英文经典 | 捕捉英语世界的智慧

About 英文经典 | 捕捉英语世界的智慧

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Publisher

回响Podcast

Category

business · education

Language

zh

Explicit

No

First episode

22 Sept 2024

Latest episode

14 Jan 2025

Latest episodes

62 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   14 Jan 2025

   E63 | 伦纳德·伯恩斯坦（Lawrence Bernstein）：公众演讲的技巧

   Transcript: LAWRENCE BERNSTEIN: Good afternoon everybody. Everybody here has been incredibly kind and welcoming. I parked the car, I came out of the car park, and somebody immediately came up to me, asked me what I was up to. Said she’d look after everything, and then she said, “I hope it goes well.” And I thought, “I haven’t really focused on going well,” what it actually means here today. And I guess if you’re not feeling terribly positive, it means not forgetting what you’re going to say, which would be quite helpful. It means nobody laughing at you, unless you’re trying to tell a joke. And it means not looking over and seeing people falling asleep, looking at their phones or generally ignoring you. And those are, by the way, three of the biggest fears of people, subconsciously, when they’re about to speak in public. So I’m going to set my sights just a tiny bit higher than that and say that I would love it as the only thing you take away from this talk that next time you have to give a speech or a presentation or you’re talking in a seminar or whatever it might be, that you just remember those two cups of coffee. And for the non-coffee drinkers amongst you, peppermint tea, even a beer is absolutely fine. Because the sad truth is that however hard we work at what we’re going to say, however much we learn the facts and the figures and all these things that a typical member of this audience tomorrow, this time tomorrow, I will be amazed if you remember more than one thing I’ve said. Or more than one thing that any of the other amazing speakers with their brilliant stories have said, because we just live in such a phenomenally noisy, busy world. We’ve got WhatsApps and streams and apps and things to watch and things to do and things to learn, and we’ve got dates to go on and games to go to. By this time tomorrow, these talks will be a distant, distant memory. And it’s extraordinary how our brains are relatively selective about what we remember. Now this doesn’t help, and I include myself in amongst this, this doesn’t help the nervous public speaker. Now that fear is a real problem, because it means that we approach our speeches already worried about how we’re going to look and sound. And it’s why often we do things that are a bit unlike us. Some people just start talking really quickly, and they get through their content and they can’t stop. And other people freeze and they just stand absolutely still and all the energy drains from them and they start to talk in a monotone. Isn’t so great for being heard. This is the fight or flight response. And it means that when we are under pressure and we feel that spotlight on us, we just start to behave in very unnatural ways. Now this is where I come back to the cup of coffee. Because if after this, I bump into one or two of you at the canteen, we have a chat and you ask me what I’m doing for the rest of the weekend, I hope, if you had a football shirt on, I might say I’m looking forward to watching a game on telly, and I might give you the absolute highlight of what I’m up to. See if it connects, see how you react. I might say, “I’m knackered after all that prep for TED. I’m going to spend the rest of the weekend watching boxsets on TV.” What I probably wouldn’t say is, “Thank you so much for asking that question. I’m going to break the weekend down into 12 points, and I’m going to talk through each point one by one and break the weekend into segments. But before I do that, I’d like to introduce the concept of the weekend, and I’d like to talk about the weekend as a post-industrial concept, because it didn’t really exist before the Industrial Revolution.” If I talk like that, would you think I was slightly, slightly unusual? And we sort of laugh about this stuff, and I laugh about it a lot. But actually, when we are under pressure, particularly in a professional situation or a student having to give a seminar that really matters, we start to talk in that way. Let me tell you about two jobs I’ve done relatively recently, and I will keep the names and the places anonymous to protect the innocent. So a few months ago, I went to another university campus where the human resources team had asked if I would help six of them develop their communication skills. And it was one of those days. Sometimes people in these groups don’t really want to go on a course, they’re very busy, you can get quite a frosty reception because people don’t want any sense of criticism. But on this day I turned up and the sun was shining and I arrived and the head of human resources came up to me, phenomenally friendly, she did everything but hug me. She offered me a drink, she took me inside. She