PCAST Report on the Federal Networking and IT R&D Program Released

On September 12, 2007, In Funding, People, Policy, Research, By Peter Harsha

The long-awaited follow-up review of the NITRD program — the first since the 1999 PITAC report Investing in Our Future — has been released and is available from the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy. It’s called Leadership Under Challenge: Information Technology R&D in a Competitive World (pdf). We’ve discussed in depth a draft version of the report previously, but this final version is far more fleshed out.
We’ll have more after we’ve had a chance to look at it more thoroughly. But if you don’t have time to read the whole thing, you can just check out the back cover, upon which are printed the committee’s four overarching recommendations:

To sustain U.S. leadership, the Federal government should:
  • Address the demand for skilled IT professionals by revamping curricula, increasing fellowships, and simplifying visa processes.
  • Emphasize larger-scale, longer-term, multidisciplinary IT R&D and innovative, higher-risk research
  • Give priority to R&D in IT systems connected with the physical world, software, digital data, and networking
  • Develop and implement strategic and technical plans for the NITRD Program

    • Also check ACM’s Technology Policy Blog where Cameron Wilson has more on IT education and workforce coverage in the report.
    Update: (9/14/07) — PCAST IT Subcommittee Co-Chair (and CRA Chair) Dan Reed, one of the principal authors of Leadership Under Challenge, has posted his take on the new report. Definitely worth a read.
    Previously:

  • PCAST Approves Draft IT R&D Recommendations
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    DDR&E Strategic Plan Released

    On September 6, 2007, In Misc., Policy, Research, Security, By MelissaNorr

    The Department of Defense Research and Engineering released its 2007 Strategic Plan this week. It’s pretty high-level and doesn’t appear to contain any surprises. The DDR&E strategy focuses on countering four different types of threats with research and engineering efforts: traditional, irregular, catastrophic, and disruptive. The plan acknowledges that the DOD has a pretty good handle on dealing with the traditional (ie, Cold War-oriented) threats, but has much work to do to counter the other three. As a result, DDR&E is shifting its priorities slightly to focus more effort on addressing irregular threats (urban operations, war on terror, etc), catastrophic threats (WMDs), and disruptive technologies (“those that could render our most significant weapons systems less effective”).
    Fortunately, the Department still sees both basic research and research in information technologies as critical to all four efforts. In its list of “enabling technologies that should receive the highest level of corporate attention and coordination,” information technology, persistent surveillance technologies, networks and communications, software research, “organization, fusion and mining data,” cognitive enhancements, robotics, autonomous systems technologies, and large data set analysis tools all figure prominently. In fact, IT figures in almost all the DOD’s “desired capabilities” in the plan.
    The whole plan can be found here and is worth a read.

     
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