John Schwartz of the New York Times has an interesting piece today on the rise in complexity of networked applications and the risks that complexity poses. Headlined Who Needs Hackers?, the piece makes the point that the biggest threat to these systems isn’t malicious users, but complexity itself. Understanding how these giant interconnected systems work […]
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 […]
The Department of Defense Research and Engineering released its 2007 Strategic Plan this week. Its pretty high-level and doesnt 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 […]
The National Coordinating Office for Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) — the ~$3 billion, 14 agency program that constitutes the federal effort in IT research and development — is looking for comment by the end of September on its draft plan for advanced networking research and development. Here’s the notice: We are […]
President Bush yesterday presented awards to the 2005 and 2006 National Medal of Science and Technology Recipients, and in his remarks reiterated his support for a strong federal role in support of fundamental research. There’s no guarantee, of course, that the President’s strong support now will help alleviate the coming appropriations meltdown (that could threaten […]
The National Science Foundation has published two reports on American research and the decline of journals publishing it. The reports show that beginning in 1992 journals began to publish less American based research with a corresponding rise in research from Europe and Asia being published. In 1992, the share of American research published in journals […]
NSFs CISE Directorate awarded the first two Distinguished Education Fellow grants today to Dr. Owen Astrachan and Dr. Peter Denning. The awards are part of the CISE Pathways to Revitalized Undergraduate Computing Education (CPATH) program that CISE began last year. New CISE Assistant Director Jeannette Wing said that CISE supports the revitalization of undergraduate education […]
CRA participated once again in the Coalition for National Science Funding’s annual Science Exposition on Capitol Hill last week and it was a great success. The event, a science fair for Congress and staff, had 35 booths manned by researchers representing universities and scientific societies featuring some of the important research funded by the National […]
The National Research Council of the National Academies of Science released a new report on cyber security and research called “Toward a Safer and More Secure Cyberspace.” The report is available for free online at the National Academies Press. The report lists three broad categories that lack of cyber security falls into: First is the […]
The Chronicle of Higher Education (sub. reqd.) has a great article on the future of the Internet and the Global Environment for Network Innovations or GENI. It contains quotes from many participants of the new Computing Community Consortium (CCC) that CRA helped launch. The article talks about the problems with the current state of the […]
