Dame Chi Onwurah
MP for Newcastle upon Tyne Central and West · Labour · United Kingdom
“An extraordinary debate is going on right now inside and outside AI companies about whether the possibility of AI destroying humanity is more or less than 10%. The European Union is moving ahead with a comprehensive AI regulatory framework, but the UK continues to rely on existing regulation.”
“The Pope also highlighted how the billions of online digital twins constitute an unprecedented concentration of power in the hands of a small number of men. Among the many consequences of the 40 years of neoliberalism repeatedly called out by the Prime Minister is a libertarian attitude to technology.”
“But this stealth digital twinning violates the integrity, uniqueness and very personhood of our constituents and of all of us. Digital twins can take many forms, from content creation algorithms and deepfakes to chatbots that reflect aspects of our personalities back at us. It is particularly worrying when children are the target.”
“The automated version of our kids will grow with them, using the power of AI to target advertising and products at them, and worse. The Science, Innovation and Technology Committee has heard about some of the tragic consequences of online grooming by algorithms and chatbots—a vulnerable boy persuaded to kill himself; a vulnerable girl fed…”
“In the arts, entertainment and tech industries, many performers are agreeing to the creation and use of digital replicas as part of their work—think of ABBA Voyage. But performers increasingly encounter unauthorised digital replicas of themselves, which pose a threat to their career, livelihood and reputation.”
“Since then, deepfakes have proliferated. The hon. Member for Mid Norfolk (George Freeman) was shown crossing the Floor in Parliament to join Reform, to his constituents’ consternation and his own—it was a fake. Then there were the horrendous photos of naked women and girls that Elon Musk’s AI created on demand.”
The complete record
Every one of 5,139 lines we hold for Dame Chi Onwurah, in date order, each linked to its source. Free to read, in full, without an account. Page 32 of 103.
“Thank you. Professor Wilsdon? Professor Wilsdon: I agree with everything that Mariana has just said. The one thing that many of us have been calling for since this idea was floated as an option for the UK system is more clarity on its purpose—its mission, in Mariana’s language. It is regrettable, in a way, that it has reached the stage of a Bill without that question having yet been properly answered. There are multiple dimensions to why it is regrettable. First, it is a recipe for confusion. When it does finally decide what it is for, it has to then negotiate and haggle for space in the wider system, as Mariana said. That is time-wasting and is a source of bureaucracy, which this thing is supposed to avoid. Secondly, the Bill and the debate around it sort of vests the choices about purpose and function in the leadership of ARIA.”
“Most of the US agencies have some degree of opacity, partly because they work on defence and security, but partly because you are going to ask people to stick their neck out and try to do things that they start out by viewing as probably impossible. Step 1 for an ARPA mission specialist or programme manager is to try to get some evidence that it is not impossible and might be possible. If you are asking people to work like that, shining a spotlight on them is more or less placing them under pressure to step back from that plate and become more conservative. I do not think that is a good thing.”
“On risk tolerance, a lot has been said about DARPA and taking a lot of risk. I personally think that talking about taking a lot of risk is a poor framing of what they do. What they aim to do is have a significant multiplicative effect on what they achieve. In other words, radical innovation simply says, “We want step change. We want to do things that would create a tremendous impact were they to be done.” What DARPA—all the ARPAs probably, but let’s talk about DARPA in America—has always been good at is managing that risk tremendously well. A large part of the reason they have succeeded is their extraordinarily good management of risk. In terms of deciding what it is for and whether one should necessarily have a public engagement with that, for some things that is very valuable. For others, opacity is surprisingly effective.”
“A really good director can overcome issues around narrowness of mission statement by using the opportunity to do things that span across many domains. In fact, I think it is a rather liberating thing. The fact that we have not at this point had utter clarity on things I regard as extraordinarily good, not bad. A defining characteristic of all of the US ARPAs is that they have a strong focus on rotating people in and out—about 80% from industry and 20% from academia, or some balance like that—and they do a lot of work with both. I entirely agree with what was said about a link between applied and more fundamental research, but I want to strengthen that statement by saying that with the industry base there is a focus on getting things done as opposed to publishing papers, and it is important to remember that.”
