This is about 50 minutes. Okay. Well, welcome, everyone, to our meeting on ai and advance system Quantum Information Sciences, quantum computing, et cetera. Im pleased to have an opportunity to welcome michael crosteus, chief Technology Officer of the United States. I think weve come to the right place to engage this important subject. As you know, the administration has taken a very energetic position in trying to advance the state of the art in both the applications of Artificial Intelligence and the Quantum Information Sciences to our nondefense applications. Parallel efforts of substantial scale in the department of defense through the Defense Advance Research projects agency and other defense entities, because these technologies are, indeed, of universal applications. So i would like to take an opportunity to begin the discussion with michael to perhaps start with the bit of current news where europe has European Union in particular has tabled some of their ideas about how to manage some of the particularly the ethical issues relating to use of Artificial Intelligence. Weve had, of course, quite a number of years of tension on a transatlantic basis about the application of advanced technologies to commercial as well as governmental applications. So, i would be interested in getting your take on this, michael. Thank you. Absolutely. Thank you so much for hudson for having me here and thank you for this conversation. Yes, yesterday was a big day of news for the world of ai regulation. As you probably know, the United States was kind of first out of the gate in january, where we proposed the ai regulatory principles, and those are out for comment. And then since then, the eu yesterday has released their attempt to do what we did in january, providing some sort of structure around thinking about regulations of ai powered technologies in the European Union. I think it will take us twofold. One, i think were very encouraged to see a lot of focus in the document on the importance of fostering an ecosystem that is friendly to Artificial Intelligence technologies. They talk about the importance of developing and working on research and Development Type projects and helping drive startups and Smaller Companies to work in the space. And they also talk very much about a valuesbased approach, and we put out our principles in january. One that i think is important to flag and one thing where i think there could be room for improvement is their next step from taking this sort of evaluation approach and actually implementing it. We found what they actually put out yesterday, i think, really does in some ways sort of clumsily attempts to bucket aipowered technologies as high risk or not high risk. The way that the scheme is structured, there will be some sort of group of some kind in europe that will make some sort of decision on whether or not a technology is high risk or not. If you are high risk, you have to go through a pretty extensive regulatory approach. If you are not high risk you dont have to do anything. We believe this all or nothing approach is not necessarily the best way to approach regulating ai technologies. We think ai regulation serves a spectrum of sorts, certain types of ai powered technologies that will require heavy regulatory scrutiny and we in the United States are prepared to do that, but there are quite a few that need a little or not at all and creating the spectrum is important. Thats where our biggest concern is. And ill be traveling to brussels next march, next month, and speaking to folks over there these concerns. I think theres a lot we have in common but this approach of very bluntly bifurcating the entire r r d to the entire system into two buckets is very harsh. Its a very good point. And as you may know, i also serve on the d. O. D. , defense Science Board and weve done studies on the application of modern technology to the development of both ai and quantum. And one of the opportunities that may evolve as the Technology Improves to facilitate better alignment with our allies in Europe Europe is underway in darpa to develop explainable ai, so that the user of the outcome or outmput of an aibased bit of analysis is able to understand the coupling between the outcome and the data that produced the outcome. And were of course not there yet, but there may be some opportunities for Research Collaboration between the u. S. And the eu to perhaps better solve this problem of explainable ai. I couldnt agree more. I think its sort of a thats a good segue into sort of how the u. S. Approach in some ways differs a little bit to the european. I think when we put out our principles last january, they sort of focus on three main themes. I think one of them hits directly on this explainability question. On the first goaround i think the most important thing on the u. S. Model is public engagement. Whenever we attempt to do this, higherpowered technology, we as the federal government have some experts, but the community is the people who know this best. They have the scientists, experts who can help us. Theres a lot of emfasis on public engagement. The second is limited overreach. We need to create a model that is risk based and use based and sector specific. The types of regulations you may have for an Autonomous Vehicle or a drone is very different for necessarily the type of regulation well have for an aipowered dying knottic. Rather than bucketing those as well, those are all high risk, you have to do 12 things, or these are not and you dont have to do anything, there has to be flexibility so youre able to do appropriately for the risks. The thirds which i think you bring up very astutely