The final PCAST report, “Designing a Digital Future,” appears essentially unchanged from the report presented to the committee last month and which we’ve detailed previously. The committee reviewed $4 billion, 14-agency Networking and Information Technology and Research and Development (NITRD) program and found that while it handles coordination of the agency programs “very successfully,” it’s not particularly effective at providing vision or strategic leadership for the federal effort. Among its recommendations, PCAST calls for the creation of a new standing committee, housed in some unspecified place in the Administrative branch and comprised of experts in IT from academia and industry, to help guide NITRD and provide strategic advice for the program. PCAST also found that current budget reporting mechanisms in use by NITRD don’t accurately detail the federal investment in IT R&D. As we noted in that previous post, much of what gets reported by participating NITRD agencies as “IT R&D” is actually “IT that’s used in R&D in other fields,” a fact which leads to a substantial overstatement of the true federal investment in IT research. A review of NIH’s investment, for example, found that of the over $1 billion the NIH reported to NITRD as IT R&D for FY09, only 2 to 11 percent of it could actually be described as true IT research. The rest was more accurately described as IT infrastructure used to support research in other fields.
PCAST’s report also recommends significant new investments in research areas that will advance national priorities — like health, energy, transportation and education — as well as research aimed at advancing specific research frontiers in IT. Our colleague Erwin Gianchandani has a detailed look at some of the research areas recommended by PCAST over at the CCC blog.
One other interesting recommendation – in light of the recent news of a Chinese supercomputer heading the list of the world’s fastest – is the panel’s call for the U.S. to abandon the competition to stay atop the Top500 rankings based on FLOPS (floating point operations per second). Calling it “an arms race we don’t really find beneficial,” PCAST member David Shaw derided FLOPS as a metric for high-performance computing. Shaw and PCAST NITRD Working Group Co-Chair Ed Lazowska (who also Chairs CRA’s Computing Community Consortium) both noted the finishing at the top of the Top500 is exceptionally expensive and doesn’t necessarily guarantee you’ll build a machine that’s particularly useful. Far more valuable a priority, Shaw noted, is to invest in research that could allow for a leap-frog of current high-performance computing technology. “We need to make sure we don’t allow procurement to crowd out research funding,” he said.
Administration Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra ran the lively briefing, calling on fellow advisors Vivek Kundra, the administration’s Chief Information Officer; Phil Weiser, Senior Advisor for Technology and Innovation to the National Economic Council Director; and Tom Kalil, Deputy Director for Policy of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, to testify to the impact of IT on government, on the U.S. economy, and on making progress on national priorities like energy, transportation, health and national security.
Kalil summed up the Administration’s position on why IT R&D is so important with four succinct points:
The IT revolution is far from over — there are many core challenges in computing still to addressed that have the potential to revolutionize further our economy, our standard of living, our national defense;
Information and communication technologies (ICT) are accelerating the pace of discovery in more and more disciplines; in fact, some disciplines like astronomy are becoming information-based fields;
ICT has had and continues to have a huge impact on our economy – a point discussant Robert Atkinson of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation amplified later in the briefing, noting that ITIF research showed that IT’s contribution to the U.S. economy is worth $2 trillion annually, and that IT jobs between 1999-2008 grew 4 times faster than non-IT jobs;
And, ICT has a role in every one of our national priorities, including health, education, energy, transportation, open government.
Kalil also noted the reasons why it’s important the federal government continues to invest substantially in IT research. The payoff from the federal investment in IT research historically has been dramatic – every billion-dollar subsector of the IT economy bears the stamp of federal support for research. Investment in basic research isn’t attractive to industry for a host of different reasons, not the least of which being that because of the nature of fundamental research, it’s nearly impossible for firms to capture all the benefit from their research investment. He also pointed out that many areas of IT research are critical to the missions of government agencies. And he noted that an investments in university research not only often produce good ideas, but just as importantly, they produce people – the next generation of scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs who will power our future.
In all, the briefing was a great showcase for the esteem in which the Administration holds IT research and its contributions to the nation. As federal budgets tighten, its crucial that U.S. policymakers understand that there are areas in which the U.S. must be allowed to maintain its science leadership, and it appears that the message that IT is one of those areas has gotten through to PCAST and to the White House.
The briefing is available as a webcast and well worth watching. The two “independent” discussants on the panel – Atkinson and Tom Leighton, founder of Akamai Technologies – are particularly worth a look (towards the last third of the broadcast).
