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Daniel Terdiman: Innovation in arms control as well as to announce the winners of the
innovation challenge, I would like to introduce Acting Undersecretary of State Rose Gottemoeller
Acting Under Secretary Gottemoeller: Thank you Daniel and thank you everyone for being
here. It's great to try out this new technology. I have to say I have been fascinated by the
potential for the information technology revolution to help us out in the world of arms control,
verification and monitoring. In fact for a long time, since I was negotiating the New
Start Treaty with Russian colleagues in Geneva, I was thinking that a lot was happening out
in the information arena that we hadn't thought about using in the arms control monitoring
and verification world. Beyond traditional treaties, like the New START Treaty that are
also areas of nuclear safe guards, the International Atomic Energy Agency for example is always
looking for ways to hone and modernize and improve its ways of safe guarding nuclear
facilities, civil energy facilities around the world. So, I was very interested in work
that we can do that would help us in this arena. So, about a year ago we got the idea
of putting together a competition, a challenge, an innovation challenge, to see if a community
of experts working in these areas, whether in the arms control arena or else in the information
and technology arena could help us think about some new ideas for really tackling these tough
policy problems, and I am very happy to tell you that while it was quite a bureaucratic
tussle as you can imagine to work this out, but for one thing the U.S. Government is very
encouraging now of technology innovation challenges , we've been working some with the Defense
Advanced Research Projects, you can see DARPA has long been at the forefront of efforts
to move these information technology challenges, they were very, very helpful and we managed
to get it done.
I am very happy to announce the results of our first competition, and we have all three
of our competition winners here on the screen. The first, our first prize winner is all the
way from Beijing where it is 2 o'clock in the morning, and she has joined us today.
Her name is Lovely Umayam, she is a graduate student from the Monterey Institute of International
Studies at Middlebury College, and she has been awarded first prize of $5,000 for her
creation of "Bombshelltoe". This is an online education platform that examines the intersection
culture and nuclear issues in order to facilitate a better understanding of basic arms control
and nuclear policy-related issues. So congratulations to Lovely and thank you very much for joining
us all the way from Beijing. We will be hearing more from her in a minute, but let me turn
to the other two prize winners. The second is Mr. Allen Childers, an aerospace and defense
industry consultant from Florida. He has been awarded the runner up prize of $2,500 for
his proposal of a mobile application that provides a platform for users to connect and
interact, as well as a rewards program for sharing information on various arms control
treaty regimes. Our third winner is Dr. Rudolph "Chip" Mappus, a research scientist at Georgia
Tech. I should say he is our second runner up, our two runners up of the same status.
He is a research scientist at Georgia Tech Research Institute and he has been awarded
the second runner up of $2,500 for his proposal of a unique geographically based online social
game for verifying treaty compliance. All three of these prizes that we've awarded are
related to the education of the public and really figuring out how to get the public
more engaged in arms control monitoring and verification, and to develop public understanding
of the challenges that face us in this policy arena. So again a very big thanks and expression
of appreciation to our three prize winners, and Dan I'm going to turn it back over to
you for, for your comments and questions. Thanks a lot.
Daniel Terdiman: Okay, well thank you very much. We did want to hear from each of the
winners, I believe each of you have a little, small presentation about your, about your
submissions. Lovely, do you want to start us off?
Lovely Umayam: Sure, again thank you so much for this opportunity. I am in Beijing, but
it's totally fine and again I am really excited to be here. So, as Under Secretary Gottemoeller
said earlier, my proposal is "Bombshelltoe", which is a nuclear policy blog dedicated to
examining nuclear issues through popular culture. In the nonproliferation field, I've noticed
we take for granted some basic knowledge like the difference between uranium and plutonium,
what a nuclear weapon free-zone is, etc. But the public is starting with zero knowledge
and usually they get their knowledge from movies and TV shows and so forth, and so "Bombshelltoe"
or the goal of "Bombshelltoe" is to foster a more meaningful conversation about arms
control issues by exploring the intersection between the two that would hopefully pique
the interest of the public into diving deeper into the details of arms control policy, and
Under Secretary Gottemoeller is a big component of social verification and its exciting and
it's an idea worth exploration. But, our conceptualization of such an issue needs a pragmatic approach,
and what I want to advocate is that we cannot leave social out of social verification, and
this means engaging in education for the public. So that's a snippet of "Bombshelltoe" and
I am excited to unleash it in the universe and share it with you all, so thanks again.
