I’m gonna start out with a couple
questions the first question who has
used their cell phone in the last five
minutes come on don’t lie I see a check
it out there who has used their GPS in
the last three hours who has flown in an
airplane in the last 30 days okay one
more question what entity with their
investment in tech has had the most
impact Google how about Apple maybe a
more traditional company Lockheed Martin
would you believe it if I told you Uncle
Sam your government now listen TEDx boca
is about reinvention and tonight I’m
going to talk about the reinvention of
government tech into the products and
services that we can’t live without now
one of them comes to mind GPS now I’m an
old guy been around a long time and the
first time I saw a GPS I flew with it in
this airplane right here in the Persian
Gulf the GPS was not integrated into the
cockpit they gave it to us in a box and
the box was about this big
but even then I could see what GPS might
become and I think we can all think of
the predecessor the Internet the ARPANET
in 1969 the government funded the
ARPANET and that connected scientific
research establishments across the
nation but what else let’s go deeper the
way we conduct go deeper tonight is take
a little journey a little thought
journey let’s plan and execute some
travel so if you’re like me you’re
planning your travel on your cell phone
or on your personal computer and those
incredibly powerful and useful devices
would not exist without the integrated
circuit but to understand the need for
the integrated circuit we got to go back
in the Wayback Machine way back to the
first general-purpose electronic
computer it was called the ENIAC and the
ante act was a huge machine the ENIAC
weights 60,000 pounds
it was funded by the US Army in 1946 at
the University of Pennsylvania the New
York Times said about the ENIAC it
performs mathematical tasks at the speed
of light hitherto too complex or
difficult for solution but as I said
this thing was huge it wouldn’t fit into
your house let alone the palm of your
hand and the ENIAC had some other
problems the ENIAC was comprised of this
vacuum tubes these vacuum tubes were
connected by wire and that connection of
wire and vacuum tubes caused something
the designers called the tyranny of
numbers the tyranny numbers meant that
as I wanted to increase the performance
of my machines I needed more tubes and
more wire well enter the integrated
circuit in 1959 a guy named Jack Kirby
patented the integrated circuit and what
he wrote in his patent application was a
body of solid-state conductor material
where all the circuits are completely
integrated Kirby worked for Texas
Instruments and their first customer was
the US Air Force this was followed by a
tidal wave of investment from NASA the
Navy and the army mostly for the space
program and the missile programs of the
day that gave rise to present-day
Silicon Valley so we’ve seen the way
government investment impacted early
computing how about software one of the
most well known software companies in
the world is Google and Google benefited
from its very outset from government
invention now you wouldn’t know that
from the project maven report so we read
in the newspaper but in 1994 the
National Science Foundation gave six
awards to something they called the
digital language initiative DLI DLI
awards went to Stanford and other
institutions but Stanford’s team was
interested in looking at the Internet as
a collection of objects or a family tree
the lead researcher Larry Page Larry was
quickly joined by Sergey Brin and Google
was spun out of that research four years
later so we’ve made our travel
arrangements we’re on our way to the
airport and we call our uber or our lift
our ride hailing services now these
incredibly innovative
inspiration companies would not exist
without it that aforementioned global
positioning system but the GPS did not
always exist as the worldwide navigation
constellation we know it of today in
fact GPS started out as a Navy program
called transit in 1966 this provided
navigation and timing signals to Navy
ships at sea so we’ve gotten to the
airport we’re boarding our flight and we
look out on the wing and we see the
modern jet engine now the modern jet
engine is a marvel of complexity and
technology there are only five countries
in the world that can design and
manufacture the modern jet engine the US
the UK France Italy and Russia now what
about China well if you read the papers
especially yesterday you just realized
they steal our designs they can make
them just fine now the modern jet engine
has been around since World War two it
made its combat debut with the German
air force but these jet engines had a
fundamental limitation they had a
service life of about 10 to 20 hours but
the US and the UK saw the advantages of
jets and they invested massively
metallurgy components technology and by
the 50s all of our front-line fighters