In the coming year, we’ll keep an eye on how the recommendations of the committee fare and have all the details here.
Steven Aftergood, of the always excellent Secrecy News blog, notes the release of a new report by the JASON panel, an influential, independent advisory committee for the Department of Defense that focuses on issues in science and technology, on the “Science of Cyber Security.” Specifically, DOD asked the panel to examine the theory and practice of cyber security, and “evaluate whether there are underlying fundamental principals that would make it possible to adopt a more scientific approach.”
The committee has released their report on the issue (the Federation of American Scientists managed to obtain a copy (pdf)), have concluded that there is a science of cyber security, but it “seems underdeveloped in reporting experimental results, and consequently in the ability to use them.” The primary recommendation of the committee is to have the DOD sponsor “multiple cyber-security science based centers and projects within universities and other research centers.” The programs should have “a long time horizon and periodic reviews of accomplishments.”
Centers, the panel believes, have several attractive features:
they give the sponsors access to the best ideas and people;
they give the sponsor a chance to bias the work towards their versions of common problems;
there is an opportunity for these centers and programs to leverage a unique collection of resources internal to the DOD, including defensive data and experience from running internal networks.
The centers would be different than DARPAs projects in that the centers “would be expected to make steady progress on a broad set of topics, rather than limit themselves to revolutionary ideas or to try to solve the latest cyber-security crisis.”
Centers would also act as connecting points for the software industry, which would accelerate the translation of new ideas into useful tools for developers. The panel believes that this would correct a long-standing deficiency wherein some very sophisticated approaches to assessing and reasoning about the security of current systems are not available in the form of developer tools, perhaps because there’s insufficient market for the private development of the tools.
A number of representatives from academia, industry and government briefed JASON on the issues, including CRA’s Government Affairs Chair Fred Schneider.
JASON reports often form the basis of action within DOD on S&T matters, and there’s no reason to suggest that the recommendations in this report won’t get consideration. Whether the investment in centers actually happens is, of course, also dependent on the DOD’s budget situation, which is in a bit of flux at the moment until Congress hammers out a final agreement on an FY 11 budget and the Administration releases its plan for FY 12. But it wouldn’t be surprising to see an effort to incorporate the reports recommendations in future DOD budgets.
In any case, the report is well-written and well worth a read.
President Obama yesterday invoked the specter of a “Sputnik moment” in competitiveness facing the country and re-emphasized his commitment to invest in innovation, infrastructure and education during a speech in North Carolina.
Here’s the meat:
You go to Shanghai, China, and they’ve built more high-speed rail in the last year than we’ve built in the last 30 years. The largest private solar research and development facility in the world was recently opened in China -– by an American company. Today China also has the fastest trains and the fastest supercomputer in the world.
In 1957, just before this college opened, the Soviet Union beat us into space by launching a satellite known as Sputnik. And that was a wake-up call that caused the United States to boost our investment in innovation and education -– particularly in math and science. And as a result, once we put our minds to it, once we got focused, once we got unified, not only did we surpass the Soviets, we developed new American technologies, industries, and jobs.
So 50 years later, our generation’s Sputnik moment is back. This is our moment. If the recession has taught us anything, it’s that we cannot go back to an economy that’s driven by too much spending, too much borrowing, running up credit cards, taking out a lot of home equity loans, paper profits that are built on financial speculation. We’ve got to rebuild on a new and stronger foundation for economic growth.
We need to do what America has always been known for: building, innovating, educating, making things. We don’t want to be a nation that simply buys and consumes products from other countries. We want to create and sell products all over the world that are stamped with three simple words: “Made In America.” That’s our goal.
…
That’s why even as we scour the budget for cuts and savings in the months ahead, I will continue to fight for those investments that will help America win the race for the jobs and industries of the future -– and that means investments in education and innovation and infrastructure. I will be fighting for that.
…
We’ve got to have a long-term vision about where we want to be 10 years from now, 20 years from now, 30 years from now.
You can read the entire speech here and watch it here.
The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is seeking nominations, including self-nominations, for visionary leaders to serve a three-year term on the CCC Council. The Council chair is currently Ed Lazowska and Susan Graham is the vice-chair.
Council members are appointed by CRA and NSF for staggered three-year terms. In the aggregate, the Council must reflect the full breadth of the computing research community – research area, institutional character, etc. Details on the role of CCC, as well as the current composition of the Council, may be found on the CCC web page. The CCC is funded by NSF under a cooperative agreement with CRA.
