Critical Technology Initiative

Vision

To create the intellectual foundations, data, and analytic tools to support the government in designing critical technology, supply chain, and infrastructure strategies that realize win-wins across its multiple objectives (national security, economic prosperity—including jobs, and social welfare—including health, environment, and equity), beyond profitability/growth.

Approach

• Develop timely situational awareness of domestic and international technology and production capabilities
• Identify innovations that transform national outcomes
• Propose strategic action, including policy
  • Define critical technologies
  • Develop metrics for national objectives (security, prosperity, social welfare) against which critical technologies should be judged
  • Develop tools to provide transparency on trade-offs and win-wins for different technology choices as well as the costs/benefits of global (de-)coupling
  • Propose strategic action, including policies, that cuts across individual agency missions

Why Carnegie Mellon University?

Our faculty team, which spans the College of Engineering, School of Computer Science, and Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy, combines globally-recognized domain experts who are defining the technology frontier in key critical technologies, with experts pushing the frontier of technologies that allow algorithms to actively learn and parse and process unstructured text, and with experts at the intersection of trade, innovation, energy, and policy. Leveraging our interdisciplinary expertise and skills in a way that is truly Carnegie Mellon, our team is pushing innovations at the intersection of hardware, software, and policy to change the possibility frontier for our nation, citizens, and society.

Areas of research