Ray Bair

I’m Ray Bair. I come to you following a 30-year career at Sandia in which I applied my electrical engineering background to design of security products for nuclear weapons, and to the development of reliability in electronic systems.

It's remarkable to me the variety and the ubiquity of the surety problems that you’ve heard this morning. It strikes me that the multidisciplinary nature of the problems accents the need for a strong technical depth as we approach the solutions. It also points out the value of partnerships as we move forward in the future.

I come to you this morning proposing the formation of an institute. The primary mission or goal of this institute would be to provide an enduring forum to establish and advance the discipline of science-based surety. The structure will be a virtual organization comprised of university, government agency, laboratory, and industrial elements. Activities occur at organizations that are specifically involved, but as a group, they benefit from the synergistic effects of the people working together.

1. education, or perhaps information resource
2. research, or research and development combined
3. and finally in applications

Each of these areas would have a specific objective. In the educational area, the ISSE would provide a forum for the exchange of surety knowledge and be a resource for the information that develops in the community. In the R&D area it would facilitate R&D partnerships for the advancement of the discipline itself. And in applications it would encourage the collaborative groups to work together and to focus on current problems. It is from this work on the current problems that many of the technological and theoretical advancements will emerge.

In general we hope to develop beyond the point solutions that you’ve heard about this morning, and try to provide a broader integrated approach to many of the technical problems that exist.

The idea is to establish a not-for-profit entity. We could consider structures like the International Combustion Research Institute, which has a very far-reaching membership, primarily low-cost individual memberships of people who get together and discuss common problems. Or we might consider the example of the National Consortium for Manufacturing Sciences in the U. S., which primarily has corporate sponsors and corporate memberships.

I see the need for a core management team for technical direction plus chairpersons for a variety of technical domains. Perhaps the topics we heard this morning could form the basis for the technical domains. We have need for a board of directors for strategic and political direction. Sandia is committed for first-year funding for founding this institute.

Two activities have emerged as starters. First, we see the opportunity for the institute to provide a journal that could be an opportunity to collect the information the community generates and disseminate it to the members and the community at large. Second we see value in offering an award much like the Malcolm Baldrige Award in Quality. We could provide a national award in the area of surety for the advancement of the science itself, or perhaps for the application of the science to a particular need. The presentation of an annual award would publicize the importance of the work and the focus on surety application.

There is a need, the institute is underway, yet the construct is still being formed. We have before us a block of clay and our task is to shape it into a desired structure as we go forward.

To be successful there must be a genuinely broad and diverse participation, and today represents the first opportunity for that. You’re invited to join the effort in whatever capacity you see fit, or contribute any thoughts you might have. We certainly need your ideas, your leadership and, most of all, your active participation.

We’ll have the opportunity in our breakout session to discuss a large variety of matters that we’ve considered and to which you might provide some solutions or thoughts. The breakout session will be devoted to critiquing some of the ideas that have been generated so far, to crafting a message to Congress if we think this is time for the nation to proceed, and to defining the work that needs to be done in the next few months or over the next several years. I encourage you to be generous in your contributions, including criticism, because I think that the advancements that we’ll make will primarily come on the basis of constructive criticism. I thank you for your time this morning and I hope to have an active session this afternoon.

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