told me a story about one of her kids had dropped ink all over her school uniform before she’d left that morning. She made me feel completely at ease, and I knew instantly it was going to be a great day. And she introduced me to her colleagues, and we all had a chat about worries and what we had to do when we spoke in public. And then I said, “Right guys, it’s time to do it. Let’s each of you, you’ve got a minute or two to prepare, but could you for one minute talk to me about something important that’s going on at work at the moment? And the other five will be your audience. And I will also pull out a camera, and the camera is going to film you just to put you under that little bit of pressure.” We’ll call her Jane, the head of HR. I said, “Jane, would you like to go first?” She said, “No, not really.” So I said, “Go on, you’re the leader here, Jane.” And this is what happened to this charismatic woman. She said, “Well, there are a number of reasons we’re here today, and I’d really … the important thing is the LRUs. And I’m going to talk about the needs of LRUs and what they need …” And she went on like this for a minute, and at the end everyone gave her a little polite round of applause. And I turned to her colleagues and said, “Guys, what is an LRU?” And I got some blank faces and said, “Jane, what is an LRU?” And she went, “Oh, it’s a learning receptor unit.” Now anyone know what a learning receptor unit is? Guys, you are all learning receptor units right now. A learning receptor unit is somebody on a course or a delegate at a talk in the small print in the HR department of this place. And what had happened is Jane had turned from this incredibly charismatic speaker having coffee with me beforehand, but she had failed the coffee shop test. When she was under pressure, she started speaking like some sort of corporate robot. Now I get paid to do some very odd things. And a little before that, I was asked by one of the big transport providers in the country if I’d go and sit in their boardroom where 30 very stern-looking, middle-aged people with laptops and notepads receive presentations of five minutes each from a bunch of very senior engineers. And each engineer is coming in to ask for money for a new project. And this group has to decide. It’s like the gladiators in the amphitheater. That means they get the money and they go on, and that means you have to go and find something else to do. The first guy, call him Jim, wasn’t his name. Jim walks in and he flusters around and he puts up a slide which has got notes and graphs and numbers and charts and God knows what else. And again, I’ll paraphrase, but he stood there and just went, “Well, I’m going to talk about the footbridge. We’ve got to get through a number of — there’s a number of reasons we need it. I’m going to talk about the background. I’m going to give you an introduction to the subject.” And he went on and on. And with about 4.5 minutes gone, he then said, “And what really matters is the type of material we use to build the bridge.” And to be honest, it was beyond me at this point, but it was something steel or aluminium or iron or some choice. And then he finished. And there was an intense debate for about two minutes amongst two of the team, the board of this organization, about which type of metal would be better. And at the end of the session they had a vote. Poor old Jim, he’d asked for a million pounds to keep his team busy building this footbridge. And after the session had finished, I went down to their canteen. I spend a lot of time in coffee shops. And I saw him sitting alone, looking a bit miserable. And I said, mate, do you mind if I just have a quick chat about how it went? So why did you need the footbridge built? And he said, “Because there’s a junction on a bend near this very, very busy transport system, and it sits between the housing estate and the local school. And every morning our CCTV catches kids sprinting across the junction trying to get to school because they haven’t got time to go up the road another half mile to go over the footbridge that’s already there. And we reckon in the last couple of months three kids have almost died. They’ve been inches away from dying. And this footbridge would have saved their lives.” And I said, “Why didn’t you tell them that?” He said, “No, but you have to be more professional than that. You have to go through all the detail.” And this board clearly didn’t have a clue that this was the reason. And they turned down something on the basis of the material he would have used for a footbridge, and they weren’t even engineers, rather than the need to save children’s lives. Again, he’d failed the coffee shop test. And ultimately, the more pressure we are under and the higher the stakes are, be they your friend’s 21st birthday party, be they a job interview where you’re speaking to a panel, be they a TED Talk, where you’ve been planning to get your great idea over to the world for years and years and years, you’ve got to appeal to people’s human side. And what we do