is this idea of promoting trustworthy ai. We care about this and need to engender trust in the american people. We need to create a regulatory model that allows that to be built. Having better r d and explainability will get us there. One of the issues related to this thats coming fast upon us is the interaction between ai and the internet of things. Science board has been doing some work on the technologies of autonomy and counterautonomy. Obviously Ai Technology is one of the things thats going to make iot work for the whole society. There may also be some opportunities for collaboration with our eu colleagues on trying to understand how we will manage the introduction of iot. Because like other applications where ai is involved, the range of applications is extraordinarily diverse. I couldnt agree more. I think where that where we manifested that type of thinking in our approach is actually through the first large white house summit we held on Artificial Intelligence was ai for american industry. We were trying to express, its going to touch every industry, whether oil extraction, biotech, youll be using this. If the u. S. Wants to lead the world with this, we need to make sure all of those industries are able to capture the benefits that that can provide. Being able to have that very important dialogue with our allies around the world on how to move forward is absolutely critical. Right. One of the lets say news items thats been a pretty constant drumbeat for the past half dozen years or so has been chinas alignment of its perception of its national and security interests with investments in advanced technology. They announced their made in china 25 initiative five years or so ago, which identified about ten areas of technology that would be getting particularly high investment from china. And its often described in the terms of billions of dollars. And id be interested in your observations, michael, about how chinas efforts have been coupled to the administrations initiative, and your perception of the chinese effort. Yeah. I think theres two threads to pull on. I think the first, which i think needs to be said, and i think to me should be evidently apparent and probably communicated more often generally, is that if a Chinese Communist party is using Artificial Intelligence to track people in their country, imprison ethic minorities, push forward a complete surveillance state, maintain a great chinese firewall and restrict content the Chinese People have access to, these are the use cases of Artificial Intelligence that are deeply in conflict with western values. And this is something that we have tried to communicate and continue to communicate with our friends and allies in europe. And there has never been more of an imperative than now to ensure we lead the world in Artificial Intelligence. We need to make sure that the next breakthroughs are made here in the west and under pinned by western values. If we dont lead we run the risk of these values that are opposed to everything we believe in, slowly permeating these new technologies and being exported. That is why the imperative is so great, why the president signed an executive order launching the initiative, why we have pursued to ensure art firnl intelligence and leadership. That is why we made the big announcement, we are committed to doubling nondefense ai spend in the next two years. That is moving from about a billion dollars to 2 billion of federally funded r d, nai, this is a massive step forward in our commitment to American Leadership in this particular domain. I think whats very important to remember, thats point one. I think point two you brought up, these commitments that have been publicly asserted by the chinese government, you know, we believe that theres a lot of we have a lot of skepticism in the validity or voracity of those particular statistics. I think i challenge we have a lot of brilliant think tank people here, journalists here, i challenge all of you to spend more time thinking about if youre attempting to report on an action taken by the chinese government, to spend more money on ai, is that actually happening . Are they actually spending billions of dollars . Can we do more . Is that really a true statement . Can you compare that number to the number that Congress Appropriates and is put out by our agencies . I think the short answer is no. I think there needs to be a better conversation around the validity of those numbers. Pointing to two studies, georgetown, a team put out that casts doubt on a lot of these numbers. They said theyre definitely not spending tens of billions and spending a lot less. We need to make that clear. When were trying to make comparisons around what the west is spending, we need to be actually be comparing apples to apples. Its a good point. One of the things i think ironically is going to render chinas investment less successful is that in parallel with their made in china 2025 initiative, they also have emphasized what they call Civil Military fusion, which is an effort to extract the military applications of these advanced technologies. Both sciences and ai are technologies that will have universal applicability. And trying to forcefeed the scientific effort into producing military advantage will have the more likely outcome that will produce nooergt military advantage nor advance the underlying science. So it is something of a limitation. And so i think were likely to be more successful with this approach. And i was very reassured by your observations about the scale of the increase. And having previously served in the office of management and budget as an official there a number of