Summary

The U.S. government has identified artificial intelligence (AI), quantum information science (QIS), 5G networks, advanced manufacturing, and biotechnology as the five “Industries of the Future (ITF)”: key technological domains projected to have the greatest impact on advancing national competitiveness in the coming years. Sustained investment in the ITF is crucial to preserving national security, improving American healthcare, advancing towards a green economy, and achieving other societal priorities. Continued progress in the ITF is also necessary for the United States to stay ahead of global economic competitors such as China and the European Union.

However, the United States currently lacks the robust science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) workforce needed for maintaining ITF leadership. Systemic inequities in the U.S. STEM talent pipeline hinder development of the deep scientific and technological expertise needed for U.S. workers to realize the full potential of the ITF. To address these inequities, the federal government must leverage and invest in its strongest vehicle of American scientific talent: the National Science Foundation (NSF).

By expanding its Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP), the NSF can help build a scientific and technical workforce that fully reflects American diversity and captures the full value that such diversity offers. The result will be a nation in which more students—including the socioeconomically disadvantaged, minorities, women, and those far-removed from academia—have the skills and opportunities to contribute to the Industries of the Future.

Summary

The US innovation ecosystem is falling behind global players like China and India because our current Research and Development (R&D) landscape does not incentivize commercialization in university laboratories. The federal government should establish the Venture Science Doctorate (VSD) initiative to close this gap by training graduates to combine research and entrepreneurship in legacy sectors. The Biden-Harris Administration should support VSD to turn more metropolitan areas into innovation centers. Swifter shifts from theory to products are “crucial to our future prosperity” as a global leader and as the United States of America, creating opportunities to mitigate rising economic inequality. Executing the VSD will require multiple agencies. The Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) will coordinate the creation of demand-side policies that remove barriers to innovation in legacy sectors. The National Science Foundation (NSF) will coordinate a strategy of regional development through VSD programs, tracking their impact with state-level economic indicators. A multinational collaboration will widen access to talent and distribute US lessons in innovation policy among international regulators in the pursuit of truly global public goods. A stronger science innovation system will recover ground the US has lost to competitors and create compelling partnership opportunities for allies.

This proposal describes a scalable PhD program that brings sector-shaping technologies to market. By bridging NSF programs for scientist training (e.g. I-Corps) and company funding (e.g. Small Business Innovation Research, Small Business Technology Transfer) VSD will support the entire innovation ecosystem. By producing scientists and influencing undergraduate degree choices, VSD will effect targeted and broad-based workforce expansion. By training graduates to create high-value manufacturing companies, job creation in this workforce and supporting sectors will soar. To do this, VSD will use mission-oriented research, complementing basic scientific research with DARPA-like, combinations of training, R&D and commerce. These are the economic experiments our innovation system needs for growth and sustainability in legacy sectors like clean energy. But to share this prosperity we need to start with the states “left behind.”

Summary

COVID-19 has reshaped every facet of our social and professional experiences. What began for almost all of us as a short-term work-from-home event has turned into a prolonged crisis that will have lasting effects on how we interact with each other and do business. Even as vaccine rollouts continue and offices slowly start to reopen, much work will continue to be remote. Employees are likely to work staggered schedules or in predefined groups in order to maintain social distancing for an unknown period of time. Many meetings and tasks that went virtual during the pandemic will likely stay that way. And employers of all types, including governments, will continue to rely heavily on technology to keep employees and customers connected and engaged.

The pandemic accelerated an already rapid ongoing shift to a tech-driven world. As a nation, we must similarly accelerate investments in information technology (IT) to support this new normal. COVID-19 has already exposed critical weakness in existing U.S. IT systems at the federal, state and local levels. Technical problems delayed millions of Americans from receiving unemployment benefits, and are now delaying millions more from receiving timely vaccines. Remote work is raising equity issues and cybersecurity concerns, and periodic internet outages have caused major disruptions to school and work.

