Day 3

Throughout this Forum, your What’s Up at Wait, What? blogger has asked attendees and participants if they have had an exceptional Wait, What? moment at the meeting. Did you have a conversation that blew your mind? Did you learn about a concept in a plenary talk that helped you forge new conceptual connections? Did you see a DARPA demo that altered your views of what was possible or not?

As a partner in DARPA programs run by the Information Innovation Office, Jeri Hessman of Schafer Corporation spent most of her time at the Demo Hall. But that gave her an opportunity to talk with dozens of program managers from all over the agency and to experience a wide sampling of DARPA technologies in various phases of development. 

That sampling constituted her What, Wait? moment, which she articulated with admirable succinctness: “Holy crap, this is all so cool!” She noted that it was amazing even for her, a member of the technology community, to experience the head-spinning collective effect of all of the technologies showcased in the hall.

A Senate committee staffer shared two Wait, What moments. One was during the plenary session by MIT’s Ramesh Raskar, when Raskar was talking about using femtosecond photography to look around corners. “I was, like, ‘you can do that?,’” which is, of course, just a variation on the phrase, Wait, What? “It was eye opening research that I had never heard anything about.”

The staffer’s second moment centered on all of the interactions between government researchers and the private sector going on in the Demo Hall, which was a veritable petting zoo of DARPA-supported technology. Said the staffer: “We really want to see much more churn and exchange of ideas and that seems to be happening here.”

Many attendees were taken with the inclusion of ethics in the discussion by plenary lecturer and breakout session moderator R. Alta Charo, a professor of law and ethics at the law and medical schools of the University of Wisconsin. That was the case for a lieutenant in the U.S. Marines, who said she found it energizing to consider questions of “not whether we can invent specific technologies — because we have — but whether we should." This same servicewoman was taken by the nanobots and microbots in the Demo Hall. Said the Lt. Col., “It was amazing to tell my children about it: Oh my Goodness, we have created what they would see in a movie. It's actually here.”

For Justin Manzo of Booz Allen Hamilton, who was manning the Demo Hall booth for the Hand Proprioception and Touch Interfaces (HAPTIX) program, his Wait, What? moment occurred when a visitor working on improving surgical training came to the booth. Recalled Manzo: “He looked at it and said, ‘Wow,’ this would be incredibly useful for training someone to do really delicate spinal surgeries.”

A Wait, What moment for Tom Kalil, Deputy Director for Technology and Innovation at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, was when he learned about ideas for making it “much easier to develop computer-numerically-controlled machine tools that could be customized for a particular manufacturing process," something he said has exciting technology and economic implications. “It could allow us to repatriate a lot of manufacturing that went overseas because of differentials in labor cost," Kalil said. "This could create a paradigm for eliminating some of those differences.”