years ago, one of the questions i always ask about the Public Sector investment, which is easy to measure, is, what are your expectations for the outcomes of this investment . And are there pertinent metrics . Are there formed expectations that might help shape public expectations about the scale of this investment . Absolutely. I think the best way to answer that is to kind of give a little bit of a description of the type of Innovation Ecosystem we have in the United States and the role that the federal government and its agencies plays in driving innovation broadly in the United States. Whats very different than almost any other country in the world and particularly in china is the way that the federal government spends research and development dollars. We dont have a ministry of science that has doled out x number of dollars and a decision is made how to spend it. We have research and development happening across all of our agencies. Darpa is doing incredible work more on the latestage applied side. National science has appropriated 8 billion a year to invest in early stage basic Research Done at a lot of universities. Theres a department of energy which has billions of dollars that are spent through the lab structure. We have National Institutes for health which does a lot of biohealth related research as well. We have a very diverse set of places and each has their own goals and pieces of the puzzle that they play. So in some ways were creating were incentivizing and creating a free market of ideas around innovation. The part that the federal government plays in the larger spectrum is that generally speaking, the federal government is investing in earlystage, precompetitive basically research and development. Thats very different than what the private sector does. Thats buy design. So the types of research that the federal government generally approaches is a type of research that the private sector is not incentivized to do on their own. That is a gap we try to fill. We do it where these ideas can come to life, taken up and absorbed by the private sector and brought to fruition and completion. A great example is this breakthrough that happened last year on quantum sup remcy. Theres no doubt in my mind that someone in beijing had sort of called upon someone else in china to achieve quantum sue remcy before the United States did. We didnt make that call here in washington. Our community yet the United States made that breakthrough first. The question is why or how . The federal government invests in this. We made a commitment years ago to investing into a kwuntum lab at uc santa barbara. Were funding the research that didnt have any commercial applications. Some breakthroughs were made. Google saw this, said this is a great team, we could bring them onboard, equip them with more resources, compute time. They acquired the group, brought them inhouse, and that group was able to achieve it. They had to prove their device could be faster than a traditional computer. Who has the fastest . The federal government does at our national lab. They took their breakthrough and they went to the fastest in the world run by the d. O. E. And ran the test to prove it. You can see this incredible Virtuous Cycle of all pieces of the ecosystem working together from the federal government doing the basic early work funding at academic institutions, moving into the private sector, having to go back to the federal government for the check. This is the type of freemarket approach innovation which has led to a breakthrough which is world changing. Its a very good observation. Having done some work with the national labs, one of the things that theyve been able to do successfully that i think interacts in a particularly constructive way with the this initiative which is basically in the foundational science of Artificial Intelligence and quantum science is, they have extraordinary modeling and sumewlation capabilities. The application of Artificial Intelligence or quantum sensing for example can be put through a synergistic suite of modeling and simulation that contributes to the advance of the foundational science. And its the foundational science that creates the technology. And on that particular point, id be interested in any of your observations about how u. S. , ai, and Quantum Sciences stacks up . Our take is we continue the world in both domains. Theres a whole number of metrics you could use to kind of come to this analysis. But generally speaking, we have the best institutions in the world. We have the most highly cited papers in the world. We have the most vibrant venture ecosystem in the world. The most dollars invested. The list goes on and on. We continue to lead the world. The question is less about where we stack up today but how do we maintain that leadership . If you look at the president very intentionally again titled his executive order on Artificial Intelligence, maintaining American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence. This is what were doing through our national strategies. Generally speaking whether it is in quantum Information Science or ai, we generally follow a strategic approach that has four primary lines of effort. So the first line is all around research and development leadership. So back to this question of the federal government spends in the neighborhood of 150 billion a year on research and development. How do we coordinate those efforts in a way that will allow us to maximize the output of those dollars . Through coordinating, privatization, a lot of increasing spending at the federal level to historic levels with this 2 billion announcement last week, and the list goes