a stethoscope. Anyway, we're
going to take a small microphone in the stethoscope and
we're going to get that sound. And then what
we're going to do, we're going to take that
sound and we are going to do some digital signal
processing. Okay? And then we're going to look
at the signature of that sound, you know,
as a function of frequency. And we can say
, oh, this is a innocent murmur. This
is a pathological murmur. So I actually built a
software, artificial neural network software. I trained it
on the signature of innocent murmur and extremely graphic pathological
murmur. And next time you go, your child
comes to your office, you put this little device
and on the other side you the signature and it
says, yep, this is innocent. No need
to send your child to the doctor. Okay.
So that was a pretty powerful device. It came
from the intersection of pediatric doctors, pediatricians and engineers
who are working in this area. So intersections they
create innovation, they create opportunities. So I was
talking about one fact earlier when you deal with the
exports, there is something that happens. They said
the magic happens. One of the things that happens
is that somehow in our own field when I go
to the conference in Mechanical Engineering and I have some
name or fame, whatever it is in my field
, I'm very careful about what I say and sometimes
don't ask the questions. You don't want to look
very stupid. But when I was dealing with these
doctors, surgeons first I found my ego was nothing
compared to their ego. That was that was the
first thing I found. And the second thing was
that I could then ask them any simple questions because
I had an outside perspective, I could ask them
why. I really don't know that biology thing.
But how does it work? How does this hard
work? Very simple questions. My experiences, sometimes
it is order those simple questions coming from the outside
that the spark of creativity, the spark of innovation
comes about. Okay, because when you are in
a given field, we think the same way.
We just keep on going along the same group all
the time and no new out of the box thinking
happens. Okay, so there was something that we
did. A company came off and then in back
actually, right here in Virginia attack in our building
headquarters on the Standard Street. We have something called
Cafe X. It's coffee shop for the unknown.
Okay. And back to my days in bed laboratories
. Uh the exercise I used to do their,
you know, once I became a fellow, we
had a number of very brilliant people working with me
. But we will call, we'll sit together once
a month and I'll ask them what will make you
unemployable in seven years, what new technology will come
along, which will make you obsolete? Will the
new transistor will be there? So, the old
stuff that we used to do with the vacuum tubes
? That's absolutely right. It was power of that
question. And people were from all over the disciplines
. Okay. Just asking that question and discussing various
options. And keep in mind these persons were at
the leading edge of their field. So they are
the world experts in their field. And you are
asking them what is going to make you unemployable?
Right? So but here what we do in the
fact that the faculty, you know, this is
a I think an old joke now on my part
. But you know, the faculty continued, you
can't tell them what will make you unemployable. That's
not possible, but we do tell them what will
make you irrelevant, that no graduate students want to
work with you. Okay? So we have been
having that seminar and you know, we got the
leading faculty member and we got we actually got a
lot of folks around different, it's just not engineers
, professor joseph paid from philosophy department, he's our
permanent member and that black swan seminars. So,
again, we are finding what we do. There
is is basically free exchange of ideas, no tyranny
. A power point that I'm subjecting you today.
It's not allowed. Power point presentation is not allowed
. And we just have a conversation, we just
have a job. And then, you know,
I have some students sitting there who are taking notes
and 4567 ideas coming up. Okay. And then
we form a little social group around them and we
say, okay, is this idea? Uh do
we want to does this idea have legs? Some
of the those ideas they die, they have a
infant mortality, They die. Nothing happens. But
some of them are the signals. We call them
signals. Those are the baby swans. It's not
the ring is the baby swans. We call them
signals the baby swans. And we are hoping we're
hoping that through this exercise Through this bringing exercise of
bringing people together will become the breeding ground for the
next blacks one. So that's where predicting the unpredictable
comes along. I actually wrote a note to the
same talent through a friend of mine. I said
, I think I'm going to prove you wrong when
you say these blacks ones are unpredictable. My whole
purpose in the next few years to prove that you're
wrong, we can predict the next black swan.
