10th Annual U.S. & Japan Digital Innovation Hub and Advanced Technology Workshop
Tuesday, September 8
Good evening, everyone.
I hope you’ve all enjoyed your first day here at Purdue. After a full day of talks and discussions, I’ll try to observe the most important rule of dinner speeches and be brief.
This is the 10th Annual U.S. and Japan workshop, and ten years is quite a milestone.
Think about how much technology has changed over that decade. Today’s discussions about AI Convergence illustrated that very well.
AI depends on semiconductor technology. Semiconductor technology depends on advanced materials and manufacturing. Space systems depend on all of these. Quantum is opening another frontier. Increasingly, all of these technologies depend on AI, and they intersect with economics, national security, and geopolitics.
For much of the last century, we organized science and engineering into disciplines. Today, the boundaries are disappearing.
So one of the lessons of our time is that technological leadership has become a team sport. For that reason, this is a particularly important time to be holding this workshop, which is very special in the way it brings together universities, companies, research institutions, and governments.
No single researcher, university, company — or even a single country — has everything it takes to move an important technology from a good research idea, through engineering and manufacturing, all the way to deployment at scale.
Our two countries bring extraordinary — and often complementary — strengths in science, engineering, manufacturing, and innovation.
But after a day like today, I’m reminded that there is one other essential ingredient — and it doesn’t appear on any technology roadmap: that is relationships.
Technology gives us reasons to work together. But collaborations endure because of relationships — between researchers, between institutions, between countries, and ultimately between people. And that may be one of the most important things this workshop has accomplished over its first ten years.
We have seen examples of what these partnerships can produce. Several years ago, Prof. Hideo Ohno’s group at Tohoku and Prof. Supriyo Datta’s group here at Purdue brought together complementary capabilities in spintronics and computing. That collaboration led to a 2019 Nature paper demonstrating a new approach to probabilistic computing using spintronic devices.
This is a good example of something Japan and the United States could do together that neither could have done as well alone.
Tomorrow afternoon I will be giving opening remarks at a companion workshop:
US-Japan Workshop: Probabilistic computing hardware for tomorrow’s energy efficient AI accelerators
Which builds on that initial work and will provide a forum where U.S. and Japanese researchers will discuss recent advances in this field. These kinds of bottom-up, researcher-to-researcher collaborations are essential to the success of the broader nation-to-nation partnership that we are discussing at this workshop.
So, thank you for being here with us, enjoy the dinner and the evening — and best wishes for another productive day tomorrow.