on. Pillar two is around a regulatory approach. We want to remove barriers to Ai Innovation and broadly in these domains and create a Regulatory Environment which fosters and drives further and more innovation in these domains. We believe that our sort of, you know, product to allow that to happen was our principles that came out last january. Thats able to balance the values of the United States with the necessity for some oversight of these technologies. The third line of effort is always around workforce. We believe in the power of the American Worker to help sustain and drive these. We need to create a pipeline for better talent so we can have the greatest quantum scientists and experts here. We have done that. A great example is in our ai, the president directed our agencies to prioritize Artificial Intelligence in their grants and fellowships. Whether at the department of energy giving out grants, whether the National Science foundation, you will be prioritizing ai in a way you werent before President Trump took that action. The second piece is around workforce around preparing the American Worker for the 21st century economy. How do we retrain and skill people, especially in an environment will there will be displacement as technologies take hold. In pillar number four goes back to around international engagement. We deepably believe there must be strong ties between the u. S. And allies in leadership in these technologies. If we dont, were ceding this domain to other countries which have a set of values which are in direct conflict with ours. So we have done so at places like the oecd, in administration that generally is very thoughtful around approaching multilateral agreements, we got the u. S. To sign on to the principles, something we signed in may of last year. That showed that we as western democracies can come together and say these are the types of principles that need to underpin ai. You can see countries manifesting those into regulations. Thats very, i think, relevant. And it ties to a question that often comes up with new technologies, where the government is a major player in the investment in the foundational science. How do you see the ability of the government to enable a transfer of this technology to the civil sector users that would be able to evolve from the foundational science that the Technology Applications . Absolutely. So i think this is something that the federal government has i think, you know, in some ways struggled with for decades. The idea of technology transfer. If a Great Innovation or basic Research Discovery is made at a lab, how do erntd pernl science and business know this exists, be able to identify this breakthrough happened, bring it into their own domain, find private capital and spur it into something bigger . Thats something we have worked on. We continue to prioritize that. I think the key is for us to be able to provide better and more clarity to the private sector on the inventory on the types of work were doing. That has been a big effort, especially the department of energy, to making their labs more open and more open pot community to share incredible work being done here. So we continue to think its a priority, and we are ready and willing to work with all private sector folks to get to that point. Thats a very useful development, because the government laboratories tend to lack a lot of the channels for propagating the technology into the civil sector. And now your work and the implementation of the quantum legislation, id be interested to see how youre getting on with it. As many of you, the president signed the National Quantum Initiative Act in december of 2018. And that actually created a National Quantum initiative here in the United States. And i think were extraordinarily proud of that. That is the whole of government effort to achieve American Leadership in quantum Information Science. I think were very excited about the funding levels weeb been able to achieve. Congress appropriated sorry, authorized 1. 2 billion over five years in the legislation. The president in his budget last week proposed 500 million alone in the year 2021. So were spending or proposing to spend a clip thats significantly higher than what congress authorized. Were thrilled about that. Whats unique about that is specifically called for the creation of quantum con sortia around the United States. So by design the places where a lot of this earlystage research around quantum science will happen, it must be something that includes the private sector and academia sitting together. Bids are essentially the requests for information from the department of energy is out on five con sortia theyll be funding over the next ya err. Theyve pledged over 600 million over five years toing about that out. Thats great, because the ability of the technology to be transferred really depends on a mechanism like that, and one of the interesting things that i noticed in the fact sheet on the initiative was youve also proposed investing 25 million in the quantum internet, and be keen to see what your expectations are, given that the internet as we know it with binary bits is was a product of innovation in arpa, the predecessor of darpa, almost 50 years ago. Absolutely. Ya o yeah. The first funding was to create arpa net, funded, this was a really big deal for the country. It showed how the creating a network that sort of connected Government Entities together could actually be something that was built into something bigger. And thats something that the department of energy is exploring now, this idea of being able to create a backbone for the future quantum internet that begins with