Please send suggestions, together with the information below, to Eric Grimson (welg at csail dot mit dot edu) by December 15th. This committee’s recommendations will serve as input to CRA and NSF, who are responsible for making the final selection.
1. Name, affiliation, and email address of the nominee.
2. Research interests.
3. Previous significant service to the research community and other relevant experience, with years it occurred (no more than *five* items).
4. A brief biography or curriculum vitae of the nominee.
5. A statement from the nominee of less than 1 page, supporting his or her nomination by describing his or her ideas for, and commitment to, advancing the work of the CCC in engaging broader communities, finding wider funding sources, and encouraging new research directions. Remember that the CCC needs truly visionary leaders — people with lots of great ideas, sound judgment, and the willingness to work hard to see things to completion.
The CCC is charged with mobilizing the computing research community to answer these questions by identifying major research opportunities for the field, and by creating venues for community participation in this process. The CCC supports these efforts through advocacy with federal agencies, through visioning activities such as workshops, through arranging plenary talks on key topics at major venues, and through other community building activities.
The two co-Chairs of the President’s “National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform” — a bi-partisan committee charged by the President with coming up with solutions to the “fiscal challenges” the nation faces over the medium and long term — set off quite a kerfuffle today by releasing a set of draft recommendations that call for up to $200 billion in cuts to federal spending by 2015 (bringing spending down to 22 percent of GDP), reforms to the tax system and federal budget process, and bringing solvency to the Social Security system.
However, the two co-Chairs — former Sen. Alan Simpson (R-WY) and former Clinton Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles — also emphasized that any plan also had to protect “key investments” in infrastructure, education and R&D. One recommendation of the chairs is to establish a “cut-and-invest committee” to do two things:
“Cut red tape and inefficient spending that puts a drag on the economy and job creation.”
“Invest in education, infrastructure, and high-value R&D.”
(You can see a copy of the co-Chairs draft slides here and an “illustrative list” of cuts here.)
Today’s release is being treated as a “Chairman’s Mark” that has not yet been approved by the full 18-member committee. The final report may not receive the full support of the committee, but if it receives the support of at least 14 members, Democratic and Republican House and Senate leaders have promised to give the plan the commission recommends an up-or-down vote. And having such a prominent effort highlight the importance of continued support for R&D, even in a brutal fiscal environment, would be a big help to our arguments.
But, that noted, there are already a lot of people very unhappy with the recommendations. The unions are already thanking the co-Chairs for telling the American worker to “drop dead,” because of the reforms proposed to social security. House Speaker Pelosi and Sen. Minority Whip Durbin have already called the proposed discretionary cuts “unacceptable.” And, just looking through the illustrative list, there are a lot of sacred cows being gored.
So, it’s possible much of this is dead on arrival. But, even so, it will likely provide good kindling for moderates and conservatives looking to make hard choices for deficit reduction. Spending will get cut next Congress. It’s nice for supporters of science funding to have the fiscal commission on its side, but when the unions and other large interest groups start yelling about their programs getting cut, the science community needs to be equally vocal in making the case for protecting R&D.
The full report will come out in December, and much like the Gathering Storm report set playing field for R&D funding debate, this will probably set the playing field for the budget debate, so we’ll have all the details.
The Chronicle of Higher Education has a great piece today describing the importance of an education that includes computational thinking, and lamenting the fact that more students aren’t becoming computer scientists. The whole piece is worth reading, but here’s a great snippet from the conclusion, which encapsulates much of the message groups like Computing in the Core and the CS Education Week effort are trying to get across to education policymakers everywhere:
Computer science exposed two generations of young people to the rigors of logic and rhetoric that have disappeared from far too many curricula in the humanities. Those students learned to speak to the machines with which the future of humanity will be increasingly intertwined. They discovered the virtue of understanding the instructions that lie at the heart of things, of realizing the danger of misplaced semicolons, of learning to labor until what you have built is good enough to do what it is supposed to do.
I left computer science when I was 17 years old. Thankfully, it never left me.
The President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) today approved a draft review of the federal government’s Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) program in which they call for significant new investment in federal IT research support, the establishment of a standing committee of networking and IT specialists to oversee the federal effort, and the establishment of a new, publicly-accessible, detailed database on federal IT research spending.
PCAST’s congressionally-mandated review of the 14 agency, $4 billion a year NITRD program, found the program “hugely successful” at enabling discovery at all fields of science and driving innovation and economic competitiveness, according to Ed Lazowska, who co-chaired a 14 person subcommittee of IT experts who assisted with the report. (Lazowska is a professor at the University of Washington and also chairs CRA’s Computing Community Consortium). However, the review found several issues with the current NITRD program.