in a coffee shop completely naturally is we think about our audience, and we are relevant to them and to their needs. We think entirely about using — we don’t even think about using our natural charisma because it happens. We just appeal to their better nature. We tell them things they think they will enjoy. And that starts with stories. Even the most complicated subjects come to life when we tell a story. And I’m sure recently, all of you are aware of the Post Office scandal that’s gone on in the UK. Everyone know what I’m talking about, and the Horizon software that has ruined the lives of people who were working honestly in post offices, these subpostmasters. You’d think this was news, but actually this has been going on for 20 years. And you know, I like to try and keep up with current affairs, but I couldn’t miss, this thing has been in “Private Eye,” it’s been in Sunday newspapers, it’s gone through the high courts. It’s been inside the papers, but always on a very technical, mathematical, legal basis. All that’s happened in the last two months is there was a TV show about it. But the TV show didn’t focus on the facts and the figures at the beginning anyway. It focused on people, an emotional connection to those people. And we saw how these lives, through storytelling, had been completely and utterly transformed. And within weeks, the Prime Minister is promising hundreds of millions of pounds of compensation without even having a vote in Parliament. That is the power of storytelling. Now I’m not saying the detail doesn’t matter, and some of you, I’m sure, are doing the most phenomenally complex academic subjects that you’re going to need to talk about as you graduate and go into careers. But still, the way you would describe that subject to a friend over a coffee is a brilliant way to introduce it to an audience who may need you to give them a lot of information, but still need to be hooked in, in this busy world where they are so easily distracted. And the coffee shop thing continues again and again and again, it’s a benchmark for everything. When we talk to our friends, we look at the benefits of a problem rather than its features. So I went to the GP some time ago. I’d had a tummy ache that had been going on for days, and I just began to get a bit worried about it. And the GP does what GP’s do and prodded around and asked me questions. It was all a bit mucky. And then typed some stuff into his computer and then looked at me and said, “Mr. Bernstein, I think you’ve got a problem with electrolytes and pathogenic bacteria.” And I can promise you, my sort of mild state of worry turned into complete panic. I can remember the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. I thought, “Oh my God, this is it, I’m finished.” I said, “What does that mean?” And he said, “Well, I think it’s food-related.” And I said, “Well, I’m not going to die of food poisoning?” “No, no, no, I think you’ll be fine by the weekend.” Now, what he had done is used his technical knowledge to give me the facts before he’d actually explained the context and the benefit to me. And had he gone about it the other way and said, “Mr. Bernstein, you’re going to be absolutely fine. I think it’s food-related.” I would have said, “What is it?” He would have told me all about his electrolytes, and I would have been fascinated. But in a coffee shop, the first thing you ask your friend is how they are. And they will either say they’re great or not so great. They won’t go into the technical medical detail, and if they are, you probably wouldn’t be having a coffee with them in the first place. The other thing we do when we go into a coffee shop is we talk about our key message. We talk about the subject. We don’t leave it until 10 minutes before we’re due to leave. We let them know that we’re going to talk about the match, or we ask them if they saw the TV show, or we ask how their date went last night before we get into the minutia of what they might have worn or what they had for their starter. Again, we get to the key message and in my case, the key message is simply that we waste too much time worrying about the symptoms of public speaking worry, which are things like shaking and looking like this and breathing too quickly. And we try and cure those when in fact they’re not the problem. It’s a bit like going to the doctor when you’ve got hay fever and lots of sneezing and saying, “Can you help me?” And he says, “Get a softer tissue.” It doesn’t really stop you sneezing. What you want is the antihistamine. And for public speaking, the antihistamine is your content. And if you talk to a group of people the same way you would talk to a friend, you will find your natural charisma and energy comes to life. You’ll start to move your hands without thinking about it, because that’s what you do when you’re on the telephone to a friend, and you will find that instantly, thinking about those cups of coffee will relax you and make you more confident next time you have to go and speak in public. Thank you very much.