were jet-powered and by the 60s all the
commercial airliners were jet-powered
revolutionising air travel so are on our
way we’re traveling and what we don’t
see is the air traffic control system
now the air traffic control system is a
complex web of technology that provides
safe separation and navigation guidance
to airplanes in flight
it’s operated and funded by the FAA it’s
got a marvelous safety record the FAA
and the air traffic control system
handle an amazing 87 thousand flights a
day 87,000 and those flights have an
incredible safety record one fatality
for every 16 million flights we made it
safely to our destination we’re leaving
our airplane we weren’t one of the
fatalities and once again we pull out
our cell phone and we call that ride a
hailing app that Google of the uber or
the lyft and makes us think about the
origins of touchscreen now touchscreen
has been around since
60s and the government invested in
touchscreen in the 70s to a thing called
capacitive touchscreen but touchscreen
really got its commercial debut in the
90s this guy right here
dr. Wayne westerman he was working as a
researcher at the University of Delaware
and he was funded on a National Science
Foundation grant he took that research
and spun off a company called finger
works now finger works was bought by
Apple Computer in 2005 and the first
iPhone shipped with touchscreen in 2007
we were in our car were traveling to our
destination and we wonder about the
origins of voice recognition technology
now voice recognition technology mostly
dates back to some DARPA research from
1971 that research was called speech
understanding research and he had at its
root something called the hidden Markov
model but that hidden Markov model
needed mathematics and they were
provided by this guy right here dr. le
bomb now he was as smart as he looked he
was a Harvard mathematician and he
figured out those algorithms he was
working at Princeton’s Institute for
Defense analysis and he was funded by
yeah you guessed it almost Sam so we’ve
seen how the government investment in
research and technology has affected
every leg of our travel for our cell
phones to the way we get around to the
way we fly what’s next well one
interesting area is unmanned systems or
drones now the first drone actually flew
in World War two it was called the
Kettering bug this was a mere 15 years
after the Wright Flyer flew at Kitty
Hawk now this thing thank God never saw
combat it looks a little scary to me but
the Kettering bug was funded by the US
Army as an aerial torpedo or a drone a
bomb of sorts drones continued to evolve
in World War two but all these drones
lacked the significant navigation
guidance and control that would make
them truly useful intelligence
surveillance and reconnaissance
platforms that is until this thing right
here project amber project amber was
funded by DARPA in 1984 with 40 million
dollars
a company that won the competition was
LSI and they built an airplane called
the gnat now the gnat wasn’t
particularly impressive it was pretty
small and had a 28 foot wingspan 15 foot
fuselage a single two bladed prop but
what made the Nath’s special was it
could stay airborne for 38 hours and
then that leveraged all those
technologies we’ve been talking about
guidance command and control navigation
and computing now amber was cancelled in
the 90s LS I went out of business and
they sold their assets to a company
called General Atomics but the gnat
lives on today as perhaps the most
famous of all drone aircraft the mq-1
predator now the Predators had a number
of firsts it was the first drone ever to
be controlled internationally it was the
first drone to fly in the civilian
airspace structure and it was the first
drone to be uploaded with weapons but
what made the predator so special is it
fundamentally changed the way we think
about drone aircraft
so before predator we thought about
drones as weapon systems after predator
we can think of drones doing just about
anything we see drones doing wind
turbine spec should we see drones doing
Medical Supply Drop
we even see drones doing household
package delivery ok now the government
invests in tech for different reasons
than then industry we know that and
often we think of our government as well
the villain or sometimes we think of our
government as inapt
or perhaps incompetent or maybe clueless
and they probably all of those things
but those government researchers those
government scientists those government
engineers that dedicate their life to
this stuff have one advantage and that
advantage is they can do research over
months or years or even decades and that
research that technology provides the
innovation of today but also the tech
platform of the future and I’m here to
tell you from personal experience that
tech more importantly well some night
somewhere someone’s life’s going to
depend on it
thank you
[Applause] [Music]
questions the first question who has
used their cell phone in the last five
minutes come on don’t lie I see a check
it out there who has used their GPS in
the last three hours who has flown in an
airplane in the last 30 days okay one
more question what entity with their
investment in tech has had the most
impact Google how about Apple maybe a
more traditional company Lockheed Martin
would you believe it if I told you Uncle
Sam your government now listen TEDx boca
is about reinvention and tonight I’m
going to talk about the reinvention of
government tech into the products and
services that we can’t live without now
one of them comes to mind GPS now I’m an
old guy been around a long time and the
first time I saw a GPS I flew with it in
this airplane right here in the Persian
Gulf the GPS was not integrated into the
cockpit they gave it to us in a box and
the box was about this big
but even then I could see what GPS might
become and I think we can all think of
the predecessor the Internet the ARPANET
in 1969 the government funded the
ARPANET and that connected scientific
research establishments across the
nation but what else let’s go deeper the
way we conduct go deeper tonight is take
a little journey a little thought
journey let’s plan and execute some
travel so if you’re like me you’re
planning your travel on your cell phone
or on your personal computer and those
incredibly powerful and useful devices
would not exist without the integrated
circuit but to understand the need for
the integrated circuit we got to go back
in the Wayback Machine way back to the
first general-purpose electronic
computer it was called the ENIAC and the
ante act was a huge machine the ENIAC
weights 60,000 pounds
it was funded by the US Army in 1946 at
the University of Pennsylvania the New
York Times said about the ENIAC it
performs mathematical tasks at the speed
of light hitherto too complex or
difficult for solution but as I said
this thing was huge it wouldn’t fit into
your house let alone the palm of your
hand and the ENIAC had some other
problems the ENIAC was comprised of this
vacuum tubes these vacuum tubes were
connected by wire and that connection of
wire and vacuum tubes caused something
the designers called the tyranny of
numbers the tyranny numbers meant that
as I wanted to increase the performance
of my machines I needed more tubes and
more wire well enter the integrated
circuit in 1959 a guy named Jack Kirby
patented the integrated circuit and what
he wrote in his patent application was a
body of solid-state conductor material
where all the circuits are completely
integrated Kirby worked for Texas
Instruments and their first customer was
the US Air Force this was followed by a
tidal wave of investment from NASA the
Navy and the army mostly for the space
program and the missile programs of the
day that gave rise to present-day
Silicon Valley so we’ve seen the way
government investment impacted early
computing how about software one of the
most well known software companies in
the world is Google and Google benefited
from its very outset from government
invention now you wouldn’t know that
from the project maven report so we read
in the newspaper but in 1994 the
National Science Foundation gave six
awards to something they called the
digital language initiative DLI DLI
awards went to Stanford and other
institutions but Stanford’s team was
interested in looking at the Internet as
a collection of objects or a family tree
the lead researcher Larry Page Larry was
quickly joined by Sergey Brin and Google
was spun out of that research four years
later so we’ve made our travel
arrangements we’re on our way to the
airport and we call our uber or our lift
our ride hailing services now these
incredibly innovative
inspiration companies would not exist
without it that aforementioned global
positioning system but the GPS did not
always exist as the worldwide navigation
constellation we know it of today in
fact GPS started out as a Navy program
called transit in 1966 this provided
navigation and timing signals to Navy
ships at sea so we’ve gotten to the
airport we’re boarding our flight and we
look out on the wing and we see the
modern jet engine now the modern jet
engine is a marvel of complexity and
technology there are only five countries
in the world that can design and
manufacture the modern jet engine the US
the UK France Italy and Russia now what
about China well if you read the papers
especially yesterday you just realized
they steal our designs they can make
them just fine now the modern jet engine
has been around since World War two it
made its combat debut with the German
air force but these jet engines had a
fundamental limitation they had a
service life of about 10 to 20 hours but
the US and the UK saw the advantages of
jets and they invested massively
metallurgy components technology and by
the 50s all of our front-line fighters
were jet-powered and by the 60s all the
commercial airliners were jet-powered
revolutionising air travel so are on our
way we’re traveling and what we don’t
see is the air traffic control system
now the air traffic control system is a
complex web of technology that provides
safe separation and navigation guidance
to airplanes in flight
it’s operated and funded by the FAA it’s
got a marvelous safety record the FAA
and the air traffic control system
handle an amazing 87 thousand flights a
day 87,000 and those flights have an
incredible safety record one fatality
for every 16 million flights we made it
safely to our destination we’re leaving
our airplane we weren’t one of the
fatalities and once again we pull out
our cell phone and we call that ride a
hailing app that Google of the uber or
the lyft and makes us think about the
origins of touchscreen now touchscreen
has been around since
60s and the government invested in
touchscreen in the 70s to a thing called
capacitive touchscreen but touchscreen
really got its commercial debut in the
90s this guy right here
dr. Wayne westerman he was working as a
researcher at the University of Delaware
and he was funded on a National Science
Foundation grant he took that research
and spun off a company called finger
works now finger works was bought by
Apple Computer in 2005 and the first
iPhone shipped with touchscreen in 2007
we were in our car were traveling to our
destination and we wonder about the
origins of voice recognition technology
now voice recognition technology mostly
dates back to some DARPA research from
1971 that research was called speech
understanding research and he had at its
root something called the hidden Markov
model but that hidden Markov model
needed mathematics and they were
provided by this guy right here dr. le
bomb now he was as smart as he looked he
was a Harvard mathematician and he
figured out those algorithms he was
working at Princeton’s Institute for
Defense analysis and he was funded by
yeah you guessed it almost Sam so we’ve
seen how the government investment in
research and technology has affected
every leg of our travel for our cell
phones to the way we get around to the
way we fly what’s next well one
interesting area is unmanned systems or
drones now the first drone actually flew
in World War two it was called the
Kettering bug this was a mere 15 years
after the Wright Flyer flew at Kitty
Hawk now this thing thank God never saw
combat it looks a little scary to me but
the Kettering bug was funded by the US
Army as an aerial torpedo or a drone a
bomb of sorts drones continued to evolve
in World War two but all these drones
lacked the significant navigation
guidance and control that would make
them truly useful intelligence
surveillance and reconnaissance
platforms that is until this thing right
here project amber project amber was
funded by DARPA in 1984 with 40 million
dollars
a company that won the competition was
LSI and they built an airplane called
the gnat now the gnat wasn’t
particularly impressive it was pretty
small and had a 28 foot wingspan 15 foot
fuselage a single two bladed prop but
what made the Nath’s special was it
could stay airborne for 38 hours and
then that leveraged all those
technologies we’ve been talking about
guidance command and control navigation
and computing now amber was cancelled in
the 90s LS I went out of business and
they sold their assets to a company
called General Atomics but the gnat
lives on today as perhaps the most
famous of all drone aircraft the mq-1
predator now the Predators had a number
of firsts it was the first drone ever to
be controlled internationally it was the
first drone to fly in the civilian
airspace structure and it was the first
drone to be uploaded with weapons but
what made the predator so special is it
fundamentally changed the way we think
about drone aircraft
so before predator we thought about
drones as weapon systems after predator
we can think of drones doing just about
anything we see drones doing wind
turbine spec should we see drones doing
Medical Supply Drop
we even see drones doing household
package delivery ok now the government
invests in tech for different reasons
than then industry we know that and
often we think of our government as well
the villain or sometimes we think of our
government as inapt
or perhaps incompetent or maybe clueless
and they probably all of those things
but those government researchers those
government scientists those government
engineers that dedicate their life to
this stuff have one advantage and that
advantage is they can do research over
months or years or even decades and that
research that technology provides the
innovation of today but also the tech
platform of the future and I’m here to
tell you from personal experience that
tech more importantly well some night
somewhere someone’s life’s going to
depend on it
thank you
[Applause] [Music]
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