connecting a lot of our Core National labs as the department of energy and use that as a backbone. And private Sector Companies can plug in, build and expand. D. O. A. Is running full steam ahead. We have a line item in our budget. Were excited to start doing the critical r d. There was a meeting in manhattan a few weeks ago where we brought together industry representatives, lab representatives, started talking about what it would look like. We put out our first thoughts on os ostp. Gov on what the future can hold. There you can see in an environment where we deeply believe in a private sector approach to innovation, we think theres an important and Critical Role that the federal government can play. Being able to build that initial backbone between labs is an Important Role we can step in. Thats good. And i think the idea of developing the backbone in the same way that when the arpa net first became visible, and it attracted users who were able to overlay their agencies or even Offices Mission on that infrastructure to facilitate its more rapid propagation, and it it sort of follows this general sort of theory of a case where the federal government should be focused on the types of activities which other parts of the innovation eco sils tem are not incentivized to do on their own, whether building the initial backbone for quantum internet, building and sustaining and maintaining super computing. High Performance Computing is expensive. Its a Critical Role the government with play, build that infrastructure, allow users use time. It keeps giving to the community. One of the unintented but perhaps most importance kwansquence of arpa net apart from the existence is the creation of human capital, to be able to develop, expand and exploit the technology. So its really a useful thick. And i just occurred to me that im remis in reminding you of the notice on the display that if you have any questions, you can get them in via the at least at this stage the binary internet. Perhaps we can do better soon. Just one final line of question. Id be interested in what the reaction has been to the administrations initiative in the scientific community, over the years ive seen these governmentled campaigns, lets say, have a varied response from the os stensible beneficiaries. Id be interested to see what kind of response youre getting . I think our response has generally been in my opinion pretty positive. You know, we went through a fairly extensive policy process to sort of shape and ultimately create the and launch the american ai initiative. And we deeply believe that each part of the Innovation Ecosystem, whether in the private sector, in academia, whether youre in the federal government, all have a very Important Role to play. And the challenge we had was, how do we identify what are the different pieces or roles that each of those what role do each of those pieces play in building those into the initiative . For us we were very maniakly focused on what assets does the federal government have to help turbo charge the others . How do we make more of our hpc available for ai compute time . We can control that but it benefits the rest of the community. We have actually shown a commitment towards increasing r d dollars. Generally the response has been positive. We continue to look for more commitments similar to us. We have shown were willing to make the leap in an environment where we want to be fiscally responsible, were able to prioritize these areas. Our call is to the rest of the community to step up as well. Well, both the Quantum Sciences and ai are ultimately things that deal with data. And be one of the questions we received from particularly energetic member of the panel who didnt of the audience who didnt need instruction from the chair, submitted a very interesting die mention mension which is your take on the statement in from the eu yesterday about aspooirg to localize the holding of data from that comes from the data activity of say nonresident firms. Yeah. General position of the United States government has been, you know, pushing back against efforts by Foreign Countries to pursue data loc lization rules. And its something that we believe is a way that you can hinder innovation and not something that is actually able to help innovation. For us we continue to believe that having a free flow of data is absolutely critical. Authoritarian regimes that want to oppress their people will use that as excuses for pursuing those types of policies. We dont need to give them an excuse to do so by doing it ourselves. Another question that had come in is more of a projection of what your expectations might be if china is successful in taking the lead in the application of Quantum Sciences or ai. What do you think might be the consequences . Well, im confident that the u. S. Will maintain its leadership in ai, so theres no need to engage in that hypothetical. [ laughter ] okay. Well the New York Times in particular has been running a series of interesting reporting on how the chinese have applied their surveillance technologies which use ai to improve the accuracy of facial recognition and so forth. And they are using their involvement in the Telecommunications Systems also to have this as a sort of malevolent app thats attended to their involvement in the Communications System in a way that is enabling and to propaga propagate their Surveillance System to elsewhere, not just in china but in africa and other parts of the world. So i think weve got a pretty compelling warning that the technology is moving rapidly, and it seems its most malevolent applications are the ones that are selected first rather than later. I