2. 

   10 Jan 2025

   E62 | 演员汤姆·汉克斯(Tom Hanks) 在2023届哈佛大学毕业典礼上的演讲

   Transcript: Now listen, it’s not fair, but please don’t be embittered by this fact. Now, without having done a lick of work, without having spent any time in class, without once walking into that library in order to have anything to do with the graduating class of Harvard, its faculty, or its distinguished alumni, I make a good living playing someone who did. It’s the way of the world, kids. On behalf of all of us who studied for two years at Chabot Community College in Hayward, California, two semesters at California State University, Sacramento, and for 45 years at the School of Hard Knocks earning a Bachelor of Arts degree in one damn thing after another, thank you. I do not — thank you. I don’t know much about Latin. I have no real passion for enzymes and public global policy is something I scan in the newspaper just before I do the Wordle, and yet here I am closing. Closing for Josiah, Pallas, and Vic. Thank you, guys. Some of us here can recite by repetition the preamble to a television show we might have seen five days a week about a strange being from another planet with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men. Superman, who disguised as a mild-mannered reporter for a great metropolitan newspaper—there were many metropolitan newspapers once, and some of them were great—could change the course of mighty rivers and bend steel with his bare hands. He was faster than a speeding bullet. He was more powerful than a locomotive. He was able to leap tall buildings at a single bound, and those are very, very impressive superpowers. No, well, what was most impressive about his powers was how he chose to wield them. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cats were saved from trees, evil-doers were banished to the phantom zone, and the innocent were rescued with reliable and assuring regularity. But in those half hours, which have since grown to many full-length films and multiverses—and God, you kids see them all—was the ongoing struggle for not just the protection and safety of the world, but to the exposing of crooks and their lies to the light of day. Superman, you see, and his proxies of Wonder Woman, Captain America, Black Panther, the Black Widow, and the Fantastic Four—my God, there’s a million of them—are all enmeshed in that never-ending battle for truth, justice, and the American Way. In such a struggle, being a Superman is a plus, even with his one lethal weakness: exposure to chunks of the wreckage of his home planet destroyed by its own hubris and apathy. But hey, there ain’t no Superman, nor anyone else in his Justice League. There’s just us on this planet. Now, on occasions such as this, beware of certain orators who resort to using sage quotations from historical figures, the words of legends of literature and arts, or the name-dropping of famous friends as a claim to some kind of wisdom or super ability. Some people standing at this podium shouldn’t be considered much more than lucky sots who are in the right place at the right time with the right goods and the right attitude. Or, as a man named Marlon Brando once said to me, “Vic, would you pick up that name I just dropped?” “Marlon Brando, would you hold onto it till we’re done? Thank you. Give it back to me at the end. I’m gonna need it back.” Yes, as a man named Marlon Brando once said to me on a message he left in my telephone answering machine, “Tommy, Tommy Hankerchief. This is Marlon Branflakes calling you to ask where you are.” Then later, he told me that when he was a young man and registered for the draft, he filled out the form for his name and age, but when it came to his race, he wrote “human.” “For Tommy, Tommy, what are we all but human?” Yeah, we are all but human. Now, as an armchair historian who reads non-fiction for pleasure, the books divine that there has never been a graduating class that has not faced the greatest challenges of all time. That come every spring, the maelstrom of history swirls so wildly that no matter the year, era, or generation, there is always an atmospheric river of events that makes right now the hinge upon which our fate is turning. And we here in the stands look at you all in the caps and gowns and we hope, “Oh, at last, help is on the way.” Somewhere matriculating today is a man of iron, a woman of steel, a superhuman just in the nick of time. Now, this is not because we have failed in our duties or are completely spent. We have done some very super things over our generations. It’s because we are all in a cage match, mixed martial arts battle royale with agents of hubris, apathy, intolerance, and braying incompetence—the malevolent equals to imperial storm troopers, Lex Luthor, and Loki. We could all use a superhero right now. Now, looking out at the flowing colors of Harvard yard, the goofy big hands that clap, the balls that represent the world on