Industrial R&D Collaboration Opportunities

Telecom, wireless, and cloud/internet companies have created, without central direction, a Mobile Edge and Cloud Network (MECN). The existing MECN already supports rapidly growing and almost ubiquitous communication among people and devices even as it enables waves of new services. While many innovative features of future generations of MECN can and will be developed and deployed by individual companies (or segments of the value chain), network-wide low latency and network-wide reduced energy use require system-wide and interoperable — if not entirely coordinated — innovations by software, hardware, and service companies.

The first phase of the ARC Project on MECN is focused on characterizing the MECN-wide applied R&D agenda, and the shareable research infrastructure to support that R&D agenda, needed to drive next generation network-wide low latency and substantially reduced energy use.

The by-invitation industry-centric ARC meeting in the fall of 2023 in San Diego will focus on enabling technology (pre-competitive) research questions that are amenable to industry collaboration. The purpose of the meeting is to solicit ideas and vet research approaches from the range the companies that need to collaborate to reduce network wide latency and energy use even new base stations, devices, networks, and cloud services are incrementally added to the vast and already complex MECN.

Some of the opportunities for collaboration will — no doubt — need to leverage existing platforms, test beds, and R&D investments. ARC’s investigation of useful ideas is shaped by two constraints. Research infrastructure investments need to:

• Be immediately and long-term useable and useful to industry leaders, vendors, customers, and service providers up and down the value chain; and

• Support standards-neutral research and experimentation to accommodate interoperability needs in light of shifting, and wide variations in, current and likely future standards across the entire value chain.

Despite a common core in human biology and behavior, the challenges of improving health care, advancing medical science and epidemiology, and the development therapeutics are overwhelmingly complex because of the global diversity of human populations and the wide variety of diseases, conditions, and etiologies. Rapid and broad advances in analytical and data sciences – in the hands of medical researchers, care providers, public health services, and pharmaceutical companies, among others – offer the promise of new forms of applied analytics to help prevent the spread of disease, improve clinical care, and develop new targeted and broad-spectrum therapies. Unfortunately, the data necessary for such targeted advances – high fidelity cross sectional and longitudinal clinical data about large general and disease-specific populations in many nations – are Balkanized by widely varying health care practices (both clinical and administrative), data collection methods, privacy laws, and proprietary concerns.

In this context there are two entwined and enabling innovations which are critical to public and private applied medical and health R&D enterprises around the world. First, there are important organizational innovations to induce health and medical enterprises to share (allow access to, not necessarily pool) patient registries, both existing and under development. To reap the potential benefits of both scale and scope in data it is important to knit together numerous patient registries (or less formally designated equivalents) into a useable and useful Distributed Patient Registry.

Second, there is an immediate and long-term data science R&D and innovation agenda to develop and deploy approaches that respect globally acceptable data privacy standards while they support open research, consortium or multi-enterprise proprietary research, and single company proprietary research drawing on a multinational Distributed Patient Registry.

The first phase of the ARC Project on a multinational Distributed Patient Registry is focused on characterizing the barriers facing, and path forward for, these enabling innovations. An ARC meeting in September will focus on these issues. The goal of the meeting is to solicit ideas and vet approaches from a range of companies, public agencies, and non-profit enterprises with missions/goals that could be moved forward by a functioning Distributed Patient Registry. Many of the most promising ideas and next steps will -- no doubt — need to leverage both recent R&D investments and existing organizations.

Government supported energy and electric vehicle research continues growing at a pace not seen in decades, with major initiatives at universities and institutes in virtually every democratic nation. The projected growth of the EV market, battery technologies, renewable energy infrastructure (including smart grid and demand management) and charging infrastructure spaces are significant growth opportunities. With a projected global energy increase of 50% by 2050, driven by the increase of EVs and newly emerging markets, the EIA’s International Energy Outlook also projects that CO2 emissions will continue to rise.

These incoming challenges represent a marked need to research precompetitive areas to meet sustainability goals, both those driven by regulatory and industry stakeholders.

The most pressing challenges facing these industries – decentralized energy systems, grid cybersecurity, and demand response/load management, for example – cannot be addressed by a single organization or country. Investments in research infrastructure need to be of a scale, scope, and broad accessibility that can lift the entire industry based or originating in democracies; there is an urgent need for shareable cross-border enabling technology research infrastructure, platforms, and facilities.

Given the state of these disparate, currently unconnected industries, the business logic for a developing a shareable research infrastructure among companies from friendly democratic nations is simple and clear:

1) by sharing research assets and outcomes, participating companies can reduce their independent investment in critical enabling (non-competitive) system technologies;

2) by collaboration on R&D for enabling technologies, leading energy providers can support interoperable innovations without diminishing competition among participant companies; and

3) open (low-cost) access technology research/platforms will support a wide
range of market-driven innovations by participant company’s customers, vendors, and other industry players.

The challenge, which only industry can address, is the definition and characterization of research infrastructure that is enabling (non-competitive), immediately useful, and likely to be an important tool in the evolution of the industry over the next decade. Join us in helping to reduce the power requirements of digital infrastructure alongside the co-evolution of EV and electric grid infrastructure, capacity, and operations.

Decarbonizing high temperature industrial processes and decreasing choke points in the pursuit of industrial decarbonization.