As noted over at the CCC blog, the presentations during the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology issued Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) report roll out are available in online videos. These eight short videos are all worth watching but three are of particular note.

Tom Kalil, Deputy Director for Policy at the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), discusses the importance of IT R&D from the perspective of the Administration. He talks about the huge impact that IT has on the economy as a whole as well as on productivity and on other scientific disciplines. He also discusses the unbreakable connections between IT and national priorities such as health care, education, energy and national security.

Tom Leighton, Professor of Applied Mathematics, MIT, and Co-Founder and Chief Scientist of Akamai Technologies, discusses his experience doing high-risk, basic research for DARPA and how it led to the founding of a company and better Internet reliability for consumers and government.

Robert Atkinson, President of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, discusses many aspects of the report including the concerns that IT R&D needs to be more than supercomputers and that a portion of the money included as IT R&D is really going toward NIT infrastructure instead of research. He also makes note that there are 20 new billion dollar industries related to IT created in the last couple of decades but that we are not investing enough in basic research to compete going forward.