which we live, the streamers in the piñatas, and someone’s very big face rendered large out there amongst. There she is. That’s it. That’s it. We see beings who are young and restless with energy and imagination, with righteousness and enlightenment and joy and compassion, and we celebrate your proclaimed wisdom and your work ethic. We know no one is faster than a speeding bullet. To our shame, every day, to our shame. But we can still summon more power than a locomotive. We are able to leap tall buildings at a single bound if we have the right gizmo. We can change the course of mighty rivers if such a thing should be done, and we make machines that bend steel as easily as using our bare hands. We know that to each other, we often seem like strange beings from another planet in habits and tastes and languages with holidays and foods we eat and names of the days of the week, all varying. We all have special powers and abilities far beyond the reach of other mortals. Some of us can repair a screen door with ease. Some of us can take care of a five-year-old kid and a toddler for 24 hours a day and never stop loving them. Some of us make sense of physics and economics and global policy. Some of us survive somehow on minimum earnings. Some of us graduate from colleges by years of lockdowns in Zooms. Now these achievements are all stellar, even though, yes, we are all but human. Still, we’d like to look up in the sky and see not a bird, not a plane, but well, someone who is young and strong and super who will fight the never-ending battle for truth, for justice, and for the American way. Someone who will take on that work. Now, all right. Now, a kooky uncle once said to me, “We should all stay in school as long as we can because the moment we graduate, we have to work every day for the rest of our lives.” Now, that uncle was a bit bitter, but he was not wrong. We all get to complain about the man and we all have debts we gotta pay, and we’re all entitled to a day off to lay about. But the work that is called for that we must do has no expiration date. It is the construction of our more perfect union, and that job will never ever be completed. It’s one that requires rigorous attention, unfading wherewithal, and all hands. The work is the keeping of the promises of our promised land, the practice of decency, the protection of freedom, and the promotion of liberty for all with no exceptions. And man, that takes on a lot of work. It’s work that is done on multiple job sites every single day. You can call each of them the battle for truth, justice, and the American way. Yes, the American way. The American way is exampled in both plain sight and in subtle attitudes, in moments of routine exchange, and in broad expectations. It’s in places of historic weight and import and in the small spaces in which we all stand. The American way could be exampled when you respect the law and the rights of all. Because if you don’t, who will? When your food is brought to you, when you thank the server. Because if you don’t, who will? When you pick up the litter that has missed the recycling bin. Because if you don’t, who will? When you vote your conscience and make sure your neighbor has the opportunity to do the same with theirs. Because if you don’t, who will? When you make good on your victories and learn from your losses because both are the results of proud and noble efforts. If you don’t, who will? The American way was first proposed not far from here when subjects of a king demanded more control over their lives than that dictated by someone else’s definition of providence. At the same time, women had no legal recourses. An entire segment of the population had been taken from their homeland and slaved to work as chattel regardless of their age, and the original inhabitants of this continent from sea to shining sea—the only ones who carried the DNA of America—were considered subhuman. Yet, even with such paradox was written down the how to — how to establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure those blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity. No matter, as time and conflict and the institutions of our democracy would determine, our gender, our race, our creed, our color, our chosen deities or who we love for it is our manifest destiny to pursue our own happiness. All of us, no exceptions, are entitled to the inalienable rights of liberty and freedom because we live in the United States of America. The vocabulary of the American way, of the law and the rights we share, is some part philosophical, amusing, some part answering a question with a question, some part trying to bull us all over with your knowledge of Latin. Some part answering the question with a question and the rest is all practical. It’s even physical and it’s certainly tangible. It’s the language of telling the truth. What is truth again in Latin? “Veritas.” Veritas. The language of telling