While there are several agencies that clearly understand the importance of fundamental computing research to their agency missions — Lazowska cited the Department of Defense as one that definitely grasped how IT figures in to a great number of the agency’s desired “critical capabilities” — many others still don’t. Some of this can be seen in the way agencies report their IT research spending levels, mistaking investments in IT infrastructure as investments in IT research. A review by the subcommittee of the funding levels for “IT research” reported by the National Institutes of Health ($1.2 billion in FY 10), for example, showed that true IT research accounted for only 2 – 11 percent of the total. And NIH isn’t alone. “The NITRD [budget] crosscut significantly overstates the total federal investment,” Lazowska said.
The review also found that while the National Coordination Office for IT, the “home” of NITRD, does a good job of handling the coordination of all the various agency efforts, there’s very little emphasis on providing vision or leadership for the program. The PCAST report calls for the establishment of a “standing committee” composed of experts in IT to help guide the program — to identify new areas of research and to oversee the current programs. This sounds very much like the former President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC), which was disbanded under President Bush and whose responsibilities were given to PCAST.
The draft PCAST report also apparently calls for the establishment of a new database that would be highly detailed and publicly accessible that tracked federal investments in IT research across agencies. The creation of such a database, Shaw said, would avoid misclassification in the budget crosscut and provide policymakers with better information, as well as allow researchers a better understanding of the different opportunities and problems faced by the various mission agencies.
The report also calls for new IT research initiatives in three key areas of priority: health care, energy and transportation, and cyberinfrastructure. The committee didn’t release details on the extent of the new initiatives, however. The report calls out the need for new research in high performance computing (and recommends getting away from using FLOPs as a metric for success), privacy and confidentiality, human-computer interactions, large scale data analytics, and cyber physical systems.
The committee approved the draft report by unanimous voice vote. Lazowska and his committee still need to make final edits to the report before its release by PCAST.
PCAST members today also heard a number of reports on issues of broader interest to the science and engineering community. National Academy of Engineering President Chuck Vest summarized the recent release of the Academy’s update to the Rising Above the Gathering Storm report, noting that, despite some progress, America’s global competitiveness is even more at risk than it was when they released the original report.
Al Shaffer, Deputy Director of the DOD Defense Research and Engineering office, told the committee that basic research at DOD is healthier than its been in many years, noting that 6.1 funding is up over 18 percent since FY 2008. However, Michael Gregg, a member of the JASONs advisory committee for DOD contradicted that conclusion somewhat by summarizing a recent report by the committee that found much of DOD’s 6.1 efforts broken — significant basic research funding actually supports applied research, the work is good but incremental, and the common management of 6.1-6.3 research is bad practice. We’ll have more coverage of the DOD research issues, and whether things have changed for the better in computer science research at DOD, in a future blog post.
We’ll also have all the details of PCAST’s review of NITRD once its finalized and released. For now, you can watch a webcast of the meeting archived here.
Numerous news reports suggest that China’s Tianhe-1 supercomputer will top the newest ranking of the world’s fastest supercomputers when the list is released tomorrow. It’s not the first time that a non-U.S. machine has led the rankings — the Japanese NEC Earth Simulator led the list as recently as November 2004 — but it does signal that China’s long-term commitment to IT research is beginning to pay serious dividends. From the New York Times coverage:
Over the last decade, the Chinese have steadily inched up in the rankings of supercomputers. Tianhe-1A stands as the culmination of billions of dollars in investment and scientific development, as China has gone from a computing afterthought to a world technology superpower.
“What is scary about this is that the U.S. dominance in high-performance computing is at risk,” said Wu-chun Feng, a supercomputing expert and professor at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. “One could argue that this hits the foundation of our economic future.”
Just another reminder that we can’t assume that the U.S. will always be the home of innovation. Our competitors are increasingly capable, increasingly committed, and investing the resources that make them attractive to the world’s best talent. There’s a lotwe can doto stay competitive, but a sustained commitment to research should be at the top of the list….
ACM and the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) today released an exhaustive report on the state of CS education at the K-12 level and their conclusion is…well, it’s not good. The computing community used the occasion to announcing a new coalition, called Computing in the Core, targeted at addressing the problem.