The upshot is clear: our investments in IT modernization and cloud computing over the last 10 years have not been sufficient. It’s time to start talking about the next steps the United States can and must take to lead at the federal level, ensuring that our nation’s IT infrastructure and tools can securely and adequately support all remote workers while providing secure, reliable, and state-of-the-art online services.

Summary

Modern data surveillance has been used to systematically silence free expression, destroy political dissidents, and track ethnic minorities before placement in concentration camps. China’s surveillance-export system is providing a model of authoritarian stability and security to the 80+ countries using its technology, a number that will grow in the aftermath of COVID-19 as the technology spreads to the half of the world still to come online. This technology is shifting the balance of power between democratic and autocratic governance. Meanwhile, the purported US model is un-democratic at best: a Wild West absent of accountability and full of black box, NDA-protected public-private partnerships between law enforcement and surveillance companies. Our system continues to oppress marginalized communities in the US, muddying our moral claims abroad with hypocrisy. Surveillance undermines the privacy of everyone, but not equally. Most citizens remain unaware of, unaffected by, or disinterested in the daily violence propagated by the unregulated acquisition and use of surveillance. The lack of coordination between state and local agencies and the federal government around surveillance has created a deeply unregulated surveillance-tech environment and a discordant international agenda. Digital surveillance policy reform must coordinate both domestic and foreign imperatives. At home, it must be oriented toward solving a racial equity issue which produces daily harm. Abroad, it must be motivated by preserving 21st century democracy and human rights.

The Biden-Harris Administration should expand the focus of the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Loan Program Office (LPO) to meet the demands of a changing energy industry. The LPO was established to serve as a backstop to private-sector financing for large-scale energy projects with embedded technology risk. The program’s success in scaling large scale power plants and manufacturing plants for next generation energy technologies is well documented. However, the energy industry has changed since the program’s beginning, and the needs for support from the Federal Government have evolved. For example, technology areas that were deemed risky in 2009 are now mature, and in some circumstances, for example in electricity generation, the industry structure that was historically highly centralized has become much more distributed. Modernizing the LPO is a critical means for advancing the Biden-Harris Administration’s climate agenda because the Office supports the development of clean energy projects at commercial scale, leverages private sector capital, and creates middle-class jobs. 

This memo recommends three important changes to the DOE LPO:

1. The aperture of the LPO must be expanded to include a much larger set of technology areas. In particular, energy storage, hydrogen production and carbon capture, utilization and storage, among other nascent fields, should be supported. Authorizing legislation should be changed to give the Program Office the opportunity to support a technological area at its discretion.
2. The Loan Program must reduce the cost of application to incentivize more deployment of smaller projects. This will expand the potential set of projects to be supported and align the Office with overarching trends in the energy sector.
3. The Loan Program should expand its purview to support projects impeded by other financing risks in the energy system. These could include grid modernization, system hardening or smart grid updates (which often do not pass traditional cost-benefit analyses), and electric vehicle infrastructure deployment.

Challenge and Opportunity

The proposed solution solves two impending challenges to the President’s climate agenda. First, while innovation is necessary to meet climate goals, the private sector is reluctant to fund first generation projects for novel clean energy technology. As the US embarks on a pivotal decade with respect to managing the national carbon budget, deploying new technology at scale will become even more critical. In particular, reaching 2050 carbon goals will require successfully innovating in hydrogen production, carbon capture, energy storage, and load-following electric power — most of which cannot be currently supported under the Loan Program’s authorization. Second, the nation’s overall infrastructure deficit has been estimated to require an additional $2 trillion of spending by the American Society of Civil Engineers in their most recent 2017 assessment. In the energy sector, ASCE estimated the requirement for additional electricity infrastructure alone to be $177 billion. Simultaneously, the economic returns to investing in our nation’s infrastructure are significant. Recent studies suggest that for every $1 million invested in energy infrastructure, the Recovery Act created 15 durable jobs. The multiplier effect from infrastructure spending varies based on economic conditions, but as the country emerges from the COVID-19-induced recession, enabling the LPO to fund a broad swath of energy infrastructure would be a viable asset for job creation in the coming years.