the truth. It is in the vision quest for truth that we look to you newly incorporated members of the Justice League of Avengers to come to the rescue. For the truth to some is no longer empirical. It’s no longer based on data, nor common sense, nor even common decency. Telling the truth is no longer the benchmark for public service. It’s no longer the salve to our fears or the guide to our actions. Truth is now considered malleable by opinion and by zero-sum endgames. Imagery is manufactured with audacity, with purpose to achieve the primal task of marring the truth with mock logic to achieve, with fake expertise, with false sincerity, with phrases like “I’m just saying,” “Oh, well,” “I’m just asking,” “I’m just wondering.” Now, literally, you cannot believe your eyes, and your ears will help others lie to you. Someone will report the world to you exactly as you wish it were, full of alternative facts, of conjured narrative meant to buttress the status quo and deny its offenses, or rejig the rules and muddy the playing field, depending on where one is on the food chain and the moral spectrum. The American way can be demonstrated without ceasing as a perpetual prayer by every big shot and any plain Jane or Joe Blow. Justice can be an everyday pursuit, case by case, with both lightning speed and the slow inevitable effect of gravity. Truth, though, oh, truth, truth feeds up in the high country, as elusive as serenity, yet as certain as the North Star and the Southern Cross. Truth is mined at the intersections of our chosen behaviors and our fixed habits in our personal boundaries. Truth has synonyms such as honesty, honor, transparency, and yet the common practice of so many is to play fast and loose with those very words. To create enemies, to claim victimhood, to raise the mediocre into merit, and to make cloudy a vista that is actually crystal clear. Likewise, truth has opposites. Omission: “You don’t need to know that.” Distraction: “That’s not the real story, this is.” Opinion masquerading as clairvoyance: “Oh, here’s what is gonna happen.” And influence peddling: “A lot of people are saying.” Truth, too, has a nemesis equal to any colored kryptonite. That lack of feral hound is never too far off the path, in the weeds and in the shadows, lying in wait for the lethal opportunity to bring truth down. And that beast is indifference, which will make moot all the permanence found in truth. Indifference will rust away the promise of our promised land. The Consequences of Indifference Propaganda and boldface lies will erode over time. Idolatry and imagery lose luster and effect. Ignorance and intolerance can be replaced by experience in the wink of an eye, but indifference will narrow the vision of America’s people and make dim the light of Lady Liberty’s symbolic torch. Indifference makes citizens into indentured servants, held in labor by the despots and tyrants whose default setting is cynicism who outlaw dissent and ban art and dialogue and books, who grab power any way they can, enabled by the subterfuge of their co-conspirators, rewarding their rationale of the complicit and surging into the vacuum caused by the indifference of a people who have been made weary by struggle. So weary that they lose hope and are left to yearn to be saved by the fiction of superheroes. Every day, every year, and for every graduating class, there is a choice to be made. It’s the same option for all grownups who have to decide to be one of three types of Americans: those who embrace liberty and freedom for all, those who won’t, or those who are indifferent. Only the first do the work of creating a more perfect union and nation indivisible. The others get in the way. In the never-ending battle you have all officially joined as of today, the difference is in how truly you believe and in how vociferously you promote and how tightly you hold to the truth that is self-evident. That, of course, we are all created equally, yet differently. And, of course, we are all in this together. If we do the work, justice and the American way are within our grasp, no matter our gender, our faith, our station, our heritage or genetic makeup, the shade and hue of our flesh, or the continental birthplace of our ancestors. Why is that truth so hard for some to accept, much less respect? If you live in the United States of America, the responsibility is yours, ours. The effort is optional, but the truth — the truth is sacred, unalterable, chiseled into the stone of the foundation of our republic. All of us are able, none of us are super. We are the Americans. Liberty and justice is for us all because, yes, we have specific names and we have lived every year of our ages, but when it comes to race, we are all uniquely, magnificently, simply human, or so said Marlon Brando to Tommy Tommy Handkerchief. May goodness and mercy follow you all the days — all the days of your lives. Godspeed. Congratulations.