My colleague Erwin Gianchandani over at the CCC blog beat me to the post so I’ll just point you in that direction for more information. There is also a good blog post on this at Education Week which you can find here.
The National Research Council today released its long-awaited, long-delayed evaluations of U.S. doctoral programs in 62 different disciplines. The Computing Research Association released the following statement regarding the evaluation:
As an organization representing more than 200 academic departments of computer science, computer engineering, and related fields, CRA commends the National Research Council for undertaking its extensive and statistically novel evaluation of doctoral programs at U.S. universities and colleges nationwide.
However, CRA has serious concerns about the accuracy and consistency of the data being used in the evaluation of the Computer Science discipline.
CRA has identified a number of instances in which data were reported under different assumptions by institutions, leading to inconsistent interpretation of the associated statistical factors.
CRA has further identified a number of instances where the data is demonstrably incorrect – sometimes very substantially – or incorrectly measures the intended component.
CRA is pleased that the NRC acknowledges there are errors in the data used to evaluate computer science departments and that, in the words of NRC Study Director Charlotte Kuh, “There’s lots more we need to look at for computer science before we really get it right.”
CRA will continue to work closely with its member departments and the NRC to help correct these errors and determine more suitable data sources for the evaluation.
About CRA. The Computing Research Association seeks to strengthen research and advanced education in computing and allied fields. It does this by working to influence policy that impacts computing research, encouraging the development of human resources, contributing to the cohesiveness of the professional community and collecting and disseminating information about the importance and the state of computing research. For more, see https://cra.org.
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White House Offers Strong Show of Support for PCAST IT R&D Findings
/In: Events, Policy, Research /by Peter HarshaThe Nation’s CTO and CIO joined other key White House advisors at a briefing today to announce the release of the President’s Council of Advisors for Science and Technology (PCAST) report on the state of federal IT research and development and offered a strong words of support for the role of information technology in driving the economy, enabling the sciences and accelerating the pace of discovery, and addressing national priorities.
The final PCAST report, “Designing a Digital Future,” appears essentially unchanged from the report presented to the committee last month and which we’ve detailed previously. The committee reviewed $4 billion, 14-agency Networking and Information Technology and Research and Development (NITRD) program and found that while it handles coordination of the agency programs “very successfully,” it’s not particularly effective at providing vision or strategic leadership for the federal effort. Among its recommendations, PCAST calls for the creation of a new standing committee, housed in some unspecified place in the Administrative branch and comprised of experts in IT from academia and industry, to help guide NITRD and provide strategic advice for the program. PCAST also found that current budget reporting mechanisms in use by NITRD don’t accurately detail the federal investment in IT R&D. As we noted in that previous post, much of what gets reported by participating NITRD agencies as “IT R&D” is actually “IT that’s used in R&D in other fields,” a fact which leads to a substantial overstatement of the true federal investment in IT research. A review of NIH’s investment, for example, found that of the over $1 billion the NIH reported to NITRD as IT R&D for FY09, only 2 to 11 percent of it could actually be described as true IT research. The rest was more accurately described as IT infrastructure used to support research in other fields.
PCAST’s report also recommends significant new investments in research areas that will advance national priorities — like health, energy, transportation and education — as well as research aimed at advancing specific research frontiers in IT. Our colleague Erwin Gianchandani has a detailed look at some of the research areas recommended by PCAST over at the CCC blog.
One other interesting recommendation – in light of the recent news of a Chinese supercomputer heading the list of the world’s fastest – is the panel’s call for the U.S. to abandon the competition to stay atop the Top500 rankings based on FLOPS (floating point operations per second). Calling it “an arms race we don’t really find beneficial,” PCAST member David Shaw derided FLOPS as a metric for high-performance computing. Shaw and PCAST NITRD Working Group Co-Chair Ed Lazowska (who also Chairs CRA’s Computing Community Consortium) both noted the finishing at the top of the Top500 is exceptionally expensive and doesn’t necessarily guarantee you’ll build a machine that’s particularly useful. Far more valuable a priority, Shaw noted, is to invest in research that could allow for a leap-frog of current high-performance computing technology. “We need to make sure we don’t allow procurement to crowd out research funding,” he said.
Administration Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra ran the lively briefing, calling on fellow advisors Vivek Kundra, the administration’s Chief Information Officer; Phil Weiser, Senior Advisor for Technology and Innovation to the National Economic Council Director; and Tom Kalil, Deputy Director for Policy of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, to testify to the impact of IT on government, on the U.S. economy, and on making progress on national priorities like energy, transportation, health and national security.
