# Advancing AI for Manufacturing through Public Private Partnerships — Transcript

I'm really excited. I guess I'm Paul's designated announcer for people here today. So I'm excited to welcome Dr. Rob Ivester, who's the senior advisor on advanced manufacturing at the National Institute for Standards and Technology.

Rob brings decades of leadership across federal research and manufacturing programs, including service as a deputy director of the Hollings Manufacturing Extension Partnership, which is one of the programs that funds Cirrus, and leadership roles within the Department of Energy. Over the course of his career, he's helped launch major national initiatives, including multiple manufacturing USA institutes, and the Critical Materials Hub, which is located here at Iowa State University, while also leading research and advanced manufacturing at NIST. Dr. Ivister continues to shape the next generation of manufacturing through his work at the intersection of research, policy, and industry, and as an instructor in graduate-level manufacturing engineering at Johns Hopkins University.

In this session, he'll explore how public-private partnerships are advancing the application of AI in manufacturing, As the lines blur between research and real-world deployment, he'll continue to, he'll outline how government, industry, and academic collaboration is accelerating the transition of AI from concept to practice. So please join me in welcoming Dr. Rob Ivester. All right.

Thanks, Mike. Mike volume's good. You can hear me in the back of the room okay? All right.

Okay, this is not that. No, it's okay. Don't worry about it. It's fine.

No, it's just, I'm used to using the screen. It's okay. It's all right. Don't worry about it.

So, I want to start up because I had a question during the break. about a public-private partnership. And I just want to give a quick, let's assume that we're talking about funding technology development, paying for research and development to mature technology. One definition of a public-private partnership is a public entity, a representation of government, invests resources, dollars, and a private entity, maybe Pella, invest resources or dollars in a partnership, a public-private partnership. And I think it's an important element as we try and transition technologies in key areas that the government has a role in that, but also to ensure successful realization of those technologies by industry, private sector has to have a role as well.

So that's public-private partnerships, and we're all already talking about AI for manufacturing, so I don't need to explain that. So one of the things that I often forget is that not everybody lives in the Washington, D.C. area and studies the anatomy of the federal government and understands departments and mission spaces and all that kind of stuff. Manufacturing has a complicated footprint into the federal government. You know, each of the members of the president's cabinet has a stake in manufacturing.

All of them, not just one or two. There's no Department of Manufacturing. I don't know if anybody noticed that, but there's no Department of Manufacturing. It doesn't exist in this country.

We do have the Department of Commerce. So the first column, economic competitiveness. That's kind of where the Department of Commerce is looking to advance things on behalf of the country. We want a highly competitive economy.

We're in a, not a war, not a battle, but we are actively in a competition with every other country on the planet. They're all trying to succeed economically. We're trying to succeed economically, and we want to be highly competitive. We want to win a lot of the time, and we always want to be in the race across the globe, across all parts of the economy.

An important part of that is bringing innovative products into the marketplace. The Department of War, previously the Department of Defense, as well as a couple of other departments, have really significant footprints into national security and manufactured products, manufacturing. It's a core element of how we defend our national security. So Department of War, absolutely, you know, all the planes and tanks, munitions, lots and lots of other things, not just that, but those are things that we can all relate to.

Battleships, you know, those are all products that have to be made. And if we want to have the best products, we have to innovate how we make them and what technologies we make them with. And then finally, energy security. It's a critical part of our trade and our relationship with other countries on the globe.

Where does our energy come from? Where does our energy go? And do we have a reliable and secure and stably priced supply supply of energy. So the Department of Energy has a stake in this.

All three of these departments have been sponsors of public-private partnerships to advance manufacturing called the Manufacturing USA Institutes. Mike referred to them in his introductory remarks. We as a nation for the last 70 years have been the pioneer in innovative thought. We're very creative.

As a nation, one of the things that we tend to lose sight of, and I know I heard Paul say it several times, but not everybody was necessarily in the room. Essentially, fail fast, fail cheap is a different way of saying it. But let's back up from the fail fast part. Fail.

It's okay in this country to fail. You go out, you innovate, You trip, you skin your knee, you get up, you do it again. You trip, you skin your knee, you get up, you do it again. In many other cultures around the world, you skin your knee once, you're done.

You're A second-class citizen. No one will give you the chance to go innovate again. No one will invest in your idea. We are remarkably resilient and tolerant of failure in our thought leaders, in our innovators.

We are still best in the world at innovating ideas and inventions. We are not best in the world at translating those inventions into products that are made here. There's been a variety of studies. They don't do all 170-some nations.

They do like the 40 nations in the OECD or something like that. And, you know, we're not always dead last. Just everybody take some solace in that. Whatever the list is, 20 countries, 40 countries, you know, sometimes we even make the top 10.

But we are not number one. The institutes were created as an element of supporting that need of transitioning technologies from something that you can demonstrate in the laboratory of any of our world-class universities. But if we're talking, say, chemicals, do you make something in a beaker? Do you make it in a bucket?

Do you make it in a vat? Or do you make it in a building-sized silo? You have to scale from beaker to silo. And the problem changes as you go through each of those steps in scale, and there's technology maturation that has to go with it.

Just because it works with 12 PhDs babysitting it in a lab in a beaker does not mean that it will work in the silo. It won't. There's work to be done there, and somebody has to pay for it. We do a great job at the beaker.

We are world leading. We are not world leading getting it all the way to the silo. So we want to address all three of the departmental missions that I mentioned, economic security, national security, energy security. There's A confluence of those interests in manufacturing and in the technology areas that the Manufacturing USA Institutes have been selected to focus on.

So some of the institutes are sponsored out of the Department of Energy, some out of the Department of Defense, some out of the Department of Commerce. We work together as a team. They're coordinated through an office at NIST. But they're all there to bring the people, ideas, and technology to cross that gap, to mature those technologies.

I keep looking at the laptop. It's just habit. It's okay. It's okay.

You know, I know I'm the last thing before Paul closes us out, and I probably have just a couple more slides, so I'm going to skip this one. There's goals, and they involve like workforce and stuff and themes that you guys have been talking about. Because I want to spend a little bit of time on this. Is this a pointer?

I think I'm going to turn the whole screen off if I push that button. Okay. All right. So I'm going to not push that button.

I don't want to turn the screen off. The screen will imagine what you're pointing out. Government universities are in the hump on the left. Oh, yeah.

Land grant university. Iowa State, fantastic R1 university doing loads of wonderful research work. Almost all of it paid for by the federal government. Not quite all, but almost all of it.

So there's the government in the left part where the government is actually doing the work, like in a federal lab, but the vast majority of research being conducted at our leading research universities is paid for by the federal government. So this is the public side of the public-private partnership. But as you go to make the silo, as you go to scale, that's over on the right-hand side. The amount of money that it takes to do that per technology is massive and much bigger than the government puts into the equation.

That's why the right hump is taller than the left hump. So that's one of the things that I want to, okay, we do some stuff over here on the left. We actually do lots of stuff in beakers. We do 1,000 or 5,000 projects. and three of them or five of them are ready to then cross over the valley and get scaled.

The cost of the five of them to get scaled is more than the cost of the thousand of them to get researched in a lab. The cost grows dramatically. Somebody has to pay for that, and we have to come to agreement that the things being done on the left line up with the things on the right. This is the really critical visual that I hold in my mind, and I'm hoping you all can hold in your minds, the need for the public-private partnership.

The role of the public-private partnership is to narrow the gap between the two humps. But just as importantly, this is essentially a handoff through the partnership. Somebody is over here and they hike the ball and they carry it. Oops, okay, I'm going to put that down.

They hike the ball and they carry it for the 1st 10 yards, dealing with the beaker stuff. And they hope that 80 yards down the field for the last 10 yards, the company is going to take the ball and cross the goal line. There's 80 yards in the middle that they've got to work together on. They've got to line up their direction.

They've got to look at the other barriers on the field. You know, there's blockers and tacklers and people running at each other. All of that has to be coordinated. You don't just start at the 10-yard line and be like, well, I'll just toss it.

And somebody will grab it and run the rest of the way. You have to line up and be in agreement. So one of the critical things that I have driven is I want to see the private sector partners that are going to invest on the right hump in the room when we're planning out the beaker project and say, if the beaker project gets to this stage and then we do it in a bucket, what are the things that you're worried about as we go from bucket to VAT, to silo. What are the key measures of technological performance and economic performance that are what you need to see so that you will bet your company's future on scaling that technology?

Not you'll embrace it, you'll put a little money in. No, you're all in, this is your path forward. What do you need from us in the early stage so that your confidence level is much higher in the later stage? All right.

It did change. That's changed. Okay. All right.

So we've got 17 institutes live today. We have coverage in all 50 states plus Puerto Rico, much like the MEP program. In addition to the three sponsoring institutes on the right, we have 9 partner federal agencies that are also investing in the network. To whatever degree the federal government is coming together on priorities in advanced manufacturing, this is the program where it happens.

Are we doing a great job? No. I give us like a C minus. We're doing a great job with the resources that we have, but we're dramatically under-resourced.

The type of thing that we're trying to do, the opportunity space that we're operating in, we could do 100 times as much activity easily. But we don't have 100 times as much money. So just so I'm clear, that's the reason for the C minus. So we have 17 institutes, loosely grouped into the five themes here.

You may see some familiar logos. Anybody just, if you've heard of one of these institutes before, or if you've heard of the Manufacturing USA Institutes, can I just get a show of hands? Like what are we, what's our, okay. So like I'm gonna say less than, somewhere around 10% of the room.

The most of you, have not really had exposure to these. The electronics, I think, is self-explanatory, and the materials as a theme area. The digital and automation, because we're here to talk about AI, I want to just talk a little bit about digital and automation before I close out. And I'm going to start with the Smart Manufacturing Institute, which I helped launch in 2000.

And essentially I would say everything, and it's called SESME. Everything that SESME has done from the very beginning is really just gearing up for better AI implementation. We didn't necessarily know it then, but that's, it's just, I'm going to say that's just a true statement. I don't need to defend it.

It's just true. everything that they're doing. They're instrumenting processes. They're structuring data. They're basically creating an enterprise that is much more friendly to the application and utilization of AI.

They were doing it for other reasons, but now that they've been doing it, all of that infrastructure is in place. On the far right, digital manufacturing, MXD, headquartered in Chicago. Similar kind of thing. It's basically trying from idea to customer support, full digitalization of all product information.

We're going to track everything about the product from the very beginning to the very end of life, including disposal and recycling. We're going to have an electronic footprint. We're going to have a digital model of everything we need to know about that and seamlessly interconnected. So if you want to think about as you're in the design stage, what happens in the use stage, you have a model that informs that.

Again, that's like an information superhighway for AI applications. And then finally out of that list, I want to talk about the Advanced Robotics Institute, ARM, which is headquartered in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. This is really just looking at the use of robots. We don't have a problem in this nation with robots replacing workers.

That's a common myth. It's just not true. If anybody wants to hear my spiel on debunking that, I'll be happy to do that in the networking. I can understand it is a concern, but it's just not true.

Robots help enterprises be more productive. It does not help them downsize their workforce. It helps them upskill their workforce. And everything that ARM has done has laid the groundwork for more applications to AI, because it's helping them understand where the value comes from in all of their activities inside their facility, and what can be automated, and what currently we still need people for.

In my mind, that's teeing up the things that we still need people for. That's because people, in the context of establishing ARM, AI doesn't exist as a tool. We're looking at robots replacing the physical actions of people. Now those robots and the software systems around it can be additionally empowered with the use of AI so that they can do things, additional things that people normally do.

All right. So we have launched a competition for an 18th institute on the use of AI for resilient manufacturing. The thing that I forgot to say about the digital cross-cut that I talked about the three different institutes from. In some sense, those are all cross-cutting of every other institute.

Every other institute has use for robotics. Every other institute has use for product information. Every other institute has manufacturing processes that could be made more smart. The AI institute is the cross-cut of everything and all of the cross-cuts.

We can take advantage of those superhighways of AI opportunity in the digitization theme. with AI, but we can also use it for all of the other institutes. And by the way, all 17 institutes have a portfolio of projects that are currently using AI in their domain, in their work. They're already using AI. This institute is not going to be, well, all the AI work happens here, and you guys stop you doing AI.

No, this institute is to help all of the other institutes succeed better at using AI. So with that, I'll close out. I think I'm on time. Not too bad, really.

Okay. All right. So together with all of these institutes, our purpose is to secure America's manufacturing future and mature more things across that valley. Final comment, and this came out in one of the discussions.

I think the role of the public, of the federal government in investing in early stage technologies as they mature, There's an interesting flip here because we, the federal government, are not the primary economic driver of AI innovation. The private sector has taken the lead. That's not a problem. We're happy to have the private sector take the lead.

Good. We don't have to pay for it. They can pay for it. And then we can still reap the benefits of it.

But every other technology area, all the other 17 institutes, the government is still pushing on the left-hand side, desperately trying to make it go faster. We don't need to do that with AI. That's fantastic. All right.

Thank you. I'd like to... Okay, can you hear me? Are there any questions?

Do we have one or two questions? Anybody have any questions right now? I'd say questions are not. Okay, totally understandable.

I think this is quite exciting. The thing that Robert was telling me is that, you know, they're just trying to kind of keep up with or understand or be able to coordinate what's going on in the AI space now and to bring it into all of this. And that is quite exciting because coordination could be tremendous. So thank you very much again.

I really appreciate you coming. You had to come all the way from the East Coast to our little conference here and we appreciate you being here. It was a wonderful experience. Thank you.

Thank you. All right.