Daniel Terdiman: Thank you Lovely, one quick question that I have for you is have you seen
other projects like this, that you know involving other issues?
Lovely Umayam: I have actually, one of the inspirations for "Bombshelltoe" was Radio
Lab from WNYC and there is also you know Wired Magazine. It is basically taking their complex
issues and simplifying it, and and I guess interpreting it with a twist, so it's a little
bit more interesting. And I mean I think that is really where social verification needs
to start, if we are going to try to use information technology, at the end of the day its people
using such technology. So they need to be well informed and they need to be interested,
especially with national security issues. So I hope that, well you know "Bombshelltoe"
in and of itself is experimental, I think it's going to be a challenge to condense the
very dense issues about nuclear policy, about arms control policy into a nuclear policy
blog, but I sure hope to try.
Daniel Terdiman: Very good, thank you so much. Allen do you want to give us a little of a
primer on your project, please?
Allen Childers: Sure, thank you for having me here today and awarding me a prize, I was
pleasantly surprised when that happened. I have a background in the military, I have
26 years in the military and part of that time was spent in the State Department and
much of that time that I had in the military and as a contract consultant after I left
the military was in the arms control world, so I come to it with a little bit different
perspective. I thought that a great idea would be to create a game along the lines of "Where
is Waldo?", except we would call it "Where are TLI?" or we create a title for something
like that, and I look at it as an opportunity to gather information not necessarily to do
intelligence gathering or verification of arms control treaties, because I personally
believe the government is responsible for that. And we don't want to create a social
network of people who are "pseudo-spies" necessarily because from a military perspective we don't
want our own citizens spying on us and I am certain from my experience with the Russians
and other countries we don't want to put their citizens in a situation where they're perceived
as spying on their own militaries or their own government. So a "Where's Waldo?" concept
came up because when you go online and look at Waldo, he is leaving a number of tools
around a number of hints of where he is at all the time and what happens is when you
take treaty limited items outside of their normal environment for example you take a
warhead off of an ICBM, and you transport it somewhere, we as a country and any other
country involved in an arms control agreement would like to understand where that warhead
is all the time, when it is not where its suppose to be and that's really the gap that
we have in verification of arms control treaties. Generally we know from data exchanges and
from on-site inspections where things are when they are suppose to be there. We have
trouble finding out where they're at when they're not supposed to be. So, my proposal
was basically to create a system of avatars, everyone would log on to a system, a "Where's
Waldo?" type of game as an avatar. So they are not identified as a person providing particular
information, we don't provide them with anything other than a series of points that they can
be awarded when they identify "TLI" that is not in place, and we provide them with some
kind of idea what a "TLI" not where its suppose to be might look like, for example a warhead
would not travel as a warhead on the back of a flatbed truck so that everyone can see,
it would travel in a trailer, we would find those kinds of trailers and have people identify
if they see that kind of data. So, then we would have to establish a number of ground
rules too with our treaty partners, we would have to test the system regularly. I was particularly
encouraged last week because I noted in an article released by Reuters that Google, Facebook,
and Amazon.com are going to take this kind of approach in a cancer research study, were
there is so much data out there that can be shared with social media and people with five
minutes or something can review that data and look for particular anomalies in that
data and tell a scientist that they see it, so you take millions of people, researching
the data for them. And that's my contribution, thank you again.
Daniel Terdiman: Very good thank you, that sounds very interesting, and Chip would you
like to let us in on what you're working on, please?
Dr. Rudolph "Chip" Mappus: So, thanks again for letting us all be here today, my proposal
dovetails with what Allen was proposing. Mine sort of focuses on or is inspired by existing
online games that utilize consumer-grade GPS and smartphone technology to hide things in
the open, right, so you know these notions of geocaching or QR codes that are hidden
in plain sight but are only, players are only aware of them and their significance by locating
them. My proposal was to have experts, treaty experts post online locations and tasks for
players to complete and then the players would go out, seek out these locations, note the
needed information that is necessary for treaty compliance, and then submit it online so that
the experts can then again verify that the players have completed the tasks. So it's
sort of a running game now where there are millions of these geocaches located throughout
the world and people play it insistently almost and this game, this proposal game is a play
on that.
Daniel Terdiman: Well thank you very much. Under Secretary Gottemoeller, I'm curious
from your prospective were you surprised to see that two of the three winners had proposed
games? I mean was that what you were expecting?
Acting Under Secretary Gottemoeller: Well, honestly I hadn't thought about games, but
they're two important points that all three of our prize winners will point out for the
community -- and first of all that is we need a way to engage the public that really gets
them interested because the whole area of nuclear arms control, conventional, chemical
biological weapons, it seems so arcane somehow, and you never seem to get the level of interest
that we had during the Cold War these days. These days its seems very remote and something
that's not really important to people's day-in, day-out lives. So I was very pleased, actually,
that all three of our prize winners came up with ways to engage the public and engage
the public in very lively ways that really point out the relevance, I think, of this
arena of arms control policy and nonproliferation policy to everybody's everyday interests,
and so I actually in the end was surprised, I have to say, but in the end I got it. And
I said this is really interesting. And this is a great way to engage the public and by
the way to get young people interested. Because especially for the younger generation, I think
a lot of them think, "Oh man, that's something from the Cold War," or "That's something we
don't have to think about today at all," so I really welcome that each of these three
prize winners came up with ideas that will engage the public and that will keep the younger
generation interested because I'm certainly looking for the next generation of policymakers
to take over in this arena when I am ready to retire. The other thing I think is that
their work points out is that, especially our latter two prize winners, the role of
ubiquitous sensing these days. That we have sensors everywhere -- sensors on smartphones,
iPads, a great number of sensors all producing data and information and we have to figure
out a way to use that information for all kinds of applications. I think the medical
applications are terrific, just mentioned a few moments ago of the use of this great
flow of data for cancer research and potentially cancer treatment. I think this is a really
exciting area in the medical arena and I say to myself, "Why not apply it to the kind of
sensing task we need in the arms control treaty and monitoring arena?" So I really welcome
also that they pointed us in that direction in this competition.
Daniel Terdiman: Absolutely, very good. You mention that you want to get young people
involved in this. Do you have a sense of whether if there were school-aged people that made
submissions to this innovations challenge?
Acting Under Secretary Gottemoeller: Well, I was just delighted that Lovely is our first
prize winner and she is a graduate student, as I mentioned at the Monterey Institute,
although now doing a year of dissertation research in Beijing, so we had a number of
very, very good applications from students all over the place. This particular competition
was limited to students in the United States, but we had quite a few good ideas coming in
from students and I am very pleased about that. And by the way, we are looking forward
to a new competition, so stay tuned for that. I am not ready today to announce the details,
but we will certainly be putting out the details of a new competition within a short time.
Sometime this spring.
Daniel Terdiman: Very good. Well, we have some questions that were submitted by people
by Twitter and also on Google+, and I thought we would give you a chance to answer a few
of those. They are not related directly to this challenge, but they are more to the question
of arms control and international security. So, one is vaguely related, and so the question
is, "What is the most outrageous information and communication technology, or concept that
you would have loved to see applied to help solve a global security problem?"
Acting Under Secretary Gottemoeller: The most outrageous? Wow, that's in the eyes of the
beholder, but I think that that's a great question. I think I will take us back to the
notion of ubiquitous sensing and how we make use of this kind of information, because a
lot of the challenges we will be facing in the future in the arms control arena, it's
kind of like the "Where's Waldo?" issue that was described a few moments ago. We are going
to very small objects, widely disbursed, things like warheads. President Obama has talked
about in the next phase of nuclear arms reductions focusing in on warheads that are in storage
facilities or warheads that are held in reserve as one of the goals for the next stage of
nuclear arms reduction. Up to this point, we have always focused in on big items, that
you can see even from outer space, even from satellites, or from overhead aircraft, like
missiles or bombers or big submarines, really large objects. But when we start focusing
in on warheads, that are held behind closed doors in storage facilities we are going to
have very, very different kinds of challenges, so having widely dispersed sensors that can
help us with the right analysis and, of course, the right acquiescence with our treaty partners
to get out looking for and finding some of these smaller objects. I think it will be
a very important step forward. So, I would say that's our greatest challenge and so I'm
looking very useful, but I think never the less, at this point, becoming well-developed
technologies are not new things but are well deployed around the world and we are just
looking for better ways to use them.
Daniel Terdiman: Can you step back in time a little bit and explain what the term "societal
verification" means?
Acting Under Secretary Gottemoeller: Yes, societal verification was first developed
during the 1950s. One of its first proponents was Joseph Rotblat who was one of the founders
of the so called 'pugwash movement' that was really one of the first efforts to bring together
Soviet scientists, U.S. scientists, and scientists from other countries to tackle the problem
of nuclear arms control and nuclear nonproliferation. So "Pugwash" did a great job and Joseph Rotblat
very early on said that we need to get the public more involved in and more excited about
these issues and really try to get them into -- into cooperating with the government on
arms control implementation. It is a challenge, and several of our winners have pointed to
this. It is a challenge you want to make sure this can be done in cooperation with governments
and make sure that people won't be accused of contradicting national policy or getting
in the way of government policy when they participate in this kind of partnership with
government on verification activities. But one thing I like to point out is this notion
of societal verification is already well established in the environmental sphere. When we had the
big oil spill down in the Gulf of Mexico a couple of years ago, it was local communities
who were really engaged and involved in providing information about the conditions on the ground
there back to governments, both local city, and in the end the Federal Government in order
to provide better data on the oil spill. So, societal verification is established in some
fields and I think we need to think about its proper use in this more narrow field,
never the less very important one of arms control.
Daniel Terdiman: Got it. And you talk about this idea being around for quite some time
and I'm curious why you though, you know, I guess the challenge was announced last August,
but why is this the right time to be starting challenges like this? Is it because of technology
just become kind of ready or why else do you think?
Acting Under Secretary Gottemoeller: We think it's partially the revolution in information
technology. I can see that these kinds of applications are emerging in other fields,
in the environment and medicine, two that we already talked about today, and finally
I felt this really compelling need to engage the public and to get them interested in this
field of policy. The President has been very committed to the so-called "Prague Initiative,"
that is his idea of eliminating eventually over time nuclear weapons and really insuring
we eventually get to zero. So in terms of engaging the public this was all important
I think in order to be able to fulfill this task.
Daniel Terdiman: Well, very good. Let me turn to a couple more questions from viewers that
are not related to the competition itself. When dealing with other countries to negotiate
the control of weapons of mass destruction, who are our greatest enemies and who are our
greatest allies, and why?
Acting Under Secretary Gottemoeller: I rather say what, rather than who in this case, our
greatest ally, in my view is experience. We've had forty plus years of experience in reducing
and eliminating nuclear weapons, first with the Soviet Union, now with the Russian Federation.
This experience over time has really given us a good idea of how to go about it and by
the way how to constantly improve it. I really like to think about new methods and technologies
for verification and monitoring because there are always better ways to do what we have
already done. But I think we have been able to clearly establish with the experience of
the last 40 years, that these kind of deals are in our national security interest, so
that's why I say experience has really shown us the compelling reasons that we need to
embrace nuclear arms control and to continue to pursue it. And that goes for other weapons
of mass destruction too. Chemical weapons have been very much in the press because of
what is going on in Syria and before that in Libya. So, it is very important to work
on these issues. Our greatest enemy, I think, is time because there is never enough time
to address every single problem that needs to be addressed. And certainly in negotiating
these arms control treaties, some of them are very complicated and we need to work out
a lot of details and you really need to keep your eye on the prize of what you are trying
to accomplish in policy terms, and not forget about that, because otherwise you can get
wrapped around the axle about all the problems that need to be confronted. And we just have
to realize that, although time is an enemy, we can take the time we need to make a really
good agreement happen.
Daniel Terdiman: You mention time -- and one of the things that it made me think about
is the idea that we talk about it with hacking and computer security a lot -- is that you
come up with the solution to a problem, and just as you come up with a solution the bad
actors are already moving on to a new kind of attack. Is that kind of something where
you worry that as these technologies become available, the people that you're worrying
about are already moving onto whole new approaches to cause problems?
Acting Under Secretary Gottemoeller: Well, certainly this has been a very fast moving
field and I'm not here today to talk about the challenges affecting the information security,
computer security realm but I would say that we have to be smart how we work these areas
of policy, the U.S.G. The U.S. Government has been putting a lot of attention into how
we tackle the problem of cyber security and the challenges in this arena and we have to
stay a couple steps ahead of the game in every way we can, but at the same time I think we
have to be embracing the potential here and having to figure out we can make use of these
great technologies to help us out with what we need to do.
Daniel Terdiman: But in the arms control arena, the same question, do you worry that as technology
is becoming your ally, solving these problems in the country, the terrorist groups are already
moving onto new technologies that could, that can...?
Acting Under Secretary Gottemoeller: If you're talking about ways to hide the ball, in other
words, to obscure what they are doing, yeah, we're always concerned about that and we're
always trying to stay a couple steps ahead of the game in that regard as well. Because
these are important assets for actors and we worry very much about non-state actors,
terrorists who might get their hands on weapons of mass destruction. In fact, that's why the
President has been so intent on working on not only nuclear arms control and elimination,
because if you get rid of nuclear weapons you deal with part of that problem worrying
about nuclear weapons in the hands of terrorists, but the other thing he has been working on
is nuclear material security. Let's lock things down, let's make sure we do everything we
can to make sure that nuclear materials don't get into terrorist hands. You have to stay
two steps ahead of those guys at all the time.
Daniel Terdiman: Well great, I think we have time for one more question from our Twitter
and Google+ viewers, this question is: "Why are the P5 scared to talk about the consequents
of the nuclear weapons that they predicate their security on?"
Acting Under Secretary Gottemoeller: I don't accept the premise of that question at all,
the P5 have been at the forefront of countries that have been working these problems from
the get-go, in fact, the United States and the Soviet Union and now the United States
and Russia, have been wrestling with this problem for forty years as I mentioned a moment
ago, so I don't accept the premise of the question. I think the question comes from
the fact that the P5 and that is the U.S., U.K., Russia, France, China have decided not
to attend a conference in Oslo on the humanitarian consequences of nuclear war. The reason is
that, we understand very well what the humanitarian consequences are and we are focused on, in
a step-by-step way, reducing and eliminating nuclear weapons. We've been concerned that
an activity like the Oslo Conference would obscure this pragmatic step-by-step approach
that we feel is the all important way to get our arms around this problem and solve it.
But I would like to make one thing really clear, there could be some confusion among
friends and colleagues in the nongovernmental community, we are very, very keen to continue
to see education on this very important issue to take place among the public, because it
is true that the public has lost sight of the dangers of nuclear use, and I think it's
very important for the expert community as well as the allies and colleague in the academic
community as well as the government to continue to educate the public about the heavy consequences
of nuclear use, so it is a very important goal, but as far as the P5 are concerned we
are very knowledgeable about this issue overall as well as being very committed to it being
done in a step-by-step way and we don't want to be distracted from that step-by-step path.
Daniel Terdiman: Very good, do we have time for one more question perhaps?
Acting Under Secretary Gottemoeller: Yes, I have time for one more question, if we don't
get zeroed out here somehow.
Daniel Terdiman: I'm curious, you mention the P5, but I'm also interested in has it
been difficult as you precede with these innovation challenges and you hope to implement the submission,
the winning ideas, has it been difficult, or do you think it will be difficult to get
other countries on board with implementing these solutions?
Acting Under Secretary Gottemoeller: Well I think it's always difficult in a government-to-government
settings to move out with new ideas, but I will say in the context of the New START Treaty
when we were negotiating that in Geneva, both we and the Russians realized that we needed
to think about some new ways to get at the problems were tackling in that negotiation.
We decide for example that we wanted to be able to count warheads in this treaty rather
than just the missile systems and use then a more generalized counting rule to approximate
the number of warheads on each missile. So that involved a more detailed on-site inspection
regime in the New START Treaty for warheads, or re-entry vehicles as we call them, on their
delivery systems, on their missiles. So we are always looking for ways to innovate, and
I think this technology revolution means some big new steps in that direction and I don't
think it's going to be simple to implement them in policy, but never the less I do think
there will be some compelling reasons to look at these approaches and to eventually incorporate
them into some new agreements. We'll see how it goes.
Daniel Terdiman: Very good, I think we are about out of time but I wanted to ask if Lovely,
Allen, and Chip if you have anything before we finish this up?
Allen Childers: I just wanted to thank again for the opportunity, I think the contest was
an outstanding idea, I would like to see more of it, and I would like to see it from other
agencies too. I think the State Department has really stepped out onto something that's
quite valuable and as a person who spent a lot of years in the Defense Department, I
would like to see them follow your lead. Thank you.
Lovely Umayam: Yea, thank you as well.
Dr. Rudolph "Chip" Mappus: Yea, I was quite optimistic with both the challenge and the
outcomes, I think we are on a brink of an opportunity here...
Lovely Umayam: I just wanted to add one more thing, also I'm really excited to know that
this challenge is starting off with public engagement, I've heard of social verification
before and I know the nonproliferation field, that has been a topic of debate. And the challenges
of really understanding what that concept is and how do we educate the public and get
them interested in the issues. I am glad to see the other winners are interested in that,
and I think we are off to a great start. So, thank you.
Daniel Terdiman: Well, thank you for all your thoughts, that you Under Secretary Gottemoeller,
and thank you to all those who tuned into watch this great discussion.
Acting Under Secretary Gottemoeller: Thank you, Daniel. I had a great time.