Future Directions in STEM Education and Research

ITherm Conference

May 31, 2017

Orlando, Florida

G.P. “Bud” Peterson

(As written; not necessarily as delivered)

I am honored to be asked to speak to this ITherm Conference, and relieved that it didn’t have to be in my major research interest area of phase-change heat transfer. While I do have a lab and work with Ph.D. students at Georgia Tech, most of my time is spent in educational administration. I have shared that possibly the only thing from my major area of study and research that prepared me for my job now is the second law of thermodynamics: When left unattended, systems go to their greatest disorder. In any cyclic process the entropy, or the measure of the amount of energy which is unavailable to do work, will either increase or remain the same. I’m still replicating the theory in higher education administration, but I think that systems left unattended go to their greatest state of disorder!

Since most of my time is no longer in the laboratory, I thought I would talk with you today about something that is very much in the forefront of what I am engaged in daily, and something that impacts all of us — future directions for STEM education and research.

Historical Changes in Higher Education

Several factors have had a profound impact on higher education through the years. The Morrill Act of 1862 established land-grant institutions, and the initial Morrill Act and those following improved the lives of millions of Americans.

In 1944 the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act, or GI Bill, helped World War II veterans to attend college or trade schools. It helped the veterans and boosted college enrollments.

After World War II, Vannevar Bush, who headed the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development, came out with the report, “Science, The Endless Frontier,” which provided a road map for continuing collaboration between the government and research universities during the war. We’ll talk more about that in a minute.

In 1957 Sputnik first orbited the earth, and that was the gauntlet for the space race in the U.S. Science took off, boosting our interest and investment in STEM fields.

Today, we see a general change from people thinking of education as an investment for the public good, to thinking that it is for the benefit of the individual. Research universities and associated organizations are now facing the challenge of communicating how important research universities are to society.

Creating a Culture of Innovation in Our Research: a 75-year Partnership

I’d like to expound on the Vannevar Bush report and its significance. For the past 75 years, research universities and the federal government have partnered to produce results that are the envy of the rest of the world. The federal government and American research universities have a unique and longstanding partnership — performing innovative research to advance our economy, improving public health, strengthening national security, and at the same time training our nation’s next generation of scientists and engineers. In return, the federal government provides universities with peer-reviewed and competitively awarded grants to support the people, tools, and infrastructure necessary to conduct the highest quality of research for the American people. 

This partnership has fostered unprecedented scientific achievement and economic growth in the United States since WWII. Research universities partnered with the federal government during the war. Numerous labs were set up across the country. People are familiar with the Manhattan Project, but there were hundreds of other research projects. As the war was ending, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt asked Vannevar Bush, former dean of engineering at MIT and chair of the National Defense Research Committee, to recommend what the postwar research system should look like. He didn’t want to lose the momentum that had developed through this unique collaboration. The resulting report, “Science, The Endless Frontier,” was transmitted to President Roosevelt in 1945. It included guidance that the government needed to support basic research. Industry didn’t have the resources or the financial incentive to support most of the basic research that would be needed in the postwar era.

The government would “outsource” its research to universities. The research would be disseminated in scientific publications and presentations at professional meetings. Everyone could benefit. NSF, established on May 10, 1950, was borne out of that recommendation. I consider it a privilege to be serving my second term on the National Science Board and helping to invest federal resources in some of the most exciting and potentially transformative research underway in our country. The system has been highly successful, and much of our country’s prosperity and innovations can be tied to university research.

Universities can be slow in accepting change

While the research has been cutting edge, universities can be slow in adapting to change. 

• Corporations readily adapt to and anticipate change because of the immediate need to make a profit and keep the shareholders happy.
• We start classes in August and end in May so that people can harvest their crops.
• We, like most organizations, have pockets of innovation, but not across the board.

The hardest thing to do at a university is to try something new, but if we don’t define our own agenda, it will be defined for us.

In many ways, this is good because it prevents them from just responding to the current whims of society!

But we must recognize that the world is changing

The information and technological landscape is changing so rapidly that technologies that were state-of-the-art when students entered college may well be obsolete by the time they graduate. Communication is instantaneous.

One of my favorite authors is Thomas Friedman, an American journalist and Pulitzer Prize winner who is also a New York Times columnist. Because of his extensive research, he has become known as a futurist. In 2005, he wrote “The World is Flat.” In 2008, “Hot, Flat, and Crowded,” and 2011, “That Used to Be Us.”