“Thank you very much. Professor Bond? Professor Bond: I thank the previous speakers. I think that the idea is about having radical innovation, which is different from grand missions and grand challenges. Certainly the budgets that have been talked about fit an agency doing radical innovation, rather than some very large-scale grand challenges. The discussion over the need for a directed mission is an interesting one. You can do it both ways. The original ARPA started off with the rather nebulous but powerful mission statement of, “Develop strategic advantage”. That is acceptable if you have a good director who understands what that means. DARPA, for example, or IARPA and so on, have somewhat narrower remits, but that does not necessarily make things easier.”
“That includes winning the war, back in the cold war days.”
“It is important to ask again who the obvious customer for ARIA is and how that is linked to different Departments, so it does not just become a matter of bringing geeks into government—the line Dominic Cummings mentioned. Yes, you want experts in government, but geeks in and of themselves are not what you want to strive for; you want to solve problems that different Departments of a democratically elected Government put out there. We should also make sure that those problems are not told to Government by experts like ourselves on this Zoom call, or other Zoom calls, as James rightly said, when everyone will just put forward their own pet project. We need to think about the democratic forums and the different types of the debate that are needed in a country, precisely so that the problems and purpose are shared as widely as possible.”
“They would actually measure their success both on whether they took those risks, because if they were going for easy things, they were not doing their job, and on whether their successes, of which there would only be a few—they accepted that there would be lots of failures—would have a big impact in the economy. For example, they ended up being very important for battery storage. ARPA-E is very different from DARPA. It has a tiny budget of about only $300 million a year. One of its problems—it is also really important for the UK to learn about the problems—is that it has been too wedded to industry. It has focused too much on asking industry what it needs and then it ends up almost being this massive technology office, compared with DARPA, which had a very clear Government customer—basically, the Department of Defence.”
“I just think there is a bit of a false dichotomy between whether you need a challenge or whether it is about a big radical innovation. DARPA has always been challenge-oriented, and that is why they needed those radical innovations to actually confront those challenges. The questions they were asking were much more specific and were framed in a targeted way, so you could actually answer the question, “Did we achieve it or not?” In terms of the risk, I absolutely agree that it is not about risk for the sake of risk. In a conference I organised back in 2014, called “Mission Oriented Innovation”, I invited Cheryl Martin, who back then was the second director of ARPA-E, and she said that they actually structured ARPA-E in such a way as to welcome as much high-risk thinking, and that the whole point was to matter in the economy.”
“Those are problems that need solving. They did not just say, “Oh, let’s go and compete in space with the Russians.” Again, it was very specific: getting to the moon and back in one generation. You can actually answer the question, “Did you get there: yes or no?” Lots of different sectors got involved; it was not just one big isolated project—that is the whole picking winners problem. It required innovation in nutrition, textiles, materials, electronics, and the whole software industry can, in some ways, be seen as an output of that. Again, how did they organise the thinking and the purposefulness of the organisation? One of the first things they did was change their own internal structure to be much more horizontal, with project managers, precisely to be purpose-oriented.”
“Every country is actually signed up to them, including the UK, so we should hear a bit more about the SDGs in the UK national debate. Let us just bring it back to the DARPA or NASA kind of model. Broadly defined, DARPA is, of course, challenge-oriented. The key thing is how it can translate those challenges into missions. Take the moon landing, which I wrote about in my recent book. I talked about both what to copy and what not to copy from it—most of it was what not to copy. The challenge was the space race, the cold war, Sputnik—NASA did not have much to do without that. They transformed that into a mission, which was to get to the moon and back again in one generation, so it would be wrong to say that DARPA and NASA are not challenge-oriented. The point is that how they are structured is much more specific than that.”
“Q Thank you very much. Professor Mazzucato, you were very clear that it is helpful not to consider this as a replacement institution. We have already heard some confusion as to whether it is cutting edge or transactional. You were also clear about the need for a strong research base, engagement on procurement, and a vision. What should that vision or mission be, in your view? We have heard from Professor Bond that there might be a trade-off between transparency and risk taking. How would you respond to that? Professor Mazzucato: I just want to clarify what I understand in terms of challenge orientation, because I think there is also a bit of confusion there. Challenges globally are the sustainable development goals.”
“So, this strategy is not completely new to the UK, but we should not pursue it as a siloed project; it must answer the big questions such as the digital divide, carbon neutrality, health ageing and so on. But you have the 2017 industrial strategy, so start there; we cannot keep rethinking from scratch each time.”
“On clean growth, the answer must be carbon-neutral cities all over the UK; or take a global challenge such as clean oceans—sustainable development goal 13—and getting the plastic out of the ocean. What is the UK’s contribution to that? What about the digital divide, under the challenge of AI and the data economy? Just think back to when the BBC had a mission. Back in the 1980s, it wanted to get every kid to code, before it was sexy—today it is very sexy to talk about coding. The BBC was doing that back then, and its own procurement strategy helped to deliver that by producing the BBC Micro computer. The BBC did that not because it was obsessed by technology but because it needed it to fulfil that mission.”
“They solved that in the industrial strategy—they listened, and I was very happy—and decided on four challenges, namely, healthy ageing, clean growth, the future of mobility and the opportunities that AI and the data economy provide to us. In terms of identifying the missions underneath those, I set up a commission co-chaired with Lord David Willetts entitled the Commission for Mission Oriented Innovation and Industrial Strategy. We worked very closely with the different challenge teams in BEIS precisely to answer your question. It is definitely not the role of an economist, academic or business person to tell you what the missions are. That must be co-created within Departments alongside different stakeholders, but surely the first answer is that those missions must be those that respond to those four challenges.”
“Q What do you think ARIA’s mission should be? I will put that same question to the other witnesses. Professor Mazzucato: I am holding the 2017 industrial strategy, which Greg Clark’s team put together. We very much advised on that and one of my roles was to say stop just making lists of sectors. You will remember that under David Cameron’s team there were five sectors: automotive, aerospace, life sciences, finance/financial services and the creative sector. I said not to make a list of random sectors, which can easily get captured by those sectors with the loudest voice, but to think about what their problems were.”
“I think that trying to bring more clarity, or at least a sense of how this issue will be addressed through the governance of this new thing, is really important. Otherwise, you or your successors, and we or our successors, will be back here in a few years’ time, asking ourselves why it did not work. I know that it has a tolerance of failure—we are all in favour of that—but the thing has to at least succeed in some respects, alongside its appetite for failure.”
“To me, the logical sequence of events would have been to conclude that process—I realise it has been a difficult year for everyone for obvious reasons—and then to identify the particular gaps and priorities to which a new funding mechanism could be directed. What we have done is fixate on a particular institutional model, imported from the US in the late ’60s, and dumped into Britain today, as the way in which somehow, magically, we are going to cut through all sorts of real or perceived barriers and obstacles in our existing research and innovation system. I just think that is a very flawed way to do this. We are where we are. The Bill is in front of Parliament. We need to focus at this point on how we can amend it, or you can amend it, to improve it.”
“Q Thank you. Professor Wilsdon? Professor Wilsdon: I do not have a mission in my back pocket that I want to push. My argument is simply that the thing needs to have more clarity. I do not really mind what it ends up doing, as long as we go into it with a better sense of what we are trying to get out of it, as Mariana said. It is worth going back to some of the other strategic documents that operate and run the UK system, including the industrial strategy, as Mariana says. In July last year, the UK Government published its draft R&D roadmap. Again, that is a good idea and it is something that many other countries do. It set out a longer-term planned direction for the system, and tried to explain to the system and to wider stakeholders how the different parts fit together and their different functions.”