think at this stage, i would like to also see if there are any questions from the floor that didnt make it into the electronic form. Do we have a mic . Michael, thanks for your great work. So we are really good at Cutting Edge Research and higher education. What role does it play to lift the standards of basic education in the nation in your work . Thank you. It could not be more critical. Creating a pipeline of american talent in these domains is absolutely imperative. One of the first actions that President Trump took in 2017 was a president ial memorandum that prioritized Stem Education at the department of education, committing over 200 million towards at least 200 million towards extend stem ed programs. We continue to look for ways to create environment where the next great ai researchers and quantum scientists are educated here in the United States. We think that its something that we can continue the move to ball forward on. And what weve seen also is a lot of interest from the private sector in joining in it that effort. So a lot of what we try to do is take efforts and initiatives that were pushing forward and believe are national priorities, and have them partner or paired with commitments from other parts of the Innovation Ecosystem to help build leverage. What was exciting about that announcement in 2017, it was paired the next day with a 300 million commitment from the some of the largest technologies in the u. S. To support Stem Education in the way they can through their types of programs and in kind donations. Thats the kind of energy we want to see and build that. One thing that our office is responsible for statutorily is the drafting of a fiveyear Strategic Plan on Stem Education. That was published in 2018 for us. Were sort of in the Implementation Phase approximately this is the second strategy since the law was passed. And this again looks at a whole of government approach. Whats unique about our r d structure in the federal government if you will, lots of agencies do it, and the same goes for stem ed. Its not just the department of education. Its not just at nassau. Its pervasive. Where the white house can play a role is bringing a lot of those folks together and making sure that the programs are working in alignment and making a big impact. Good. Weve had a couple of additional questions that have been submitted in lec truelectronic. First one, expand on chinas use of ai to commit gross human rights abuses, what can the u. S. Do to hold accountable the u. S. Companies and universities that work alongside Chinese Companies so that fuels the abuse . Yeah, thats a really good point. I think the action taken by the Commerce Department in adding to the entity list a number of Chinese Companies which were complicit in and in enable the suppressing the minorities in the country is a huge step. We need to point to and bring more attention to. There are a number of Technology Companies in china that are being utilized to pursue these human rights atrocities, and these need to be called out for what they are and added to entities list. The question of u. S. Engagement in some ways here, i think, is a little bit tricky and one that i care about deeply. I think there is an obligation among a lot of Technology Companies in the u. S. To be a lot more openeyed and less naive and more cognizant of the types of activities that are happening when theyre engaging in china. And this idea, you talked about it a lot, was the Civil Military fusion. This idea that even if youre conducting what you believe is innocuous research as an american in china, that type of research is being used for all sorts of reasons that and ways that you often cant even imagine. So for us as we constantly remind folks, whether youre investors deciding to invest in chinese startups, American Companies trying to do business in china, there is prominent American Company that was selling medical devices that was used to do biometric analysis, it was used to track and create a database of ethnic minorities. This is tragic. We shouldnt have american Companies Complicit in this type of behavior. Since the problem is so pervasive, i think well probably need more detailed federal attention to it. One of the issues that always comes up when discussion of resources are engaged is in funding of ai and Quantum Sciences, did the allocation of those resources result from a decrement in investment and some other part of science that Scientific Research that might be considered lower priority . Or for whatever reason came out second to ai and quantum . Yeah. Generally speaking our Budget Proposal for 2021 was a 6 increase overall for research and development from the 2020 proposed budget. So the pie increased, and we spent a lot of that excess plus up in the areas that the president s prioritized. Good. Well, take some more questions from the floor. The gentleman with the beard. I feel theres a fundamental flaw name and. Peter humphrey, intel analyst and a former diplomat. Your spectrum, there are times in which things are dual use. For example, you can use the exact same algorithm to detect heart arithmias as to detect flaws in the screw signatures of american submarines transiting the south china sea. So you need two spectrum. You need one in which its pretty much single use and you can measure the good evil potential of that single use. And the other spectrum is this complex mix of good uses and bad uses, dual uses. And are you going to stop the proliferation of the arith moia detector so that the chinese dont get their hands on the screw signature flaw did etecto . Cant you establish two spectrum to better get a handle on this . I