When doing research for his 2011 book, he looked back at 2005. He realized

    Facebook didn’t exist

    Twitter was still a sound

    4G was a parking space

    Applications were what you sent to college

    Cloud was still the sky

I found his latest book, “Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist’s Guide to Thriving in the Age of Acceleration,” to be very insightful.

In it he talked about Moore’s law. As you know, Moore’s law is the expectation that the power of microchips will double every two years, demonstrating the power of exponential change. The increase in transistors has been arithmetic. This has in turn created a geometric increase in the rate of information generation. Actually accelerating — as the number of transistors increases linearly, information creation is accelerating, perhaps geometrically.

The title to Tom Friedman’s book, “Thank You for Being Late,” came from times when he was scheduled to meet friends or interview people over breakfast in Washington, D.C. Because of rush hour traffic or delays on the Metro, they would sometimes rush in late, apologizing. His answer became “Thank you for being late. It gave me a chance to connect two concepts I have been struggling with, or just to think.”

After one of those times, he gave his ticket to a parking garage attendant at the cashier’s booth. The elderly gentleman said, “I know who you are.” He had the same attendant another time, and the man told him that he writes, too, and has his own blog. It turns out that the man was from Ethiopia and had a blog on political and economic issues in Ethiopia. Tom Friedman reached out to him to interview him. He was college-educated and had been forced into political exile. His blog is read in 30 different countries. That is an example of the power one person can have because of the web.

Just in the year 2007, we saw monumental changes.

To illustrate the rate of change, Tom Friedman used the year 2007. Just in 2007:

• Apple introduced the iPhone
• AT&T invested in software-enabled networks
• Big Data emerged
• Open source software platform
• Facebook expanded, Twitter started
• Google launched Android
• Kindle
• IBM began building Watson
• Beginning of the clean-power revolution
• Cost of DNA sequencing fell dramatically
• Intel introduced non-silicon materials into microchips — Moore’s law continues

I think most people missed the significance of that last one, and all that has been made possible through non-silicon materials in microchips.

Higher education is under much more scrutiny than at any point in history. There are issues involving cost and affordability, campus safety, and free speech. 

These issues, when combined with greater competition for resources, are creating a need to explore and develop both immediate and long-term sustainable solutions that address the effectiveness and costs associated with higher education.

It is imperative that we continue to explore and evaluate new, innovative approaches to higher education, in order to provide alternative educational models that reduce costs, improve the processes and approaches we employ, and increase accessibility for lifelong learning. 

Education needs to change at a rate perhaps even faster than the world around it.

Our universities are well positioned to meet changing demands but will require a change in the way we operate and seek to achieve our mission.

Every university claims to teach their students how to think critically — some actually do. In addition to teaching our students to “think critically,” they need to be able to process vast amounts of information to turn it into knowledge. We need to develop new educational methodologies, and we need to create a culture of innovation.

We need to teach our students to use information to create knowledge

The question is, “how can we educate our students to use these massive amounts of information to create knowledge?” The applications are almost limitless.

For example, one of the major surveillance components for pinpointing flu outbreaks is the web. Professionals gather information on how many people in a certain area have done a web search on flu symptoms, and it correlates closely with the outbreak in an area.

Sensing and software are transforming just about everything in our lives. Tom Friedman gave as an example of how Channel Outdoor uses customized pop-up ads on the interstate. In Boston and 10 other cities, they collect data on 130 million drivers, using phone aps. They know who stops at Dunkin’ Donuts and who bought tickets to the Super Bowl.

Sensing software is transforming everything from the dairy industry to transportation. Sensing software on locomotives can sense and broadcast the quality of the tracks and help regulate fuel efficiency. It can help determine that predictive maintenance needs to be moved up if the engine has been running beyond 100-percent capacity. It saves the railroad industry millions of dollars and helps with safety.

Georgia Tech, Georgia State University, and the city of Atlanta are founding members of the MetroLab Network, announced in September 2015 at the White House Smart Cities Forum. MetroLab is a framework for sharing the best uses of smart-city technology. It’s the first network of its kind, and it’s already enabling experimentation and implementation. The potential of the Smart Cities concept is tremendous. It has implications in several areas including cybersecurity, energy efficiency, environmental sustainability, systems thinking, urban planning, and many others. And in turn, every one of those areas is related to safety and quality of life.

And on our Atlanta campus, we’ve launched a new faculty council with members from more than a dozen Georgia Tech units. Dr. Elizabeth Mynatt, executive director of Georgia Tech’s Institute for People and Technology (IPaT) and a Georgia Tech professor of computing, is chairing the council.