We can predict the next disruptive technology. We can
predict the next big thing. Okay, so that's
the purpose of this. And it only happens and
it can only happen if we bring people from different
disciplines together. Otherwise if I'm working in wireless technology
, my solutions, my future, I'm going to
be thinking of linearly, but you really need to
think non linearly to get to the next disruptive technology
. Okay, so a couple of stories on intersectional
innovations beyond my own work. And actually these stories
are from this book is called Art Science. It's
a wonderful book. And uh, the first story
that I have, and I do have some notes
on this one, because there are a lot of
factual things here, I want to make sure I
see them. Right? So firstly, this story
of Diana Debbie, how many of you have heard
of her? She's at right now at the Olin
College outside boston and she's a professor of Electrical Engineering
and Music. Okay. In 1982, she used
to live in New York City and she was working
as a concert pianist. Okay. She was going
through one day looking at the what are the future
trends in music. She was browsing through the journals
, Right? And she found most of the articles
that she found they were written by engineers. She
said, what in the world is going on here
? Why are the, why are engineers writing about
the latest trends in music? And she said,
I don't even know who an engineer is. So
she went over to a friend's house and the notes
say she had just bought encyclopedia Britannica. So let's
flip through the pages and find out what does an
engineer me. And they found there are too many
engineers, Mechanical engineers, chemical engineers, electrical engineers
and all kinds. And she said, oh it
looks like uh if engineers can get into this field
of music, write papers, why can't I,
as a musician look into engineering and then bring bring
that scholarship to the music field. So she said
I'm going to do it, I'm going to become
an engineer. Okay. So she made her living
through her piano concert but then she joined new york
city new york college City College and she entered mechanical
engineer. Okay. She got her I think masters
their undergraduate there and then she went to MIT after
that. And she's I think electrical engineer is what
I really want to do because I'm very interested in
understanding chaos. Okay, so back to my work
, why does the flow become turbulent? How many
of, you know, something more chaos? TDF
chaos. Okay, great story. Okay, so
here it is, you know, like here is
a professor, this is the good old days when
we didn't have these fast computers. So, you
know, he's putting the data into the computer and
he's looking at uh you know, can I predict
weather? Can I make a prediction of what the
weather is going to be a week from today?
24 hours from today? So anyway, while he
was working on this, he felt he had to
go and get a grab a cup of coffee.
Okay, So he said, ok, here's the
here's the data and a computer you may recall.
It will truncate up to the last digit. It
was eight accurate up to eight decimals and the last
stages was truncated. He jotted that down, went
back, had a cup of coffee, then he
came back and he put that data as the input
into the next iteration. Okay, so keep in
mind what he did. He had the data output
. If he had stood there, it will have
continued the process computation while he he took that data
and he thought he was just taking that data putting
it back in. It should be all right.
Well, it turned out the result was very different
than for example, if he had not taken that
date out because it was truncated At the 8th digit
. So these problems of other prediction, for example
, they are extremely, extremely nonlinear and a small
change in the initial condition can change the output.
So it came to be known as the butterfly effect
, maybe that you have heard. Right? So
it depends on what whether we will have on a
long term, it depends on whether the butterfly way
far away somewhere, decided to flap its wings or
it didn't. So our weather will be different.
That small change in the initial condition in a highly
nonlinear problem can cause that kind of change. So
that's the tv of chaos. Okay, well,
it also turned out then, you know, they
looked at it and it turned out that actually,
depending on a small chain, you can have tons
of solutions, many, many solutions, but they
had some kind of a regularity to this on the
right hand side, what is known as a tractor
, This strange uh a tractor. So even if
you have all kinds of solutions, but they will
follow one of those trajectories. Okay, so that
was the moment for her. She said, well
if this is what happens in chaos, can I
have, can I take this and apply it to
have a musical variation? Can I change a little
bit and have a new composition? But it will
still follow one of those trajectories, right? And
the story goes on and now it's my story,
it's going to be incremental. So when they were
trying to get me at R. P. I
. Many, many years ago, uh so one
of the alums from R. P. I,
you know, we have the technology college, we
need to have something in fine arts, let's have
an electronic studio where the performance will be done by
electrons. We'll have electronic ballerinas, there will be
atoms and molecules doing some dancing around. And so
they wanted to have that and they're uh I was
just happened to be talking to somebody there and I
said, you know what happens if we take uh
that's a symphony And we say, you know,
between the array, I'm going to divide that space
between Doha and Ray into. I start 64 spaces
And I'm going to take one particular performance are simply
and I'm going to change door with dough plus one
over 64th of the sound between them. And and
I don't want to see what happens, right?
You said that's a great idea. We should probably
see what happens, hold that performance look like.
