Two years after Arati Prabhakar was appointed director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, she has set the US on a path to regulating artificial intelligence. Just six months after taking up her new role in 2022, the IEEE Fellow has advised President Joe Biden on drafting an executive order to achieve this goal.
Prabhakar is the first woman and first person of color to serve as Director of OSTP, and she has also broken glass ceilings at other agencies: She is the first woman to lead the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
Initially, she didn’t think about working in the public sector — it wasn’t until she became a program manager at DARPA in 1986 that she truly understood what she could accomplish as a government employee, she says.
“What I loved about[civil service]is the opportunity to shape policy on a scale that’s truly unparalleled,” she says.
Prabhakar’s passion for addressing societal challenges through the development of technology has led him to hold leadership positions at companies such as Raychem (now part of TE Connectivity), Interval Research Corporation and US Venture Partners. In 2019, he helped found Actuate, a Palo Alto, California-based nonprofit organization that aims to develop technology to address climate change, data privacy, access to healthcare and other pressing issues.
“I really valued seeing science, technology and innovation from different perspectives,” she says, “but what I loved most was public service, because of the impact and influence it can have.”
Discover your passion for electrical engineering
Prabhakar, who was born in India and raised in Texas, said she decided to pursue a STEM career after classmates told her as a child that women shouldn’t work in science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields.
“Having my parents say that made me want to pursue it further,” she said, adding that her parents, who wanted her to become a doctor, encouraged her to pursue engineering.
After earning his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Texas Tech University (Lubbock) in 1979, he moved to California to continue his education at Caltech. He received his master’s degree in electrical engineering in 1980 and his doctorate in applied physics in 1984. His doctoral thesis focused on elucidating the effects of deep defects and impurities in semiconductors on device performance.
After earning her PhD, wanting to have a bigger impact with her research than academia would allow, she applied for a policy fellowship at the American Association for the Advancement of Science to work in Congress’ Office of Technology Assessment, which examines issues related to new and expanding technologies, evaluates their impacts, and studies whether new policies are needed.
“We have big goals for the future, such as mitigating climate change, and science and technology must contribute to achieving them.”
“I wanted to share my research into semiconductor manufacturing processes with others,” Prabhakar said. “I found that exciting and valuable.”
She was accepted into the program and relocated to Washington, D.C. During her one-year fellowship, she conducted research on microelectronics research and development for the Research and Technology Subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, which oversees STEM-related issues, including education, policy, and standards.
There, she worked with people who were passionate about public service and government, but she says she didn’t find the same feeling until she joined DARPA. As a program manager, Prabhakar founded and led several projects, including the Microelectronics Office, which invested in the development of new technologies in areas such as lithography, optoelectronics, infrared imaging and neural networks.
In 1993, she says, an opportunity came up that she couldn’t refuse: President Bill Clinton nominated her to head the National Institute of Standards and Technology. NIST develops technology guidelines and conducts research to develop tools that improve the quality of life for Americans. At age 34, she became the first woman to lead the agency.
She led NIST during the Clinton Administration before moving to the private sector, serving as CTO of Raychem, an appliance parts manufacturer in Menlo Park, Calif., and president of Interval Research, a private research and development lab in Palo Alto, Calif. She spent the next 14 years in the private sector, primarily as a partner at U.S. Venture Partners in Menlo Park, where she invested in semiconductor and clean technology startups.
In 2012, she returned to DARPA as the agency’s first female director.
“I held my breath when I got the call offering me the job,” says Prabhakar. “It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to make a difference at the agency I loved early in my career, and it turned out to be just as rewarding an experience as I had hoped it would be.”
For the next five years, she led the agency, focusing on developing better military systems and next-generation artificial intelligence, while also working to create solutions in social sciences, synthetic biology and neurotechnology.
Under her leadership, DARPA established the Biological Technologies Office in 2014 to oversee basic and applied research in areas including gene editing, neuroscience and synthetic biology. The office launched the Pandemic Prevention Platform and helped fund the development of mRNA technology, which is being used in the Moderna and Pfizer coronavirus vaccines.
She left the firm in 2017 and moved back to California with her family.
“When I left this organization, what stuck out to me was that the United States has the most powerful innovation engine in the history of the world,” Prabhakar said, “and at the same time, what stuck out to me were the big ambitions for the future that science and technology have to help achieve, including mitigating climate change.”
To that end, she helped found Actuate in 2019 and served as the nonprofit’s CEO until she became OSTP’s director in 2022.
She said that while it wasn’t a career she was passionate about, she realised that the role engineering, science and technology play in the world has “the power to change how the future unfolds”.
U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm (left) and Arati Prabhakar announce that Department of Energy researchers achieved a nuclear fusion breakthrough in 2022.
Olivier D’Uglier/AFP/Getty Images
World-leading AI regulation
When Biden asked Prabhakar if she would take the OSTP job, she didn’t hesitate to respond, “When can I get started?”
“I was excited to work under the President because he sees science and technology as essential components in building a bright future for the country,” Prabhakar said.
One month after taking office, the generative AI program “ChatGPT” was launched and became a hot topic.
“AI was already being used in many areas, but suddenly it’s becoming visible to everyone in a way that had never been seen before,” she says.
Regulating AI has become a priority for the Biden administration because of the breadth and power of the technology and the speed at which it is developing, she said.
Prabhakar led the writing of President Biden’s Executive Order on the Development and Use of Safe, Secure, and Trusted Artificial Intelligence. Signed on October 30, 2022, the order outlines goals such as protecting consumers and their privacy from AI systems, developing a watermarking system for AI-generated content, and preventing intellectual property theft resulting from the use of generative models.
“This executive order is arguably the most significant achievement on AI,” Prabhakar said. “It’s a tool that mobilizes the executive branch[of the U.S. government]to recognize that these systems pose safety and security risks, but they also create great opportunities. This executive order has put the government on a very constructive path toward regulation.”
Meanwhile, the US has spearheaded a UN resolution to make AI regulation an international priority, which the UN adopted in March this year. In addition to defining regulations, the UN aims to use AI to advance the achievement of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.
“There’s still a lot of work to be done,” Prabhakar said, “but I’m really pleased with what the president has accomplished and I’m really proud to have been a part of it.”