3. 

   8 Jan 2025

   E61 | 计算工程科学家凯伦·威尔克斯(Karen Willcox)：数字孪生如何帮助我们预测未来？

   Transcript: All right, well, let’s start with an easyquestion. How many of you are wearing a Fitbit or an Apple Watch or some otherkind of health tracking device? And how many of you have got a smartphone withyou here today? Maybe I should say how many of you have not? The fact that so many of us have thesetechnological marvels in our pockets or on our body is a sure sign of therevolution that’s taking place in computing over the last decade. And I wantyou to think with me for a second about the elements of that revolution. So firstoff, are the data. These devices are collecting dataabout our health, our movements, our habits, and more. And what’s reallyimportant is that those data are not generic population data, but they’re datathat are personalized to us, each as an individual. Second, andjust as important, are the models. Insidethese devices are very powerful mathematical and statistical models. Some ofthese models are learned entirely from data, perhaps a machine-learning modelthat has learned to classify whether I’m running or walking or biking orsleeping. Some of these models are based in physics, such as a physiologicalmodel that describes the equations that represent cardiac function or circadianrhythm. And now where things get really interesting is when we start to put thedata and the models together. Mathematically, this is known as data assimilation. So we have data and we have models. With dataassimilation, we start updating the models as new data are collected from thesystem. And we don’t do this update just once, but we do it continually. So asthe system changes, as I get older and my circadian rhythm or as my cardiacfunction is not what it once was, the new data is collected and the models areevolving and following along with me. Now that data assimilation is really importantbecause it’s what personalizes the models to me. And that then gets us tothe fourth element, which is the element of prediction. Nowthat I have these personalized models, it’s so powerful because I can now getpredictions or recommendations that are tailored to me as an individual andthat are tailored to my dynamically evolving state over my life. So… what I’m describing, this working togetherof data and models, is likely very familiar to all of you because it’s beendriving your personal choices in retail and entertainment and wellness for manyyears. But what you might not know is that a similar revolution has been takingplace in engineering systems. And in engineering systems, thestory is much the same. We have data and we have increasing amounts of data assensors have become smaller, lighter, cheaper, and more powerful. In engineering, we also have models. Our modelsare usually grounded in physics. These models represent the governinglaws of nature. They’re powerful models that let us predict how anengineering system will respond. What you see up here on the slide is a pictureof the unmanned aircraft that I have in my research group that we use for agreat deal of our research. And for this aircraft, we have powerful finiteelement models that let us predict how the aircraft structure will respondunder different conditions. So these models let us answer questions like,will the structure of the aircraft hold together on takeoff if I design it inthis way? Or, what happens if the aircraft wing gets damaged and I continue tofly it aggressively? Will the aircraft hold together? And again, just like theFitbit and the smartphone example, we can put the data and the models togetherto build a personalized model of the engineering system, a personalized modelof the aircraft. And we call this personalized model a digital twin. So what is adigital twin? It is a personalized, dynamicallyevolving model of a physical system. And I want you to think about the digitaltwin of my aircraft. So as I create that digital twin, I’m going to becollecting data from the sensors on board the aircraft. I’m going to becollecting data from inspections I might make of the aircraft, and I’m going tobe assimilating that data into the models. And what’s really important is that I’m notbuilding a generic model of just any old Telemaster aircraft. I am building apersonalized model of the very aircraft that is right now sitting in my garagedown the road in South Austin. And so that digital twin will capture thedifferences, the variability from my aircraft to say, my neighbor’s aircraft. And what’s more, that digital twin will not bestatic. It’s going to change as my aircraft ages and degrades and gets damagedand gets repaired. We will be assimilating data all the time and the digitaltwin will follow the aircraft through its life. So this is incredibly powerful.I want you to imagine now that you’re an airline or maybe in a few years’ time,you’re an operator of a fleet of unmanned cargo delivery drones, and imaginethat you would have a digital twin like this for every vehicle in your fleet. And think about what that would mean for yourdecision making. You could make decisions about when to maintain any oneaircraft, depending on the particular evolving state of that aircraft. Youcould make decisions about how to optimally fly an aircraft on any given day,given the health of the aircraft, given the mission needs, given theenvironmental conditions. It would really let you optimally manage that fleetof aircraft. So this idea of a digital twin is pretty neat.The term “digital twin” was coined in 2010 in a NASA report. But theidea, this idea of a personalized model combining models and data, is mucholder. And many people point to the Apollo program as beingone of the places where digital twins were first put into practice. So in the Apolloprogram, back in the ’60s and the ’70s, NASA would launchApollo spacecraft up into space, and they would also deploy a simulator, avirtual model on the ground in Houston, to follow along on the mission. And now this became very important and it becamevery useful in the Apollo 13 mission. And again, perhapsyou all know the story because we’ve seen the movie. In the Apollo 13 mission,the spacecraft suffered a malfunction. It was very badly damaged. It becamestranded up in space. And so the story goes that NASA were able totake the data from the real aircraft, the physical twin stuck up in space, feedit into the simulator and to the virtual models on the ground in Houston, dothe data assimilation, dynamically evolve the simulator so now that itrepresented the conditions of the damaged spacecraft and then use thatsimulator to run predictions and ultimately guide the decisions that broughtthe astronauts back home safely. So more than50 years later, this idea now has a really great name, the name of digitaltwins. And what’s really exciting is that it’s moving well beyondjust aerospace engineering. So in our engineered world, we’re starting to seedigital twins of bridges and other civil infrastructure for structural healthmonitoring and predictive maintenance. We’re starting to see digital twins ofbuildings for energy efficiency, digital twins of wind farms to increaseefficiency and to reduce