Currently, the LPO is restricted to financing only the first three deployments of new technologies, and new technologies that are highly capital intensive, such as concentrated solar power. The LPO exists to absorb financing risk for the private sector, risks which often stem from capital intensity or technology uncertainty. As we consider the energy transition in the coming decades, a new set of technologies needs support for initial commercial deployment. Additionally, however, a broad array of infrastructure investments continue to go unfunded by the private sector for other reasons as well, particularly in geographies where commercial markets for offtakers are not fully developed. Expanding the technology and stage aperture of the LPO to include a broader array of projects would attract private capital and accelerate the transition to a decarbonized future.

Plan of Action

The Biden-Harris Administration should expand the DOE’s Loan Program Office (LPO) to enable the Federal Government to quickly make investments in a broad range of infrastructure categories through the pre-existing contracting authorizations at the LPO. Accordingly, we propose three changes to the DOE’s LPO. First, the technology aperture of the Loan Program should be expanded to include a broader set of technologies, including but not limited to energy storage, hydrogen production, carbon capture, utilization and storage, and carbon dioxide removal. Program staff should be granted the flexibility to support a wide range of technology areas at their discretion, in a manner not dissimilar to ARPA-E in the breadth of technical fields within staff purview.

Second, the Loan Program must be adjusted to account for a more distributed energy industry by reducing the cost of application and the corresponding size of project to be supported. For example, the first deployment of a novel grid-scale energy storage technology could be financed at the $10+ million level rather than the $100+ million level. A company looking to deploy that technology would be currently discouraged from applying as a result of the upfront cost of application. The Loan Program should support projects across the capital scale, with flexible application requirements depending on the order of magnitude of public support being requested. 

Finally, the Loan Program should expand to support projects impeded by other financing risks in the energy system. These risks could include high-risk project cash flows from uncertain offtake agreements, as for example with public transportation infrastructure or grid modernization, system hardening, and electric vehicle infrastructure deployment. A comprehensive list of infrastructure to support should include:

• Existing planned projects and deferred maintenance on public transit systems;
• Identified grid modernization or hardening programs in state resource plans;
• Accelerated smart grid expansion;
• Building retrofits for both energy efficiency and carbon emissions reduction;
• Electric charging stations; and
• Addressing methane leakage in pipeline systems.

Conclusion

At the Roosevelt Project, we are developing action plans for communities that experience significant industrial upheaval, particularly in the context of forthcoming energy transitions. Though these transitions will vary in their nature as a result of local socio-economic realities, access to or distance from natural resources, and exposure to various climate risks, the transitions will most acutely affect communities of working-class, low-income, under-educated Americans. Federal support for the deployment of shovel-ready energy infrastructure can support the creation of high-quality jobs. For infrastructure deployment to positively contribute to both decarbonization and job creation, projects must be targeted to regions that are likely to be affected by the transition. The adjustments to the DOE LPO proposed here offer one important tool for quickly deploying infrastructure in the next four years.

Summary

The United States leads the world in the market share – and ‘mindshare’ – of massive digital platforms in domains such as advertising, search, social media, e-commerce, and financial technologies. Each of these digital domains features one or two dominant market players who have become big through the ‘network effect,’ wherein large volumes of customer activity provide data inputs to make these platforms work even better. However, the gains that big players enjoy from the network effect often come at the expense of the platform’s customers. The network effect is further amplified by platform lock-in, whereby new platforms are unable to interoperate with existing market players. A more serious risk manifests when the dominant platform provider provides the same services as that of businesses using the platform, thus becoming a competitor with a built-in information advantage. This prevents new entrants to the market from growing big, limiting the choices available to consumers and creating the conditions for harmful monopolies to emerge.