Technology has changed so rapidly that policy in many areas is not keeping up:  examples — drones, other autonomous vehicles, and patent laws.

So, what are the policy implications? First, we are not just consumers anymore — we are contributors. 

Sometimes we have a say in what information is shared, and at other times, we do not. The Clear Channel research is an “inactive imposition,” gathering data without people’s permission or awareness.

There are issues of transparency. We must be willing to open up. For example, Georgia Tech is a leader in health analytics, part of the Institute for People and Technology that I just mentioned, along with the Georgia Tech Research Institute, or GTRI, and several of our colleges. In collaboration with the Healthcare Georgia Foundation, we have developed a Data Web Portal for disseminating comprehensive healthcare measures available at the community level in Georgia. It will lead to better health care in rural areas and help eliminate health disparities.

We have to ensure accuracy of our information and in the way it is analyzed. We are all familiar with the recent terms of “fake news” and “alternative facts.” Fake news can be produced anywhere because of easy access to the web. And, we have to know that it can lead to a digital divide — the haves and the have nots.

We need to develop new educational methodologies
There has been a shift in culture that redefines the overall approach to education. With that in mind, we have brought together 50 faculty, staff, and students in a Commission on Creating the Next in Higher Education. Guided by a philosophy that education is more about doing than listening, the structure empowers students to have more control and responsibility over their own education and assists them in developing personal agency and necessary soft skills. Other emerging themes include a systems-thinking approach that defines what pathways are critical during a traditional higher education experience and a clear definition of what comes after graduation.

Our Commission on Creating the Next in Education is a coordinated effort to adopt innovative educational methodologies and lifelong learning initiatives through our Center for 21st Century Universities, or C21U, our Center for Teaching and Learning, or CTL, our Office of Information Technology, and Georgia Tech Professional Education, which reaches learners from 130 countries. The commission is an 18-month effort that began in January 2016. It is designed to help us grow, support, and expand the educational experience at Georgia Tech. It has a broad charter to imagine all the ways that a Georgia Tech education might be more effective, accessible, and affordable.

They are taking into account the changing demographics of students, new ways of organizing undergraduate and graduate learning, and identifying how potential advances will transform lives around the world.

We are also thinking about what we have to do to achieve a shift in culture that redefines the overall approach to education and the need to prepare the “whole student” through formal and informal curriculum both in and out of the classroom, utilizing peer learning, etc.

One of the ways we are reaching people throughout the world is through Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs.

We continue to implement technology-enhanced education, including MOOCs.

Enrollment continues to grow. We offer 34 courses, with 1.8 million students. We’re taking concepts that we have learned from MOOCS to develop online degree programs.

Some very smart are people working on Tech’s strategic plan, but nobody predicted the amazing rapidity with which “technology assisted instruction” would be adopted.  

This is Magnus Egerstedt, Schlumberger Professor and Associate Chair for Research in ECE. Don’t be too impressed with the photo on the left. It was staged for the cover of one of our Research Horizons magazines, and the robot in the air is actually suspended.

He does, however, teach a course called “Control of Mobile Robots.” In the two times he has taught it, he averages 51,000 students, so that’s 102,000 total. He just rolled out a third course offering using Coursera’s new “on-demand” format with 6,000 students taking it. The course focuses on how to make robots move in safe and effective ways.

He shared a story with us. A couple of years ago, he was vacationing in Spain with his family. A woman came up to him on the beach and recognized him from the course she took. She asked to take a selfie with him. He said it was the only time his 12-year-old twin daughters have ever been impressed with him in the last few years! He’s kind of a “MOOC rock star.”

Students studying on campus are benefiting from MOOCs: Faculty say it improves classroom teaching, taking components from online learning into the classroom.

One of the ways that colleges and universities can offer affordable educational opportunities to more students is through technology-assisted education. We’re taking what we’ve learned from MOOCs to apply it to online degree programs. A little over three years ago, Georgia Tech partnered with AT&T to offer an Online Master of Science in Computer Science, or OMS CS, to help address the nation’s growing shortage of qualified workers in STEM fields and provide promising career opportunities to thousands of students. It is the first completely online master of science in computer science, offered at a fraction of the cost of earning a similar degree via on-campus classes.

As one of the leading technological universities in the U.S., Georgia Tech is committed to helping students maximize the value of their educational investment. To this end, we’re implementing measures to help improve college completion rates, control costs, continuously improve quality, and offer online education for lifelong learning. The program has grown from 380 in its first cohort to more than 4,500 students today. It is interesting to note that some already have master’s, and some have Ph.D.s. It is a testimony to the need for lifelong learning.