downtime. In the natural world, there’s a lot of interestin creating digital twins of forests, farms, ice sheets, coastalregions, oil reservoirs and even talk of trying to create a digital twin ofplanet Earth. And in the medical world, there’s a great deal of interest increating digital twins to help guide medical assessment, diagnosis, personalizedtreatment and in silico drug testing. So, many, many exciting potential applicationsof digital twins. But now, I would not like you to leave my talk today thinkingthat all of this is a reality, that we can create digital twins today of allthose complex systems. It’s still beyond reach to create a digital twin of anentire aircraft. It’s still beyond reach to create a digitaltwin of a cancer patient or of planet Earth. Creating digital twins of thesevery, very complex systems is very, very challenging. And let’s think for a minute why it’s sochallenging. So one reason it’s very difficult is because of the scales thatthese systems cross. If you think about my aircraft, damage at the microscopiclevel on the material on the wing of the aircraft translates across scale toimpact the way the vehicle flies at the vehicle level. In medicine, we all knowthat, again, changes at the very fine level, at the molecular or the cellularlevel in our bodies translate across scales to have impacts on us at the systemlevel, at the human level. And computational models that resolve all ofthese scales, from the microscale all the way up to the system level, arecomputationally intractable. We can’t solve them even with today’ssupercomputing power. But then you might say, “OK, well what about the data?You said we had a lot of data. Can we not just learn digital twins from data?” So yes, we live in an era of big data and wehave a lot of data often for our systems. But when it comes to these verychallenging, complex systems in engineering, in science and in medicine, thedata by themselves are almost never enough. The data are almost always verysparse in both space and in time. The data are almost always noisy and they’reindirect. As an engineer, I can almost never measure whatit is I want to know. If I want to know about the health on the structureinside my aircraft wing, I can’t just break it open and take a look. I amlimited to those few sensors that are on the surface of the wing, taking thosemeasurements and then trying to guess. More than guess, trying to infer what’shappening inside the wing. The same is true in medicine. A medical practitionercan’t open somebody up to take a look at an organ. Again, we are limited tosparse, noisy and indirect observations taken from the outside to try to inferwhat’s going on. So then you might say, “Well, we just have towait a few years because sensing technology will get better and better andbetter.” And that’s true. Maybe, maybe then we’ll have enough data to really beable to characterize what is going on inside these very complex systems. Buteven that’s not enough, because all that would tell us is what’s happening now.And remember, we have to do more than that. We have to be able to predict whatmight happen in the future if we take different actions. So we’re always goingto need the models. So this sounds like a huge challenge, and indeedit is. But the good news is that we have a lot of hope for addressing thischallenge. And a big part of this hope rests on this notion of predictivephysics-based models. These are the models that encode the governing lawsof nature that let us make predictions — predict how a cancer tumor might growor how a cancer tumor might respond to radiotherapy treatment, or predict howan Antarctic ice sheet might flow under different future temperature scenarios. And bringing these predictive physics-basedmodels together with powerful machine learning, with scalable methods and datasimulation and optimization and decision making, and with high performancecomputing, that’s the realm of the interdisciplinary field of computationalscience. And that’s the focus of the Oden Institute here at UT Austin, where webring together faculty from 24 different departments across campus to tacklethese kinds of challenging problems. So I’m going to close by provoking yourimagination and I hope you’re excited, like I am, about the idea of a digitaltwin. And maybe as you go home, you can look around and think, “Oh, what if wehad a digital twin of that?” But let’s look at some examples of some of thereally exciting areas where digital twins could make a difference in tacklingsome of the biggest problems facing society. And as I go through this, you’llalso see some of the really exciting research that we have going on here at UT Austin. So the first area is space systems. You probablyall know, we are at the dawn of a new space era. It is so excitingand it’s so exciting for our students. And what’s even more exciting is thatcentral Texas is right in the midst of that new era. So digital twins clearlyhave a role to play in managing the health and the operations of space systems,of launch vehicles, of satellites. You can see here, this is some of the workthat I’m doing together with my colleagues from the Cockrell School, RenatoZanetti and Srinivas Bettadpur. Digital twins also have a big role to play intracking and managing space objects and space debris. And here at UT Austin, wehave one of the world’s leading experts in this area, that’s Moriba Jah. Moribais building digital twins for space domain awareness. If we think about the environment andgeosciences, again, digital twins could play such a role here. This picture yousee, Omar Ghattas’s, high-resolution, physics-based model of the Antarctic icesheet, which is put together with observational data of all different kinds tounderstand what might be going on, to help guide decisions about where to drillice cores, where to take observations, and ultimately to inform thedecision-making around our future climate. We see also here the work of ClintDawson in building a digital twin of a coastal area, here, the GulfCoast, again combining powerful physics models with all the different kinds ofdata and here, focused on making storm surge modeling for hurricanes even moreaccurate, again, in support of critical decision-making. And then in medicine, I think it’s pretty clearthat digital twins have such a role to play in realizing the promise ofpersonalized medicine. Here we see some of the work of Michael Sacks from ourOden Institute Willerson Center, in moving towards patient-specific,personalized heart care, and the work of Tom Yankeelov and DavidHellmuth, also in the Oden Institute, also working with Dell Medical Schooland part of biomedical engineering, in building digital twins for cancerpatients. So I hope that helps to, as I said, provoke yourimaginations to think about what might be possible. I personally could not bemore excited about a future world where digital twins are enabling safer, moreefficient engineering systems. They’re enabling a better understanding of thenatural world around us and they’re enabling better medical outcomes for all ofus as an individual. Thank you.

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