Kalil summed up the Administration’s position on why IT R&D is so important with four succinct points:
Kalil also noted the reasons why it’s important the federal government continues to invest substantially in IT research. The payoff from the federal investment in IT research historically has been dramatic – every billion-dollar subsector of the IT economy bears the stamp of federal support for research. Investment in basic research isn’t attractive to industry for a host of different reasons, not the least of which being that because of the nature of fundamental research, it’s nearly impossible for firms to capture all the benefit from their research investment. He also pointed out that many areas of IT research are critical to the missions of government agencies. And he noted that an investments in university research not only often produce good ideas, but just as importantly, they produce people – the next generation of scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs who will power our future.
In all, the briefing was a great showcase for the esteem in which the Administration holds IT research and its contributions to the nation. As federal budgets tighten, its crucial that U.S. policymakers understand that there are areas in which the U.S. must be allowed to maintain its science leadership, and it appears that the message that IT is one of those areas has gotten through to PCAST and to the White House.
The briefing is available as a webcast and well worth watching. The two “independent” discussants on the panel – Atkinson and Tom Leighton, founder of Akamai Technologies – are particularly worth a look (towards the last third of the broadcast).
In the coming year, we’ll keep an eye on how the recommendations of the committee fare and have all the details here.
JASON on “Science of Cyber Security,” Recommends New Centers
/In: Policy, Research, Security /by Peter HarshaSteven Aftergood, of the always excellent Secrecy News blog, notes the release of a new report by the JASON panel, an influential, independent advisory committee for the Department of Defense that focuses on issues in science and technology, on the “Science of Cyber Security.” Specifically, DOD asked the panel to examine the theory and practice of cyber security, and “evaluate whether there are underlying fundamental principals that would make it possible to adopt a more scientific approach.”
The committee has released their report on the issue (the Federation of American Scientists managed to obtain a copy (pdf)), have concluded that there is a science of cyber security, but it “seems underdeveloped in reporting experimental results, and consequently in the ability to use them.” The primary recommendation of the committee is to have the DOD sponsor “multiple cyber-security science based centers and projects within universities and other research centers.” The programs should have “a long time horizon and periodic reviews of accomplishments.”
Centers, the panel believes, have several attractive features:
The centers would be different than DARPAs projects in that the centers “would be expected to make steady progress on a broad set of topics, rather than limit themselves to revolutionary ideas or to try to solve the latest cyber-security crisis.”
Centers would also act as connecting points for the software industry, which would accelerate the translation of new ideas into useful tools for developers. The panel believes that this would correct a long-standing deficiency wherein some very sophisticated approaches to assessing and reasoning about the security of current systems are not available in the form of developer tools, perhaps because there’s insufficient market for the private development of the tools.
A number of representatives from academia, industry and government briefed JASON on the issues, including CRA’s Government Affairs Chair Fred Schneider.
JASON reports often form the basis of action within DOD on S&T matters, and there’s no reason to suggest that the recommendations in this report won’t get consideration. Whether the investment in centers actually happens is, of course, also dependent on the DOD’s budget situation, which is in a bit of flux at the moment until Congress hammers out a final agreement on an FY 11 budget and the Administration releases its plan for FY 12. But it wouldn’t be surprising to see an effort to incorporate the reports recommendations in future DOD budgets.
In any case, the report is well-written and well worth a read.
President Continues Push for Innovation
/In: Funding, Policy /by MelissaNorrPresident Obama yesterday invoked the specter of a “Sputnik moment” in competitiveness facing the country and re-emphasized his commitment to invest in innovation, infrastructure and education during a speech in North Carolina.
Here’s the meat:
You can read the entire speech here and watch it here.
CCC Council Nominations Needed
/In: Computing Community Consortium (CCC) /by MelissaNorrThe Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is seeking nominations, including self-nominations, for visionary leaders to serve a three-year term on the CCC Council. The Council chair is currently Ed Lazowska and Susan Graham is the vice-chair.
Council members are appointed by CRA and NSF for staggered three-year terms. In the aggregate, the Council must reflect the full breadth of the computing research community – research area, institutional character, etc. Details on the role of CCC, as well as the current composition of the Council, may be found on the CCC web page. The CCC is funded by NSF under a cooperative agreement with CRA.
Please send suggestions, together with the information below, to Eric Grimson (welg at csail dot mit dot edu) by December 15th. This committee’s recommendations will serve as input to CRA and NSF, who are responsible for making the final selection.