But again, the idea was that, you know
, you can have this musical variation and you don't
know what you're going to say, but they will
follow that trajectory. It will still follow that process
, just like the following the turbulence. It will
follow one of those trajectories and that's her claim to
fame. You know, she came up with the
idea of this musical variation through chaos, a musician
and electrical engineer, turbulence and the piano concert player
. She brought them together. Right? So that's
what happens when you have intersection together one more story
. And then we'll conclude uh how many of you
have heard of Giulio Aquino? He has been very
very in the news. Uh he is the dean
of the College of Engineering at Northwestern University Last year
in January 2012. Uh he actually along with another
person uh he wrote an article on emerging technologies.
Okay. It's a great story though. He was
born in Argentina and you know he in his childhood
uh he used to paint, he loved painting,
okay. He used to uh bent and then all
kinds of political problems in Argentina. And then you
know his studies were disrupted but he stayed with painting
and then he also decided he wants to do something
in math. Okay. But he finished that studies
and then he came to the United States and then
he gotten into his graduate studies and he actually studied
at that time uh the problem are mixing. How
do fluids mix? Alright. Mixing is pretty important
, right? That is the cosmetics or it is
some medicine you know you want to have a very
homogeneous mixing. Okay. So he said I wanted
to study that. So you know here he's trying
all kinds of equations to study that phenomenon and he
wasn't getting anywhere okay and he said one day you
know but he used to paint remember so you know
one day he went on his desk and he he
took his brush and painted something there. Okay.
He said you know that's the kind of mixing I
want. Okay, that's exactly the kind of mixing
I want. So then he he said, you
know, really to understand the phenomena mixing and a
perfect mixing. Uh regulations are not helping me.
And he said, I'm going to use the pictures
, I'm going to use the paintings. I'm going
to do the pictorial understanding of that. And he
wants to understand how to again, the phenomenon chaos
. How does chaotic mixing take place? How did
the fluids unfold themselves? And how do they then
do the perfect mixing? So again, the example
there is and he is now pretty famous. Uh
he has a number of books and some of his
books are just on his paintings. And of course
he wrote a book which is mentioned here. The
art are mixing with an admixture of art, fluid
salads and visual imagination. You can see you can
imagine that book, it is the last stage with
wonderful paintings done by him. Right? So here's
another example where the real art and and then they
came together to create something more fundamentally new. Okay
, so I think what I thought I will conclude
my talk by saying that this is not all TD
for us, you know, we actually practice it
. We actually implemented at Virginia attack, you know
, in many institutes, but I'm going to focus
on the four slides on my on the Institute for
Critical Technology and Applied Science. Uh, this is
our vision. We want to be a top institute
globally known for transformative, sustainable technologies to meet the
societal needs. Okay, and to do that,
we actually act as a catalyst for interdisciplinary research.
And what I really want to focus your attention on
is it says that the intersection of engineering and the
sciences, physical life and social and humanities. Okay
, so you need all of them together. And
this is what is interdisciplinary research. This is multidisciplinary
research. People come to write a proposal together.
Yeah. You write your section, I write my
section, we send a proposal. If we get
awarded, we'll work together and then we'll go our
own ways. But in the interdisciplinary research you found
permanent relationships you want you learn from each other.
Okay. It is that interdisciplinary research which leads to
creativity leads to paradigm shift solutions. And the last
one by the cartoon here is what is called trans
disciplinary research. The original disciplines have no meaning in
you. What's our Okay. Uh so we look
at cutting edge technologies, nanotechnology, biotechnology, our
seller, molecular biology, cognitive brain, cognitive information
technologies. Each one of them by the way,
is extremely powerful. technology. Nanotechnology is supposed to
be the next industrial revolution.$3.7 trillion dollar global
market, pervasive in every walk of our life is
the cosmetics. We were uh the oh solar for
the world, for the world. Excel the composites
, nano composites we use for the automobiles. So
it's pretty progressive. Same thing on the cellular molecular
biology so dominant these days. You know, what
is in our gene? What is the DNA?
How does it impact our cell growth our whole life
in general, Bring the next frontier. I mean
if I had my guts, I would like to
reverse engineer brain and then report it, put it
together. You can imagine how difficult that task is
. Maybe it will take 50 years, but we'll
get it, we'll get there uh and sustainability.