“It is a place that moves quickly. As you are probably aware, when you show up at DARPA, you have an expiration date on your badge, as we say, so you move fast and the whole place is geared to do that. The agency now has a record of 63 years of production—again, with oversight at all times. It gets the job done, in that context.”
“Dominic Cummings said: “The purpose of ARIA ought to be to sample in this broader design space, to do things differently, and to learn from the things that have been super-productive in the past. That means in very simple terms extreme freedom.” Dr Highnam, does DARPA have “extreme freedom”? What does that mean in cultural terms? Does complying with, for example, US freedom of information laws or procurement regulations—it is proposed that ARIA would be exempt from them—impact on that freedom? Dr Highnam: That is a great question. DARPA is an agency in the Department of Defense in the US Government. We have a number of regulations and laws that of course we operate within. We have a number of special authorities that allow us to operate a little faster and with a little more independence, but with oversight.”
“Q It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mrs Cummins. May I also echo your thanks to our witnesses for taking the time to join us for this important session? I am in awe of the range and breadth of your experience in innovation and scientific research, and all the more grateful to those of you with experience of DARPA for joining us this afternoon, as the architect of the Advanced Research and Invention Agency, Dominic Cummings, the previous adviser to the Prime Minister, has apparently refused to give evidence to the Committee. We are able to go only by what he has said previously, and there seems to be some confusion as to what ARIA is and whether it should be engaged in cutting-edge research or in the translation of existing research. You might be able to comment on that.”
“Q I will follow up on that and then bring in the other witnesses. You speak about oversight. Would it be possible to give a bit more detail on that? In particular, the UK Government are currently mired in a cronyism scandal; indeed, that is what is being debated in the House today. DARPA is well known for having exchange between itself and the private sector, but how do you prevent projects or programmes from going to friends, mates and those with, if you like, special interests, without some degree of oversight? Dr Highnam: I can speak only to how DARPA operates. We have very rigorous review processes—technical, financial and others. We have conflict of interest rules and so on that we all follow. There are robust processes and independent looks at those processes. Again, we could not operate any other way.”
“Q Thank you very much. Could I ask our other witnesses to respond? Professor Azoulay: If I might add one element to the question that the hon. Member asked, the programme managers at DARPA and also at ARPA-E—the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy—have a fixed expiration date, which means they will need to go back to academia or to the venture capital firm or large firm that they left, and generally they want to do so with their head held high and their reputation intact. I think that that has created over time a norm of correct behaviour, if you will, and the absence of cronyism. That norm element is also very important, in addition to the formal regulations.”
“That is very clear. Dr Dugan: I served as the 19th director of DARPA and echo Peter’s statements that there are indeed oversight and regulations that govern the behaviour at DARPA. We have free and open competitions. One of the things it is important to understand is that part of the reason that innovation is so robust at DARPA is that there is a sense that there is an equal opportunity for many to apply to the programmes and to be fairly judged. As a result, many bring their ideas to DARPA. That is part of the robustness of the ecosystem that has developed around the agency. It is a very important element of the work.”
“Q Thank you very much for your responses. May ask one more follow-up question? I have spoken about some of the concerns about oversight and so on, but may I ask each of you what you think is the key positive element of culture? You have spoken about the desire to return with your head held high. What should we be looking for in the directors and programme managers as the key positive part of the culture that ARIA should seek to build? Dr Highnam: Honour in public service is top of the list.”
“Honour? Dr Highnam: Yes. You join a place like DARPA to change your field and make a difference for defence. We are a defence agency. When you come to DARPA, we give you the lever arm, we help you position the fulcrum, we give you the mass to make things happen, and we give you the processes around you to make sure, as Regina said, you do it fairly, openly and robustly. We do exit interviews when people leave DARPA, and one of my favourite quotes is, “If you don’t invent the internet at DARPA, you get a B.””
“Fabulous. Professor Azoulay: I second that entirely, but I would also say credibility in both the scientific world and the business world. It is a relatively rare breed of individuals who have credibility in both domains at the same time, but that is to quite a large extent the X factor in the typical DARPA or ARPA-E programme manager.”
“What I can tell you about diversity from my own experience, both in Silicon Valley and at DARPA, is that for decades we have known that specificity of goal and outcome is a good way to get more equality and diversity in assessment of ideas and in people conducting or pursuing those ideas. We know that across academic institutions and across companies. One of the things that is important is to set crisp and clear goals, because the ideas are then measured against them, and they can come from many different individuals and organisations. As I said previously, I believe that is central to building that ecosystem out, and for that ecosystem to be diverse and more equitable.”
“We design the programmes such that we have a very clear and ambitious goal that is also measurable and testable. Programme directors have a finite period in which they collect a group of performers from a mix of organisations and disciplines in service to that goal, and there is passion, spirit and urgency that comes with that. It cannot be created in the abstract; it has to be real in order to engender the kind of genius and collaboration that is characteristic of these programmes. The programme directors are themselves scientific or engineering experts. They are great musicians, as you might think, but they are not playing an instrument at the time of conducting the programme; they are rather conducting an orchestra of expert musicians who together make a symphony. That is very important.”
“Q Thank you very much. Dr Dugan, I will ask you the same question. The tech sector and science and innovation are not known for their diversity, but we have heard that diversity of thought is very important in the agency. As shadow Minister, I would like to see a broad range of diversity in the people who are recruited, in terms of gender, class and race. I am asking this question of you because you are the last person that I came to. How can the culture promote diversity as well as being positive? Dr Dugan: Let me take the questions in order. I would add that DARPA and ARPA-like organisations are optimised to create breakthroughs. Those breakthroughs happen at the intersection of some science and engineering that we are pulling forward in service to a new capability or a new problem solution.”
“Thank you very much. I know that others have questions to ask so I will leave it there, but I just want to say how inspiring it is to hear such positive reference to the power of public service, science and research, and to oversight as being an enabler rather than a burden.”
“We have seen AI create state-of-the-art information-retrieving capabilities, sift through vast amounts of data and speed up the publishing process, so it is changing the process of research, but also in itself it is obviously making discoveries and scientific advancements. Three per cent. of all peer-reviewed journals are now AI-related and this new trend of AI plus another science is really booming. So biology is currently experiencing its “AI moment”. We saw in the State of AI report that there is a 50% year-on-year increase in papers; 25% of the output since 2000 is a biology and AI collaboration. DeepMind’s AlphaFold is a really good example of that. Demis Hassabis has publicly said that one of the drivers at DeepMind is AI that could win a Nobel prize, so he has already set the bar for an ARIA.”
“That said, it is still unclear to me if there needs to be one challenge enshrined in law or whether the programme managers should have the freedom; I think we will hear more from others on what their decision is there. The most important thing is that I just kept hearing time and again from the community I spoke to, similarly to what the gentleman from DARPA said, that this is a time to serve. People really want to find a place to do research that saves people’s lives, especially in the AI eco-system. I think that your question about the impact that AI has on research is a very good one. AI is impacting research, just as it does all areas of the economy, both in disrupting the fabric of its own self and advancing research.”
“Tabitha Goldstaub: First and foremost on your point around focus, really it needs to be about imagining how funding is done to find the breakthroughs that others describe as being at the edge of the edge, with freedom—testing, for example, things like the lotteries, the grants, the speed of contracting, loans, prizes and all the things that we have heard about throughout the whole of today. I really think that ARIA is about exploring these ideas. If you are looking for a single focus, I believe wholeheartedly in Mariana Mazzucato’s mission-driven approach to innovation. The AI community was incredibly catalysed by the industrial strategy grand challenges. And of course there are these urgent missions. Alondra Nelson said in her first speech post being nominated by Joe Biden that all science should address social inequality.”
“Q Thank you very much to our guests for joining us and bringing your experience. It is a real pleasure to have an all-female panel. It is a real rarity when it comes to discussions of science generally. There is some confusion about what ARIA should be. Should it be focused on cutting-edge research, should it be about the transformational translation of existing research, or should it bring the two together? What I would like to know from both of you, with your wide experience, is what you think ARIA’s goal or purpose should be. What problem should it fix? Ms Goldstaub, you have experience of artificial intelligence, which could be a critical area of research. Do you think it is going to change the nature of research, how we research and how scientific research occurs? How should we envisage ARIA responding to that?”
“There is an opportunity to look at high risk, high reward. I would hope that the leadership of ARIA considered that, to fund things that are really innovative, you yourself have to be innovative. We will need to think and be imaginative about how you go about sourcing and funding projects, so that we do not just get a modified version of what we are currently seeing, but can fund in a way that is more bespoke. By doing that, we are opening up what I hope would be exciting possibilities.”
“That is not unimportant, because at the moment we are enjoying a big buy-in from citizens around science, as they see the relevance of what funding science over a period of years actually does, in being able to deliver us—in this case—from a pandemic, and of course there is climate change there, as well. So that is important. The focus of the purpose needs to be crystal clear, so that there is no confusion with other funding agencies. That would just lead to mini-chaos, or things falling through the gaps and being shuffled around, which is not at all helpful. The last thing I would say in this context is that there is an opportunity to look at how you fund. For perhaps quite understandable reasons, current research funding is quite formulaic; it is box-ticking to get the funding. What sort of projects will be funded? Normally, low risk.”
“If I think of some of the big grand challenges—certainly a number of those were funded at the European Commission—often they would be narrowed down, so that there would be three absolutely superb proposals in quite different areas of research, which would have come through the review process. Then it would be a decision about which one we should fund. And that is an ideal time to say to citizens, “What is it that you’re interested in?” Of course that makes the research very relevant; it would tend to make it translatable into the economy, the life/wellbeing environment and so on; it also then has a substantial buy-in from citizens.”
“Q Thank you very much. And Professor Dame Anne Glover? Professor Glover: You were asking if the UK’s ARPA or ARIA should have a single purpose, or focus, and in terms of subject area, I would argue not, because you do not know where the good ideas are coming from. It would be really valuable to have quite a wide and informed debate from a very broad spectrum of interests as to where the calls should come from regarding ARIA. Therefore, when they are looking for a call for research, what are the big areas? In a way, this is quite similar to looking at the grand challenges, which Tabitha has already mentioned. However, there is an opportunity here in looking at grand challenges, because who decides what those grand challenges are? Voices that are very frequently missing in that debate are citizens’ voices.”
“Yes, we have to find four or five of those individuals, but it is the people who work with them who make a huge difference. It is the open science, open data and spirit of openness that will go a long way to finding those people who will culturally fit and enable us to engage well beyond just those five individuals and find the edge-of-the-edge breakthroughs that we really need. I hear people saying, “I have ideas that I just don’t even put forward right now; they are unthinkable, because they are unfundable.” Once people can come together, you start to unlock that, which saves you from this lack of diversity where you are just funding individual after individual and effectively asking people to compete with each other.”
“The planet is burning, I don’t want to work at the big banks or the big tech giants.” They want the academic freedom of the universities but they do not want to work alone. They see the financial reward of successful start-ups, but they want to take long-term bets. Generally, they want to make the world a better place. It is people like that who fit into the mould that we are looking for. I worry also about the lone genius model. We are well beyond individual success being seen like that. This is all about community. One of the things I have heard time and again is that people do not want to be funded as individuals but as groups of people. It is a community that would come together around a programme manager that is really important.”
“Is it possible that we can find five or six great people who know all the different potential areas of research, who can make these kinds of choices on behalf of the British people, using public money, and can integrate the changing nature of research, while at the same time being innovative and having, we would hope, diversity of thought and hopefully also of gender, region, discipline, etc? Is it possible to find five or six people like that? What elements of the structure of ARIA are important to promote that? Tabitha Goldstaub: It is totally possible to find those people. I cannot speak across all science, but I definitely feel there is a generation of young, mid-career AI talent that feel they are in a sort of gap—the fuzzy middle, as Andy Hopper calls it. They are asking themselves, “What am I doing?”
“Q Just to follow up with two brief questions. The points you raise, though different, have raised similar questions in me. First, in terms of deciding what areas of research and challenges should be addressed, what if we rely on the leadership, as you suggest, Professor Dame Anne? What ARIA seems to support is what I would call the “big man” model of research: choose five or six great men—generally, they are men—and give them the freedom to be geniuses and to choose what they want to research, to have, as Dominic Cummings says, “extreme freedom”. Ms Goldstaub, you say that AI is changing how research happens, and also the scale, I would say.”
“What Braben said is that we should look for “irreverent researchers and liberated universities”. Do not look for people who have a research area that we think is really important and we must go there. Debate widely among researchers, of course, but also Government Departments, devolved Administrations, foresighters, businesses, citizens. Let us imagine the future. ARIA could be the stepping stone, if you like, to inventing that imagined future. For a future to exist, you have to imagine it in the first place and you have to convert it into what you would like. There are lots of different ways of doing that. With inspirational leadership, you can move towards that. You can probably increase dramatically your chance of getting it right by having an irreverence around what you do, and not the usual measures of success.”
“In my view, a large part of the success of ARIA will come from having quite inspirational leaders throughout. In terms of how you fund and who it is that you are funding, I would go back to what I was alluding to earlier. There needs to be a big conversation about this. There are often older men who have got a reputation in research, so they are naturally the ones we go to, but as I know from bitter experience, as you get older, sometimes your thinking closes off in particular areas and you are less open to ideas. I am thinking of Professor Donald Braben, whose comments the Committee would probably be very interested in. He set up a venture research unit in BP, back in the ’90s I think, and has written several books about this kind of blue skies research area.”
“Q Thank you. Professor Dame Anne? Professor Glover: Just for easiness, can I ask Committee members to just call me Anne? Otherwise it is a bit of a mouthful. On the idea of five or six individuals, I would caution on that slightly. I am partly bought into the idea, but if you are identifying five or six individuals, you have already pinned your colours to the mast in what you want. You have already prejudged the areas you want to work in or the ideas that you are interested in. Where the five or six people might be really important to identify is for the running of ARIA itself. Whether it is the overall director of ARIA or the research leaders in the different themes that might be funded in ARIA, they will be key people and they need to be credible, trusted, very effective at communication and really open-minded.”
“Thinking about the design of it, we would be making sure that we do not focus too much on whether we are looking at basic or applied research or commercialisation, but flipping that on its head and thinking about what market problem we are trying to solve, who the end customer is, and then working back and thinking about who you need to engage along the way.”
“When we think about some of the challenges that we are trying to solve in the UK, as well as the science superpower ambition and the goal of spending 2.4% of GDP on R&D, we will not hit any of those targets unless businesses are involved and engaged. The design of ARIA will be quite important to whether it will work for businesses or not. The wording of the Bill is less important than the design and make-up of who is involved in ARIA and in thinking about what challenges the institution is trying to solve. Thinking about the individuals for a moment, we would very much like to see industry represented alongside the science base.”
“Q As my first question was for both the Royal Society and the Royal Academy of Engineers, I will start with a question to Ms Burch. Neither the ARIA Bill nor the explanatory notes refer to private sector investment. Is that an issue, and is it possible for ARIA to achieve its mission without engaging with the private sector? Can you suggest improvements to the Bill or its context in order to ensure that that happens? Felicity Burch: That is a really important question. It is definitely the view of the business community that ARIA needs to be designed with the business community and the private sector in mind.”