1. Name, affiliation, and email address of the nominee.
2. Research interests.
3. Previous significant service to the research community and other relevant experience, with years it occurred (no more than *five* items).
4. A brief biography or curriculum vitae of the nominee.
5. A statement from the nominee of less than 1 page, supporting his or her nomination by describing his or her ideas for, and commitment to, advancing the work of the CCC in engaging broader communities, finding wider funding sources, and encouraging new research directions. Remember that the CCC needs truly visionary leaders — people with lots of great ideas, sound judgment, and the willingness to work hard to see things to completion.
The CCC is charged with mobilizing the computing research community to answer these questions by identifying major research opportunities for the field, and by creating venues for community participation in this process. The CCC supports these efforts through advocacy with federal agencies, through visioning activities such as workshops, through arranging plenary talks on key topics at major venues, and through other community building activities.
President’s Deficit Commission Co-Chairs Say R&D Investments Should Be Protected
/In: Economic Stimulus and Recovery, Funding, Policy /by Peter HarshaThe two co-Chairs of the President’s “National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform” — a bi-partisan committee charged by the President with coming up with solutions to the “fiscal challenges” the nation faces over the medium and long term — set off quite a kerfuffle today by releasing a set of draft recommendations that call for up to $200 billion in cuts to federal spending by 2015 (bringing spending down to 22 percent of GDP), reforms to the tax system and federal budget process, and bringing solvency to the Social Security system.
However, the two co-Chairs — former Sen. Alan Simpson (R-WY) and former Clinton Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles — also emphasized that any plan also had to protect “key investments” in infrastructure, education and R&D. One recommendation of the chairs is to establish a “cut-and-invest committee” to do two things:
(You can see a copy of the co-Chairs draft slides here and an “illustrative list” of cuts here.)
Today’s release is being treated as a “Chairman’s Mark” that has not yet been approved by the full 18-member committee. The final report may not receive the full support of the committee, but if it receives the support of at least 14 members, Democratic and Republican House and Senate leaders have promised to give the plan the commission recommends an up-or-down vote. And having such a prominent effort highlight the importance of continued support for R&D, even in a brutal fiscal environment, would be a big help to our arguments.
But, that noted, there are already a lot of people very unhappy with the recommendations. The unions are already thanking the co-Chairs for telling the American worker to “drop dead,” because of the reforms proposed to social security. House Speaker Pelosi and Sen. Minority Whip Durbin have already called the proposed discretionary cuts “unacceptable.” And, just looking through the illustrative list, there are a lot of sacred cows being gored.
So, it’s possible much of this is dead on arrival. But, even so, it will likely provide good kindling for moderates and conservatives looking to make hard choices for deficit reduction. Spending will get cut next Congress. It’s nice for supporters of science funding to have the fiscal commission on its side, but when the unions and other large interest groups start yelling about their programs getting cut, the science community needs to be equally vocal in making the case for protecting R&D.
The full report will come out in December, and much like the Gathering Storm report set playing field for R&D funding debate, this will probably set the playing field for the budget debate, so we’ll have all the details.
On the Value of a Computer Science Education
/In: Computing Education, CRA /by Peter HarshaThe Chronicle of Higher Education has a great piece today describing the importance of an education that includes computational thinking, and lamenting the fact that more students aren’t becoming computer scientists. The whole piece is worth reading, but here’s a great snippet from the conclusion, which encapsulates much of the message groups like Computing in the Core and the CS Education Week effort are trying to get across to education policymakers everywhere:
Read the whole thing.
PCAST Calls for More Investment in IT, Advisory Committee, and Better IT Spending Figures
/In: Policy /by Peter HarshaThe President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) today approved a draft review of the federal government’s Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) program in which they call for significant new investment in federal IT research support, the establishment of a standing committee of networking and IT specialists to oversee the federal effort, and the establishment of a new, publicly-accessible, detailed database on federal IT research spending.
PCAST’s congressionally-mandated review of the 14 agency, $4 billion a year NITRD program, found the program “hugely successful” at enabling discovery at all fields of science and driving innovation and economic competitiveness, according to Ed Lazowska, who co-chaired a 14 person subcommittee of IT experts who assisted with the report. (Lazowska is a professor at the University of Washington and also chairs CRA’s Computing Community Consortium). However, the review found several issues with the current NITRD program.