Of course, I want to look at the intersection
of them to create a sustainable future. And that's
why most of our research area is unsustainable energy,
sustainable water, National security, uh emerging technologies.
So you know, that's what we normally do.
And back to my bed laboratories mantra was given,
you have to be on the top three. So
what we do is we believe in a spiral growth
. So we actually invest in faculty and then they
go back and then they get some money from our
grant from NIH and I. S. F.
D. O. E. And then when we
get to some point we bring all of them,
all of them together. We form a center and
we say now typically 16 to 20 faculty, 32
to 40 PhD students working in one area. And
then we say you better be among the top three
in what you're doing. So that's the normal model
. And of course it is about innovation and healthy
does of blue sky component. And we realized that
if we ask our faculty to take those risks,
you have to provide some safety net. Okay,
So we provide a safety net and salsa, but
the black, black swan most recently and I'll conclude
with that most recently we have set up a group
called Outliers, the Outliers Club. Okay. And
this is not by broad agency announcement. I sort
of look at some younger faculty whose neurons are still
better than mine and those, uh, because I
understand, uh, if you look at the history
of Nobel prize winners, most of the ideas on
which they got the Nobel prize, they were there
in the age of 18- 35. So my
colleagues, some colleagues of mine, they say,
what are you doing? You're telling me that,
uh, we don't have the ability to come up
with the Nobel prizes. Yeah, because we are
all the age of 35. I now let me
tell them no. If you have an idea that
you conceived at that time and now you may be
70 you can still be part of the or less
. I but the idea there is again, uh
, you know, let's think about the next blacks
, One last thing about the next transistor. Let's
think about the next iphone so that we can do
it together. So I want to leave you with
this slide. I think what we are trying to
do through this exercise and thanks for actually having this
opportunity to do it. The idea is, you
know, let's start the process. Let's start the
process of getting all of us together from arts and
the humanities and the Science and Engineering. And let's
bring the intersections, let's bring the interdisciplinary research and
hopefully as we move forward, you know, we
can just simply in my way of thinking, build
a bridge to the future and that future is off
is full of potential. It has the next disruptive
technology. It has the next disruptive idea. It
has the next transistor it has, it is the
next blacks one. Thank you very much. Okay
, time for questions I guess. And dialogue actually
more than question. The dialogue. Yeah, sure
. I will see your research for your research.
Energy, right? It's one of the topics my
own work is in nanotechnology at the intersection of intersection
with biology. So I'm mostly into nano bio interface
. Okay, so I'm trying to understand things that
a single cell level for example. You know,
again, my interest has been in cardiomyopathy, cardiovascular
disease and in cardiomyopathy. The ejection factor of the
heart goes goes down okay. And you know,
if you climb one step upstairs, you know you're
huffing and puffing. Uh so the I was just
working with the drug traffic cardio cardiology center and she
said, you know, we think that the capacity
, the mechanical capacity of these cells cardio vascular smooth
muscle cells goes down. And mutation takes place with
some jeans and it is most likely the culprit is
Dustman 21. And then that mutation takes place.
You know, the problem starts. I said,
no, we can check it out. So I
built a single cell stature. It's a small a
few 100 micron 100 migrants stature. And you know
, you can put a cell on this one uh
cardio vascular smooth muscle cell, you can stretch it
and you can see it's displacement. And you can
plot force versus displacement. Right? And now you
take a pathological cell and you do the same thing
. And the car was going to be different,
Right? And you will see yes, we tried
all the mutation investment 21 cause the maximum degradation in
the curve from a smooth muscle cells. So that
is the culprit. We proved it. So now
the question is you go to the pharmacist and tell
them, hey, give me the drug, what
do you think it's a potential drug? Well,
I can use the same drug on the same platform
and which our drug brings that curve to that of
the smooth muscle cells. That's the drug of choice
. We call this rat lab, R. A
. T rat lab so that we don't have to
work with rats. Don't have the problems that we
normally face when we try to work with rats.
So, so that's my nana by interface. And
just one more example there is, you know,
we have been looking at we have made something called
nano knife. It's about a few nanometers in diameter
, 3 to 5 nanometers in diameter, very small
and a nanometer. All of you know, it's
a billionth of a meter. My single strand of
here is damages 10, 10,000 times more than a
nanometer. So we are making 3 to 5 nanometer
uh white knives. Now I can take that night
and I can actually do class sectioning of cells and
I can see them at that level. Right,
So my my own research right now is more at
the nano bio. Although my previous life in a
university of colorado, I did a lot of work
on energy and thermal management because I came from the
Bell Laboratories. So we're making chips and one of
the problems in the chips is how you take the
heat away. So I was working on thermal management
but now I'm looking at the nano solutions for thermal
manager. Sure. So I've been thinking a lot
about how can we prove boot and help maintain that
creativity and innovation, innovative nature that Children have it
and we, we tend in our educational system to
train them out of it, particularly in the stem
field. Um, so I'm wondering if, because
we talk about like pipeline issues and stem and we
need more degrees in these areas, but that's not
really true. We need a different kind of output
, we need more creativity, we need more innovation
and but how do we keep kind of that child
like kind of attitude thought process while giving people the
foundational expertise? They need to be successful because that's
not really what we're doing now. Good question.
And let me just again start with a story from
Bell Laboratories, you know, the most amazing thing
at the Bell Labs, We had a total budget
of$2.7 billion 1976. And I joined the laps
and the the budget for unencumbered untargeted research, Why
does it happen anyway? That kind of research was
only 8.9%,,$250 million dollars in Murray Hill.
And it is out of that basic untargeted, unencumbered
research That Bell Laboratories produced eight Nobel Prize winners And
they were awarded one patent a day in its history
, keeping that innovation creativity possible. So I think
we have to bring that even in our own academia
, the idea of unencumbered untargeted research, because we
are so much right now focused on writing proposals.
You know, the we have to survive, we
have to get our summer salary, we have to
feed our PhD students. And so what happens is
, you know, we are right now, we
don't have time to do that unencumbered, untargeted research
. Right? So I think one thing to keep
that curiosity is to bring the undergraduate students, the
graduate students and the faculty members okay together, in
a vertically integrated framework where we can just not have
a particular topic to discuss about, but we can
just simply, as I said, mhm, what
is the new thing that we want to do?
We do? One thing was called the deep dive
with our studio and what we do there is we
give us some problem to students and we say Coke
and Pete Salvo is pretty bad. It will be
provided to you, but the studio is locked in
the next 24 hours to find a solution to this
problem. It works pretty well, it works pretty
well, right? So I think Mike Bill Gates
said one Microsoft guy, he said well you know
you really have to put the attention, you have
to put that stress and then you know sometimes the
creativity comes along. So I think we need to
make this as a part of our curriculum Right from
day one in the freshman year where we can say
that you know there will be some part of your
course work where we are going to bring you together
to explore the unexplored to predict the unpredictable And I
think we, our curriculum is so tight. I
know an engineer so tight we have 100 33 credit
hours and boy you try to take one course out
and put something in. It's not an easy job
but I think we had there is a need for
changing the whole curriculum answer to your question I just
presented at the last conference on mindfulness. He said
engineering 2029 And the reason I picked up 2029,
a student entering our university will be in 2025 for
engineering and I went 12 years from back 2013.
Is the students K through 12. So I said
I want a student in 2020 who will be an
engineer in 2029, but I want to go back
to K through 12 right now. Okay, so
I think we need to bring that thing together.
What will our society need? What will our society
need in 2029? And the population of the world
is maybe nine billion? What are the water needs
? What are the energy needs? How many gallons
of fresh water per person? How many BTUs per
hour per person. We know that's where we have
to be. We know where we are. We
know the gap now, how can we use creative
juices to fill that gap. So I think if
you give the students, that's my own experience,
if you give the students a big problem that they
can wrap their, you know, maybe not the
solution, but I see that as a problem.
How do we provide fresh water so many gallons per
water for 8.9 billion people, Right? And they
say, yeah, I'm motivated, I want to
come with new solutions. I want to have that
creativity and I want to say, man, I
was able to impact.1 of that problem, but
it's a big problem. So I think we don't
give our students, we don't inspire our students.
We don't give our students that big problem that they
can relate to. I'm, you know, it's
not a cliche to say we're going to solve the
problems of the world. Yeah. We're not going
to solve the problems of the world. But if
the student thinks That I'm going to make an impact
even on 1000 of that problem solution is motivated and
the creativity comes along. So the answer to your
question in my mind would be to bring that big
problem, those big problems and put them in focus
. Let me say you will do it. Just
wondering if in these intersections, how is house?
Uh huh the visible making things visible influence. And
I'm talking now about animation. So the intersection of
mathematics and art to animate. Yeah, yeah.
Actually it plays a pretty big role, you know
, with the ICHAt with Ben nap, our other
institute Institute for Creative Art and Technology and nick to
so we are actually going to go for an engineering
research center proposal averages talking earlier And these are most
prestigious awards for engineering. For example, these are
like$52,000 million dollars grand's. And the idea is
will fundamentally change the way we look at that technology
of the society through this one. So our basic
idea is very simple, very close to what you're
saying. So Ben, Ben and I sat together
and we said, you know, look we have
data analytics. We know data mining, the big
data and we know data visualization, we do that
. And persons like Echo and some other folks in
our music department. They also do data certification.
All right. So we bring this sound and the
visual and the analytics together. Combination of them.
Will it allow us to uncover or discover some information
which we couldn't see when we look at each one
of them individually. Will I have, well they
have a Eureka moment really sort of trigger that brought
out that part of the brain is when I see
them together through the sound, through the analysis through
the visuals. Yeah, I get the kernel of
truth. All right. I see the reality as
it is right. We call it you know,
just in the conference we'll call it calling it mindfulness
that you know you see the reality as as it
is Uncluttered. So maybe bringing these things together the
role of visualization and then for engineers, the role
of analytics and then for all of us are affected
by music by sound. And if we do it
right. My my hypothesis, my thesis is will
uncover information either much faster than which we would have
done otherwise or we will uncover new information that wouldn't
have been possible without them because of the visual piece
, the sound piece. Everything together. Are you
doing? Could you describe this sort of thing as
multi dimensional lateral thinking? Yeah. Well, you
know, it's pretty close. Yeah, yeah,
yeah. And dimensional now. Yeah, I'm glad
you didn't say four right? But the temporal thing
and then, you know, bringing the music and
the sound, uh, by the way, you
know, the in indian classical music in the ragas
that they play, how smart, how good a
master is is judged by whether he can take the
classic raga, classic notes and do all kinds of
variations to this and still keep the basic, remember
that we talked about the attractor, it's going to
be on that one. But hey, I'm going
to do all kinds of innovative variations. You know
, ravi shankar was known for that and a lot
of other masters were known for that. So the
idea in terms of, you know, the music
also just not the visual, but now imagine you're
listening to it and then you're also looking at some
visuals to go with that, which will capture this
, like in uh what Dupont Gardens, I think
some gardens and Delaware, you know, you go
in the evening, beautiful gardens and then in the
evening the fountains come along and then the music comes
along and the height of the fountain goes with the
music, if it is better one symphony and you
know, when the music around around and suddenly all
these guys are going up right, But it really
creates, it actually invokes some neurons in your brain
, but start thinking and looking at things differently.
So, Absolutely right. Multidimensional and dimensional, not
three dimensional, not for dimensional and dimensional. Yeah
. Okay, Okay, so you mentioned kind of
this unencumbered funding and support for that, and I
I wonder because the way our universe is structured right
now, it's this is the problem. I'm giving
you money. Yes. All right, address this
question. And before you start addressing the question,
you have to prove to me that you can address
the question. Sure. And and we tend to
use traditional ways of doing that Part of I'm going
to call this a movement. So part of the
movement that we need to make is getting other people
to hear the value and understand that the risk is
worth it. So, this is a two part
question. How do we sell it? And then
while we're selling it, how do we prepare?
Not just kind of the government, the funding agencies
, the community at large, but how do we
get current scholars to be ready to hear given how
disciplining early entrenched we are. Well, the good
news is that things are happening. Okay. I
remember one engineer came to me, I was still
at CRC at that time and he said, you
know, I'm looking for a faculty position, an
electrical engineer. And I think, uh, I'm
just trying to see what you do. And I
said, you know, before I go any further
, why do you think I should hire you?
Why should, why should we hire? Just give
me one reason? And I think I had a
, let's say, a copy on my desk on
my table and he said, I'm going to make
that dancing invisible. So if I can make that
invisible, will you hire me? I said yes
right away. Right. And then, you know
, of course it was very simple when he explained
it to me and I said, dan, why
didn't I think of that? He said, you
know, you can only see in.32.7 micron range
, that's our visible range. So he said,
all I'm going to do is I'm going to put
waves around it which are beyond your visible wavelength and
I'm going to make it invisible. Right. Of
course, there is a lot more going behind that
. But you know again, So there are people
and the idea I found that if you tell them
that we have an outlaw club, When we are
hiring the younger young faculty that you know, you
will get$10,000 to pursue your passion, pursue your
hobby. Okay, We have a mechanism where we
can give you some money to follow your hobby.
It may not be related to electrical engineering, it
may not be related to math, it may not
be related to physics are even philosophy and they say
this is an attractive place to come. So I
think we are trying to do that at that institution
level. So I have set aside some percentage of
my money, it's not even 8.9%, which was
at Bell Labs, but five of my discretionary funds
have set aside for unencumbered untargeted research at the NSF
. I'm fortunately I'm part of one of those clubs
, you know there is called the big two nano
bio info carbon or 2.0. So you know,
I've been sort of part of that one and there
the idea is to look at transformative research. The
big buzzword these days at NSF and NIH is transformative
research. Well, you know, what does transformation
mean? Right. Well it's fundamentally going to change
the way we look at it is the transformative,
it's paradigm shift. And I think the previous director
of NSF, who unfortunately, um now moved to
Carnegie Mellon as president. He didn't finish his even
six year term in the third year removed, but
he was focusing on this on incumbent on target research
. The problem was as follows. Even when you
tell the faculty in the blood agency announcement that we
are looking for transformative, high risk, high do
our research. They know for sure, at least
in their minds that the reviewers are still the same
old reviewers. And when they look at the proposal
, they are still going to say, this is
a crazy idea. Don't find it, right?
So that's the problem. So, you know,
we're trying to change the culture, even our different
agencies. But some of the fault lies with us
, you know, as faculty, as researchers.
We don't these days take risk to go beyond.
But the question is, if you're a full professor
, if you are tangled, what in the world
is the risk? Right? So, you know
, I I, you know, we have to
change that piece, right? I remember going to
Harvard University and I was talking to Dean of the
college of your name and I said, you know
, let's do something together on nanotechnology. He said
, why? I said, I will go for
a big proposal. And he said, well,
you know, that's not how we operate. What
do you mean? This is not how you operate
. Don't you go for lots of money from NSF
NIH? He said, no, we have pretty
big endowment, but that was not the main point
. But his point, he said, actually,
we expect our full professors, how many of you
are full professors here. Okay. But he said
, we expect our full professors not to write more
than one paper a year and that paper better be
paradigm shift paper. We don't want all these papers
to be you know more paper to read. So
I mean the focuses on quality that focuses on paradigm
shift. So some universities, you know actually Harvard
and MIT that they're not there because of because there
just happened to be there, there are certain things
they do which propels them into that category. I
went to Princeton University again, same thing I used
to be there. So uh I used to you
know work with them when I was in bed labs
. So I think there are certain things we can
do but cultures change very slowly but I think we
are in the process of some of these institutes but
you know, I think we are into the Virginia
Tech has done a very good job in focusing on
some of the interdisciplinary things and I think I I
see some changes since I have come and I think
things are happening because with NSF, when I asked
them about the undergraduate, it's still about number.
Yeah, I know how many do we have in
the pipeline? Just because 100,000 people in the pipeline
doesn't mean you're going to get anything kind of shiny
in the end. Yeah, no, absolutely right
. And I think, but I think they understand
it and there is a need for, basically in
my mind, it's really in the academia, if
we can't do in the universities where we have so
much freedom to do certain things, I don't know
where we'll do it. Uh you know, people
are now trying to create bell labs 2.0 and all
that, but it's not gonna be possible. You
know, things don't happen like that. We're not
going to have an 80 antimonopoly anymore. Uh we
don't have, we're not going to have a company
which had one million employees and we provided telephone to
everybody. So, you know, that's not going
to happen. So I think the place where we
can do an incumbent, untargeted, curiosity driven,
high risk, high reward paradigm shift in the creative
innovative technologies or science or ideas is in the academia
. And one of the ways of doing that is
to create those intersections. So maybe my answer to
your question is, you know, I think it's
happening. Maybe we are here, maybe we are
here in this path. We'll get we'll get there
. I'm pretty done optimistic. I'm uh incredible optimistic
, Right? So, I mean, I think
it's going to happen. Uh I think, you
know, the exercise I gave at the to my
students again is a part of my incorrigible optimist in
all my classes, uh would repeat myself. I
give them the following exercise. And then they come
to my class every time every morning when they get
up, it doesn't matter what the courses on mechanical
engineering, heat transport, transport phenomenon on technology,
it doesn't matter. Their assignment is every morning when
they got up, they have to write three reasons
why am I happy today? I don't even give
them the option why I should be happy today.
