Technology Transfer

Panelists:
€ Moderator: Yigal Arens, Co-Director, Digital Government Research Center; Director, Intelligent Systems Division, Information Sciences Institute of the University of Southern California, arens@isi.edu
€ Hsinchun Chen, McClelland Professor and Director, Artificial Intelligence Lab, University of Arizona; Founder, Knowledge Computing Corporation
€ Isaac Maya, Director, Industry and Technology Transfer Programs, Integrated Media Systems Center, University of Southern California
€ Steve Minton, CTO, Fetch Technologies, Inc.
€ Reagan Moore, Co-Program Director, Data and Knowledge Systems, San Diego Supercomputer Center

The NSF¹s Digital Government research program is distinguished by requiring that all the research that it supports be performed in collaboration with government agencies. This requirement is derived from the fact that information technology and other research the program supports becomes ³digital government² research primarily by virtue of having a particular impact on the processes of governance, the provision of government services to citizens and other interactions between citizens and their government.
It is therefore only natural that the ultimate test of the value of digital government research is its ability to positively impact government and its operations. This is also of great importance to those agencies that have contributed to the research with their personnel¹s time and/or with money. But the process of technology transfer is not a simple one, and is not fully understood. Many researchers at universities and in private industry have struggled with it for a long time.
This panel brought together people who have viewed technology transfer from several different angles and who are personally involved with it in different ways. We heard from a person whose job it is to find opportunities for government funded research in industry. We heard from representatives of companies that were created based on university research. And we heard about efforts to transfer technology developed by the DG program itself into government.