Therefore, the Biden-Harris Administration should advocate for legislation and enact policies designed to bring openness and transparency into the digital platforms marketplace. A key aspect of such policies would be to require a set of interoperability standards for large digital platforms. Another would be to require open Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that allow customers (end-users as well as businesses) to seamlessly take their data with them to competitors. These actions will unleash greater competition in the digital marketplaces that are becoming the mainstay of the US economy and increase transparency, choice and opportunities that the US consumer and businesses can benefit from.

Summary

The United States is an invention and innovation powerhouse that has long produced remarkable achievements. Yet American invention is at a crossroads today. After more than a half-century of unrivaled global leadership in basic science, innovation, and manufacturing, the U.S. is losing ground throughout the innovation pipeline across a wide range of sectors. The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed this vulnerability, making brutally clear the need for innovation to address major challenges that arise and highlighting weaknesses such as our dependency on global supply chains. A strong Invention Ecosystem can power our path to economic recovery, sustained growth and societal resilience.

This report explains the functions of the Invention Ecosystem, presenting a framework that highlights the ecosystem’s main components and the inventor and innovation pathways that 1) inspire and prepare students and future inventors to address crucial challenges and thrive and support the innovation economy, and 2) build and sustain today’s inventors and entrepreneurs to enable value creation from their ideas in the form of products and businesses. These pathways together will yield a pipeline of people and businesses that create jobs, foster resilient economies, and produce solutions to our most pressing challenges.

The ecosystem is outlined in four sections, represented by its distinct pillars including K-12 education, higher education, entrepreneurship and industry. Each section describes the role of the pillar, features specific challenges related to the ecosystem, and offers a set of discrete policy recommendations for a policymaker audience to extract and optimize the full value of U.S. innovation.

This report was produced by the Day One Project with support from the Lemelson Foundation.

Summary

Comprehensive and reliable mortality data is vital for public health research. Improving our infrastructure for managing these data will generate insights that promote longevity and healthy aging, as well as enable more effective response to rapidly evolving public health challenges like those posed by the COVID-19 pandemic. A modernized mortality data system will ultimately be self-sustaining through access fees, but will require federal investment to update state reporting infrastructure and data use agreements. The Biden-Harris administration should launch an effort to modernize our nation’s infrastructure for aggregating, managing, and providing research access to mortality data.

Summary

Developed during a different industrial era, today’s education system was never designed to meet modern learners’ needs. This incongruity has heaped systemic problems upon individual educators, blunted the effectiveness of reforms, and shortchanged the nation’s most vulnerable young people — outcomes exposed and exacerbated by COVID-19. Building back better in a post-pandemic United States will require federal investments not only in schools, but in “learning ecosystems” that leverage and connect the assets of entire communities. Tasked with studying, seeding, and scaling these ecosystems in communities across the country, a White House Initiative on Community Learning Ecosystems would signal a shift toward a new education model, positioning the United States as a global leader in learning.

Summary

The coronavirus pandemic has forced a sudden acceleration of a prior trend toward the virtual provision of healthcare, also known as telemedicine. This acceleration was necessary in the short term so that provision of non-urgent health services could continue despite lockdowns and self- isolation. Federal and state policymakers have supported the shift toward telemedicine through temporary adjustments to health benefits, reimbursements, and licensure restrictions.

Yet if policymakers direct their attention too narrowly on expanding telemedicine they risk missing a larger—and as yet mostly unrealized—opportunity to improve healthcare in the United States: increasing the overall share of health services provided directly to the home. At-home healthcare includes not only telemedicine, but also medical house calls (home-based primary care) as well as models in which individuals within communities offer simple support services to one another (i.e., the “village” model of senior care, which could be extended to included peer- to-peer health service delivery). The advent of “exponential” technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain, and the Internet of Things (IoT) is unlocking new possibilities for at- home healthcare across each of these models.

The next administration should act to reduce four types of barriers currently preventing at-home healthcare from reaching its full potential:

1. Labor-market barriers (e.g., unnecessarily restrictive scope-of-practice rules and requirements for licensing and certification)
2. Technical barriers (e.g., excessively slow and burdensome processes for regulatory approval, weak or absent standards for interoperability)
3. Financial/regulatory barriers (e.g., methodologies for determining eligibility for reimbursements that favor incumbents over innovators)
4. Data sharing / interoperability barriers (e.g., overly restrictive constraints related to data privacy and portability)

The surge in education technology use in response to COVID-19 represents a massive natural experiment: an opportunity to learn what works at scale, for which students, and under which conditions. However, without the right data standards in place we risk incomplete or inaccurate inferences from this experiment.

The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically increased use of educational technologies. There is evidence that this “emergency onlining” will lead to learning loss, especially among underserved communities. To understand and address the extent of learning loss—as well as to explore and support potential future uses of educational technologies—the U.S. Department of Education (ED) must systematically implement established open-data standards that allow us to understand how students engage with learning technologies. Widescale implementation of these standards will make it possible to combine and analyze validated data sets generated by multiple technologies. This in turn will provide unprecedented, on-demand reporting and research capabilities that can be used to precisely identify gaps and create targeted interventions. Specifically, we recommend that ED mandate the use of the open Experience API (xAPI) standard for educational technology purchased with federal funds. We further recommend that ED invest time, talent, and resources to further develop this standard and pilot efforts to leverage educational-technology data for insights through the Institute for Education Sciences (IES) and other agencies.

Challenge and Opportunity

The COVID-19 pandemic rapidly forced schools across the country to close physical campuses and convert all instruction to an “emergency online” modality for much of 2020. The situation will likely persist well into 2021. The emergency shift to online teaching meant that many teachers had insufficient preparation to successfully adapt classroom-teaching methods for digital formats. Moreover, many students—especially those from low-income families or from historically underserved racial and ethnic groups—lack access to high-speed broadband and technology assets needed to fully participate in online learning. These factors are combining to create learning losses that exacerbate our existing digital divides that may persist for years.

Robust educational research and development is needed to fully understand the extent and distribution of learning loss, as well as to develop interventions for addressing it. Educational technologies—which record all student interactions, from logins to mouse-clicks to assignment submissions—could provide a wealth of data on how online education is succeeding and/or falling short. Unfortunately, these data are frequently recorded in a way that is unique to each application. This lack of consistency makes it difficult to integrate educational data or make comparisons between institutions

The time is ripe to introduce new requirements for learning technology designed to ensure that parents, educators, administrators, and stakeholders at every level can assess where students are at, what they know, and what will best help them to advance. These insights could also significantly reduce the day-to-day demands on teachers’ time and attention, enabling them to focus on deeper student questions. The technology needed to implement such requirements are already available in the open-source xAPI standard, which is currently in the final stages of approval as an IEEE standard. Further, there are xAPI “profiles” that define specific data requirements for processes common to educational technologies, such as playing a video. While the concept of a learning-data standard was recommended by ED as early as 2015, adoption has been uneven in practice. This situation must change for us to immediately address COVID19 learning loss as quickly and accurately as possible.

Plan of Action

To address the challenges outlined above, we recommend including xAPI as a federal procurement requirement to encourage adoption among educational software and service providers. Widespread adoption will mean that most—if not ultimately all—providers consistently and automatically generate only the educational data that conforms to standards established by ED. Establishing consistent standards for educational data will make it easier for all parties to contribute meaningfully to key datasets, and for researchers to develop tools to track and exchange meaningful data. These outcomes together will deliver deeper understandings of how our nation’s students are doing, inform efforts to close achievement gaps, and facilitate tracking of changes over time. We also recommend investing ED time, talent, and resources into further developing the xAPI standard and participating in pilot projects that demonstrate its utility. Each of these recommendations is detailed further below.

Recommendation 1. Mandate use of the xAPI standard for ED-funded procurement.

We recommend that ED mandate use of xAPI for all educational technology purchased through ED directly as well as through federal grants. ED should also establish a process for ensuring compliance, including conducting conformance tests on educational software and services from different providers.

The IEEE is in the final stages of publishing the open-source xAPI standard. Mandating its adoption would demonstrate cutting-edge ED leadership. Widespread adoption of the standard will provide a common approach to collecting evidence about how students, parents, and teachers interact with education platforms, paving the way for much more rigorous, consistent, and reliable educational research.

Recommendation 2. Develop xAPI profiles to facilitate data integration and improve data quality for the educational sector.

IEEE is standardizing documents that help automate the data governance needs for a type of educational solution (“application profiles”). Standards developers are rarely familiar with learning sciences and educational research. As a result, xAPI profiles will tend to be general in nature unless domain-specific experts get involved. For instance, medical experts have worked to develop the MedBiquitious xAPI Profiles for Medical Education. Human-resources experts have developed the Human Resources Open Standards (HROS) xAPI Profile and, and work is ongoing for an Assessment xAPI Profile that supports the U.S. Chamber of Commerce T3 initiative.

ED should invest time, talent, and funding to develop xAPI profiles that are aligned with current research and national priorities. An xAPI Profile effort could help to normalize data collection from a spate of popular 5th grade mobile math applications, that properly identify the relevant ED standards, competencies or objectives are challenged by a student, which could provide such app developers with the automation that would simplify generating better, aligned data. Works like this could change online classrooms into opportunities to embed better pedagogy into practice at scale.

Recommendation 3. Invest in applied research and development.

ED should partner with schools and educational technology companies to invest in applied research that demonstrates insights from standardized educational data. ED should also work with partners to invest in public repositories of code to make it easier for all stakeholders to leverage insights. Such investments should focus both on the short term (e.g., providing immediate insights about use of educational technology and learning loss during the COVID-19 pandemic) and long term (e.g., providing examples of potential applications that could be scaled and replicated in the future). Such investments would not only advance our understanding of education, but would also help to develop a market for further development of data-based educational products. IES and ED’s Office of Educational Technology should partner to identify topics and approaches to conduct this cutting-edge research.

There are multiple examples of research using educational-process data that these investments could build on. IES recently issued a request for proposals (RFP) to use National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) process data to identify students with disabilities, to understand how those student use available accommodations, and to determine which are most successful. Predictive models of student dropout risk, course design analytics to identify areas for improvement, and course-taking patterns are all being conducting using this data at relatively small scale through academic societies, such as the Society for Learning Analytics Research (SoLAR) and the International Educational Data Mining Society. All stand to benefit and leverage this data to dramatically improve research.

SoLAR recently published a position paper describing current challenges with these data.4 Larger educational-research societies such as the American Educational Research Association (AERA) and the National Council on Measurement in Education (NCME) have launched specialized groups focused on working with educational-process data.

By investing in this area, ED could help to nurture this area of research and make a difference in the lives of students, parents, teachers and schools across the country. This approach would help to motivate better data quality and enable technologists to build more robust learning applications, thereby helping us to stem the COVID-19 learning loss as quickly as possible using contemporary science and technology.

Summary

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) models can solve well-specified problems, like automatically diagnosing disease or grading student essays, at scale. But applications of AI and ML for major social and scientific problems are often constrained by a lack of high-quality, publicly available data—the foundation on which AI and ML algorithms are built.

The Biden-Harris Administration should launch a multi-agency initiative to coordinate the academic, industry, and government research community to support the identification and development of datasets for applications of AI and ML in domain-specific, societally valuable contexts. The initiative would include activities like generating ideas for high-impact datasets, linking siloed data into larger and more useful datasets, making existing datasets easier to access, funding the creation of real-world testbeds for societally valuable AI and ML applications, and supporting public-private partnerships related to all of the above.