Why am I happy today? Right? It's interesting
for engineers to think along those lines, Right?
But, you know, so, you know,
pretty soon they start becoming more reflective before, you
know, the initial answers are we have no homework
last night, I didn't fight with my girlfriend last
night, You know, whatever those. And then
suddenly they started getting into, you know when I
got out yesterday and I found that a few roses
were blooming okay? And I went out last night
and there were stars in the sky and I felt
that right and pretty soon they started getting into this
optimistic, this reflective mode. But they also come
to the class in it with a sense of optimism
and I am not in the education department, but
I bet if the studies are done, if you
come to the class with a sense of optimism,
better learning takes place. Okay, so that was
my motive behind it. And and of course,
you know, in a very funny sense, I
used to tell them after two weeks, I was
hoping that you will say one reason I'm happy today
. I'm going to attend professor margins class go that
you can imagine that one. So I think I'm
optimistic. I think we are. It will be
a slow trajectory, but I think we're going to
get there and I think Virginia attack will get there
okay. And as a nation we absolutely have no
choice. The one thing that keeps us apart from
other countries varies India. It is china is the
innovation. We are pretty damn good at innovating things
. You know, it's in our it's in the
culture. All right. So I think I'm pretty
optimistic. I think we're going to innovate. We're
going to create new stuff. Uh, you know
, nobody else created facebook, Nobody has created iphone
, you know, we did and we're going to
continue to do that. So I'm pretty optimistic.
Okay. Yes. Speaking on some of the earlier
question really struck any the language of your remarks,
which is very much about perceptual metaphors about seeing a
disciplinary hearing. And it sounds so to speed that
what might be more important than thinking about problem solving
, which requires a toolkit and inclination. But a
larger pedagogical problem is the jur task is to make
people more sensitive to what they see so that the
perception of an opportunity that for that would allow you
to say not only retrospectively black splotch was somehow inevitable
or had a high probability. Uh but see those
very immediate perceptions that little exercise that you just described
of looking around maybe part of a larger pedagogical agenda
would certainly not be only a stem field. Kind
of a thing of Try to account for what one
perceives both on the sensitivity, the perception side and
the communicative part. Yeah. Where the different perspectives
can actually be recognized as not only different, but
there is a potential value in those different ones.
So those contributions can happen. Einstein didn't achieve very
much after he went to the institute for advanced beyond
35 at that point, but simply the juxtaposition kind
of insurance doesn't necessarily lead to those evidently creative transformative
out comes and people are going to say it's time
to pull the plug and coming from a field where
Congress just pulled the plug on the entire discipline,
on NSF funding for the entire discipline and political science
, I sort of worry about that. Yeah,
no, I think, you know, to me
perceptions and you know, you're absolutely right with your
comment. But my own sense is that, you
know, when I bring people together from different disciplines
, I gained some insight which I won't have gained
otherwise. Okay. And that's why even when I'm
thinking of the next act as building, if I
have one, you know right now, everything is
transparent. We have made these intersecting places. I
want to have actually a separate room where you just
go there put your feet on the table and reflect
and think and maybe get the inside that comes from
having people come together. Okay, So there's a
room for bringing those perceptions together into the new kernel
of truth. Yeah. But you know, in
this conference on mindfulness, we I mean we as
a society and even at the whole world now we
actually don't have time to sit back and reflect on
things, right? Our minds are always cluttered and
some moments of insight fullness. Now I'm getting into
my mindfulness conference right? The moments of those big
insightful things and the big ideas sometimes come when the
mind is Uncluttered and it allows the mind then to
synthesize everything that it has seen and comes up with
something new. 1111 reason people focus on mindfulness.
Okay, so there are a number of ways,
you know, and I think we are on the
right path. We are somewhere, there were not
in the first one, we're somewhere in the middle
and we'll build a bridge to the future which will
be exciting, which will be innovative, which will
be created. Thank you. Very okay. Thanks
very much. Last away Next meeting at 5 15
. So about Russia? Yeah.