Plenary Proceedings
Presentation of Breakout Session Products and Panel Discussion

Dr. Alan Rudolph:  This morning's session, as you recall, is intended to hear back from the session chairs with regard to the sessions that were introduced yesterday. We will have brief outbriefs from each session covering various areas of interdisciplinary science.

Larry Dubois will introduce the session chairs who will give you the outbriefs, and then Larry will lead a focused discussion between the session chairs to try to bring out those synergies and contrasts and try to get some informal discussion between the session chairs as to what we can really look forward to, what are the critical enablers, and technologies that we might be able to look forward to in the future.

Dr. Larry Dubois:  Let me just reiterate what Alan said: it's been, I think, a great meeting so far. The breakout sessions, at least the ones that I attended (I tended to pop in-and-out of a number of them), were extremely well-attended. You took our message to-heart yesterday that there truly is no such thing as a free lunch, and you worked hard. Again, we are asking for your participation today in the form of questions and answers.

Keep up the enthusiasm long beyond this meeting! This is just the first step of what we hope will be many steps in this direction for DARPA.

We had a brief discussion last night of all the session chairs to just get a sense for where everyone was and look at some of the similarities. There clearly is complexity that we will hear about through all the different sessions. We will hear about diversity across many different species - microorganisms, again, another common theme. And one of the other things I think we will hear about a lot it is the integration across multiple length-scales. But there also are some key problems, and these were highlighted last night in our discussions. I think they will become a little more obvious today: there is a true language barrier. Biologist speak a different language than traditional physical scientists and engineers. Also, there are fundamentally different ways of approaching problems. I think that the great thing about a meeting like this, and putting together programs the way DARPA does, is that we're going to start bridging some of those cultural gaps, and I think that will be great.

In addition to providing an overview of what happened at the sessions and answering the four questions listed on the back of your agenda, we have also asked the session chairs to provide one or two "really cool" things that they heard about at the sessions to give you a flavor for the excitement of what's happening in their different disciplines.