We need to create a culture of innovation

We need to create a culture of innovation in our teaching, in our research, in our students, in our facilities and how we design our campus.

We’re working to build a culture of innovation:

• In our teaching (lifelong learning, concepts from MOOCs used in on-campus learning, flipped classrooms, Vertically Integrated Learning, and our work with the Commission on Creating the Next in Higher Education).

• In our research (collaborations, interdisciplinary, partnering with industry).
   
• In our students through curricula and competitions. We are committed to help them develop entrepreneurial confidence. Whether they go to work for a corporation or start their own company at some point in their career, it is a necessary life skill in today’s society, and especially for the future.

• In how we design our campus: shared labs and other resources in the Engineered Biosystems Building (EBB), sustainability, collaboration with business and industry in innovation neighborhoods surrounding the campus.

Building on the OMS CS program’s success, the new OMS Analytics degree that launches next fall will continue Georgia Tech’s tradition of providing cost-effective options for nontraditional learners. Along those lines, three professional master’s degrees — Manufacturing Leadership, Applied Systems Engineering, and Sustainable Electrical Energy — are delivered in hybrid format combining online learning with on-campus visits.

Creating a Culture of Innovation in Our Teaching: Resource Utilization

One of the required courses for the OMS CS program that we talked about is artificial intelligence.

In College of Computing Professor Ashok Goel’s artificial intelligence class in spring 2016, Jill Watson was one of nine teaching assistants. “She” is a computer created by a team of graduate students using IBM’s Watson platform. You may have read the coverage in The Wall Street Journal or The Washington Post. It was an experiment in the College of Computing as part of the OMS CS program. Every time Professor Goel offers the class, he estimates his 300 students post about 10,000 messages in online discussion forums, too many for him and his eight teaching assistants to handle. While the number of questions increases as the number of students goes up, the number of different questions does not.

He added Jill Watson to provide faster answers and feedback. She had 97 percent confidence in her answers and received good reviews from the students. In fact, she was nominated for best TA. Students didn’t find out she was a computer until the semester’s end. We’re now trying out the concept in other classes, including three introductory Computer Science classes this past January.

Creating a Culture of Innovation in Our Teaching: Globalization

As we know, impact is enhanced through global engagement. Your ITherm conference has a global focus. Some of the greatest breakthroughs in countless fields have occurred because of global collaboration. 

Georgia Tech is a global university. Our faculty are engaged in research in more than 100 countries. Our students come from 117 countries. Fifty-four percent of our undergraduates have a study-abroad experience before they graduate.

For 26 years, we have had a campus in France, Georgia Tech-Lorraine. In December 2016, we signed an agreement to establish the Georgia Tech Tianjin University Shenzhen Institute. It is a partnership between Georgia Tech, the Shenzhen government, and Tianjin University.

Georgia Tech is committed to providing lifelong learning. It starts with K-12 outreach to instill STEM interest and skills and extends to 25,000 traditional and online students enrolled in degree programs, more than 18,600 learners who benefit from Georgia Tech Professional Education (GTPE) professional development courses and certificate programs, and the 643,000 learners worldwide enrolled in 28 massive open online courses (MOOCs) produced by Georgia Tech.

Creating a Culture of Innovation in Our Research: Partnering with Industry

During the past five years, corporations have opened more than 20 innovation and technology centers and labs in and around Tech Square, all within a several-block area, with still others in the planning stages. Companies such as Worldpay, Keysight Technologies, and NCR are attracted to Tech Square so that they can access the talent and technologies being developed and collaborate with Georgia Tech faculty, staff, and students. This, when coupled with the many startups fostered in the innovative, dynamic environment developed by the Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC) and the Enterprise Innovation Institute (EI²), Georgia Tech’s chief economic development and business-outreach arm, has dramatically changed the face and culture of Midtown.

Today, Georgia Tech’s impact extends throughout the state and across the region. In 2016, EI² partners evaluated more than 200 technologies based on Georgia Tech research innovations, created or saved more than 16,000 jobs, generated more than $757 million in investments, and helped more than 1,200 manufacturers reduce operating costs and generate sales. In addition, ATDC companies in 2016 reported revenues totaling more than $274 million and served almost 2,000 Georgia entrepreneurs statewide.

Creating a Culture of Innovation in Our Research: Talent and Technology

Major research universities frequently foster innovation in teaching and research, attracting the world to their doorsteps. Nowhere is this more evident than in Atlanta in Technology Square. Today Tech Square is a vibrant, energetic live-learn-work-play district where new startup ventures, large companies, and higher education collaborate to develop new technologies and promote and enhance economic development.

The Harvard Business Review article referenced in the slide noted that in the past, companies did innovation in isolation. Today, very few companies have a monopoly on technology. They are leveraging the research capacity of research universities in urban neighborhoods.

We are developing other economic ecosystems in other areas around the Atlanta campus as well.

Creating a Culture of Innovation in Our Students: A New Paradigm

It is estimated that 65 percent of students entering primary school today will ultimately work in jobs types that don’t currently exist and will hold 15 different jobs during their career. Georgia Tech is preparing students for the future through curricula and student competitions designed to instill entrepreneurial confidence. The annual InVenture Prize competition in the spring has drawn more than 3,600 participants during its nine years. On March 16, this year’s winning team was CauteryGuard, a team that created a safer medical device to remove unwanted tissue and to stop bleeding during surgery. The team won $20,000 plus a free patent filing and a spot in Flashpoint, a Georgia Tech accelerator. The team also won the $5,000 People’s Choice Award, as well as the People’s Choice Award in the ACC InVenture Prize held on the Georgia Tech campus March 30-31.

Georgia Tech encourages STEM education and an innovation culture in schools all over the state through the K-12 InVenture Challenge, which reaches about 2,000 students annually and is held in conjunction with the Institute’s InVenture Prize undergraduate competition. Eighty teams participated from more than 40 Georgia elementary, middle, and high schools.

More than 1,000 students are participating this year in CREATE-X, a program designed to give students tools to establish startups or to think innovatively within a corporation. Its three signature programs are Startup Lab, Idea to Prototype, and Startup Summer. Since its 2014 launch, CREATE-X has helped 49 student-founded startups. Of those, 32 are still going in Atlanta and have raised significant follow-up funding.

Georgia Tech students also test their creative ingenuity in other competitions such as the Capstone Design Expo, Ideas to Serve (I2S), and Convergence Innovation Competition (CIC), along with innovation programs such as VentureLab and TI:GER®, and living-learning communities such as Startup House and Grand Challenges. Some provide classroom instruction and credit toward graduation, but all give students the opportunity to work collaboratively to create products and services that can find a market niche.

Creating a Culture of Innovation in Our Facilities: Economic Development

Small to midsized companies: Smaller companies, including startups, locate in innovation neighborhoods because of ready access to customers and the opportunities and support for scaling their businesses. Large companies invest in them and possibly acquire them. Focusing on scaling small companies will help ensure their success and long-term presence in the region, helping to build the reputation of the region as a great place to locate and grow a business.

Creating a Culture of Innovation in Our Facilities: Partnership

The future of STEM education and research is in partnerships. Interdisciplinary collaboration, partnerships between universities, partnerships with government, and philanthropy.

Georgia Tech’s campus reflects this. For any new facilities we’re building, we’re very purposeful about how they will be used.

Our Engineered Biosystems Building co-locates and integrates faculty and students from the Colleges of Engineering and Sciences and complements the Institute’s goal of developing solutions to some of society’s greatest challenges by spurring innovation and economic development in an interdisciplinary manner.

We partner with Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta and Emory University. The facility itself was built through a partnership between the state of Georgia, Institute funds, and philanthropy.

Tech Square: Future Expansion

The newest addition to Tech Square will be the Coda building, developed by Portman Holdings. It will house Georgia Tech’s high-performance computing center. The 750,000-square-foot, mixed-use project is slated for completion in 2019. Coda will become a magnet for corporations and startups alike, while serving as a state-of-the-art resource for breakthrough research. As such, it will help propel the region and Midtown Atlanta as one of the leading innovation ecosystems in the Southeast and the nation.

Our Future: Continued Collaboration

American science has put a man on the moon, ended polio, sequenced the human genome, connected the world through the internet, and then placed it in the palm of your hand, and allowed us to diagnose countless medical conditions with the aid of an MRI. We’re working on new cybersecurity solutions, driverless cars, smart cities, cell-based manufacturing, and customized medicine, to name a few.

The partnership between America’s research universities, the federal government, DARPA, the Department of Defense, and associated entities such as the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and others has greatly improved our national health, reinforced our national security, and generated untold job growth.

Our economy depends on our ability to create the technologies, cures, and jobs of the future. Through our shared commitment and support, our nation’s research agencies can continue to sustain the promise of America's leadership in scientific, technological, and economic advancement.