agree. In the world of ai you can think of face recognition software, the same type of technology that can be used to unlock your iphone is something they can use to identify certain folks theyre trying to target. So generally speaking, yes, its a complicated topic. I think the best manifestation of it is the work that commerce is doing on some of export controls relating to some of these emerging technologies. Pe they were on the hook for looking at tech. They had a long process in trying to get Stakeholder Feedback on export controls on ai, how do you get your hands around the types of issues you bring up with dualuse cases . It continues to be tricky. Its not something we shouldnt think about, but it certainly is tricky. Yes, sir . Taiwan is in the forefront of the penetration or the inference by chinese. So how can u. S. In the further cooperate with taiwan . The other question is the tsmc, Taiwan Semi Conductor Manufacturing Company is the leader in the semiconductor manufacturing, and a bunch of chips to china, is there some specific time that being couldnt contemplated to not benefit the wrong use of those chips . Thank you. Thank you for your question. I think generally the best way for me to answer that is to go back to the main thesis of today. We need to ensure western leadership in next generation technological discoveries. That requires us to have a strong relationships with all of our allies across the world to work on kind of making sure that they are the homes for next great discoveries and that includes all of our allies around the globe. I think weve hit our sellby date. I know you have to get back to your day job. Weve really appreciated your opportunity that youve offered here to explain whats been going on with this important investment. And we wish you well. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you. [ applause ] the winners are in. For this years student cam competition. We asked what issue do you most want the candidates to address . We received more than 2500 entries, from 44 states, with more than 5,000 students participating, with our winners telling us the most important issues are climate change, gun violence, college aformat, the opioid crisis, Mental Health and immigration. Now its time to announce all of our first prize winners. Our first Prize Middle School winners are eight graders, una young, devna, and marisa vouster. Theyre winning documentary is titled blackout, misinformation in the age of social media. It doesnt matter which party you associate with. It doesnt matter for whom you end up voting. If you have access to the internet, social media is going to influence your vote. We have to exercise Critical Thinking and keep an eye on the sources we choose to follow. Otherwise the United States will just be the next of social medias victims. Our first prize High School Goes to Thomas Mckenna from homeschool, where cspan is provided by comcast. His is titled overreach from the oval office. Everybody wants action, but nobody wants addiction. By reigning in executive power we can ensure the control wielded in washington remains balanced among the three branches of government. I ask the 2020 candidates, how will you put a halt to the runaway train . The first apprise are these 11th grards from Jinx High School where cspan is available through cox. Their documentary is titled, 200,000, about the opioid crisis. Johnson johnson through misleading advertise, oklahomans created an opioid epidemic. The first prize goes to these 10th graders. They are from Long Beach Polytechnic High School in long beach, california. Their winning documentary is titled vision 2020, restoring the integrity of american democracy. The more you get money from certain types of sources, the more youre beholdern to those sources. And what you want to be is to be free enough to make decisions based upon what you think is in the best interest of your district and the nation. And now its time to announce our 5,000 grand prize winsers. They are these 11th graders from the Harker School in san jose, california, where cspan is provided by comcast. They won the top prize for the titled demand, about technology and data privacy. In 2016 cambridge analystcall collected data to influence the 2016 election from 87 million facebook users, of which only 270,000 had consented. Were not faced with music privacy here, were faced with personal information piracy. Congratulations to our grand prize winners. Oh, my gosh. None of us has taken formal Video Production classes and all just got together as friends. Didnt do this as part of a class. Were at the Harker School right now, and this is one of the top stem schools in the country. Everyone around us is doing ai projects, and everyone is thinking about working for tech companies. But we were thinking that sometimes their he havedent issues with tech companies, date awe breaches. We thought bringing a voice to the concerns of many with just about data breaches and privacy breaches were important. It helps were in silicon valley, the center of the tech change. Our student cam video documentary competition has awarded more than a Million Dollars in total prizes since 2004. The top 21 winning entries will air on cspan starting april 1st. You can watch them all online at studentcam. Org. Now to the middle east institutefor a discussion on the syrian conflict, particularly in idlib and the international communitys humanitarian, military and diplomatic response to the crisis. This is an hour and 35 minutes. Ladies and gentlemen, good morning. Im very sorry for the delay this morning. Other news is keeping our moderator busy. But he will be here in five or ten