While there are several agencies that clearly understand the importance of fundamental computing research to their agency missions — Lazowska cited the Department of Defense as one that definitely grasped how IT figures in to a great number of the agency’s desired “critical capabilities” — many others still don’t. Some of this can be seen in the way agencies report their IT research spending levels, mistaking investments in IT infrastructure as investments in IT research. A review by the subcommittee of the funding levels for “IT research” reported by the National Institutes of Health ($1.2 billion in FY 10), for example, showed that true IT research accounted for only 2 – 11 percent of the total. And NIH isn’t alone. “The NITRD [budget] crosscut significantly overstates the total federal investment,” Lazowska said.
The review also found that while the National Coordination Office for IT, the “home” of NITRD, does a good job of handling the coordination of all the various agency efforts, there’s very little emphasis on providing vision or leadership for the program. The PCAST report calls for the establishment of a “standing committee” composed of experts in IT to help guide the program — to identify new areas of research and to oversee the current programs. This sounds very much like the former President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC), which was disbanded under President Bush and whose responsibilities were given to PCAST.
The draft PCAST report also apparently calls for the establishment of a new database that would be highly detailed and publicly accessible that tracked federal investments in IT research across agencies. The creation of such a database, Shaw said, would avoid misclassification in the budget crosscut and provide policymakers with better information, as well as allow researchers a better understanding of the different opportunities and problems faced by the various mission agencies.
The report also calls for new IT research initiatives in three key areas of priority: health care, energy and transportation, and cyberinfrastructure. The committee didn’t release details on the extent of the new initiatives, however. The report calls out the need for new research in high performance computing (and recommends getting away from using FLOPs as a metric for success), privacy and confidentiality, human-computer interactions, large scale data analytics, and cyber physical systems.
The committee approved the draft report by unanimous voice vote. Lazowska and his committee still need to make final edits to the report before its release by PCAST.
PCAST members today also heard a number of reports on issues of broader interest to the science and engineering community. National Academy of Engineering President Chuck Vest summarized the recent release of the Academy’s update to the Rising Above the Gathering Storm report, noting that, despite some progress, America’s global competitiveness is even more at risk than it was when they released the original report.
Al Shaffer, Deputy Director of the DOD Defense Research and Engineering office, told the committee that basic research at DOD is healthier than its been in many years, noting that 6.1 funding is up over 18 percent since FY 2008. However, Michael Gregg, a member of the JASONs advisory committee for DOD contradicted that conclusion somewhat by summarizing a recent report by the committee that found much of DOD’s 6.1 efforts broken — significant basic research funding actually supports applied research, the work is good but incremental, and the common management of 6.1-6.3 research is bad practice. We’ll have more coverage of the DOD research issues, and whether things have changed for the better in computer science research at DOD, in a future blog post.
We’ll also have all the details of PCAST’s review of NITRD once its finalized and released. For now, you can watch a webcast of the meeting archived here.
Update: Ed Lazowska has put together a summary of his remarks (pdf) from the meeting.
China Leaps into Supercomputing Lead
/In: American Competitiveness Initiative, R&D in the Press, Research /by Peter HarshaNumerous news reports suggest that China’s Tianhe-1 supercomputer will top the newest ranking of the world’s fastest supercomputers when the list is released tomorrow. It’s not the first time that a non-U.S. machine has led the rankings — the Japanese NEC Earth Simulator led the list as recently as November 2004 — but it does signal that China’s long-term commitment to IT research is beginning to pay serious dividends. From the New York Times coverage:
Just another reminder that we can’t assume that the U.S. will always be the home of innovation. Our competitors are increasingly capable, increasingly committed, and investing the resources that make them attractive to the world’s best talent. There’s a lot we can do to stay competitive, but a sustained commitment to research should be at the top of the list….
Is CS Education Running on Empty?
/In: Computing Community Consortium (CCC), Computing Education, CRA, Diversity in Computing, Events, General /by MelissaNorrACM and the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) today released an exhaustive report on the state of CS education at the K-12 level and their conclusion is…well, it’s not good. The computing community used the occasion to announcing a new coalition, called Computing in the Core, targeted at addressing the problem.
My colleague Erwin Gianchandani over at the CCC blog beat me to the post so I’ll just point you in that direction for more information. There is also a good blog post on this at Education Week which you can find here.
NRC Doctoral Rankings and Computer Science
/In: Misc., R&D in the Press, Research /by Peter HarshaThe National Research Council today released its long-awaited, long-delayed evaluations of U.S. doctoral programs in 62 different disciplines. The Computing Research Association released the following statement regarding the evaluation: