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.
The same committee that gathered five years ago to produce the highly-influential “Rising Above the Gathering Storm” National Academies study has reassembled to revisit the report and has come to even gloomier conclusions about the state of our innovation ecosystem. They’ve released a new version of the report at a congressional briefing today.
This is good timing by the committee as Congress tries to figure out a strategy to pass the America COMPETES Act reauthorization this session and preserve increases for NSF, NIST and DOE in the approps process. It’s looking increasingly likely that any chance for passage for COMPETES will have to come during the lame-duck session, after the November elections. But even then it’s unclear how it will move forward, especially if the House changes hands (as is looking increasingly likely). We’ll know a little more soon. In any case, the report paints a pretty bleak picture of where we stand now, and hopefully that resonates with Members. I’d recommend at least looking through the executive summary and the list of factoids. Sobering stuff.
Here’s a snippet from the executive summary:
So where does America stand relative to its position of five years ago when the Gathering Storm report was prepared? The unanimous view of the committee members participating in the preparation of this report is that our nation’s outlook has worsened. While progress has been made in certain areas—for example, launching the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy—the latitude to fix the problems being confronted has been severely diminished by the growth of the national debt over this period from $8 trillion to $13 trillion.
Further, in spite of sometimes heroic efforts and occasional very bright spots, our overall public school system—or more accurately 14,000 systems—has shown little sign of improvement, particularly in mathematics and science. Finally, many other nations have been markedly progressing, thereby affecting America’s relative ability to compete effectively for new factories, research laboratories, administrative centers — and jobs. While this progress by other nations is to be both encouraged and welcomed, so too is the notion that Americans wish to continue to be among those peoples who do prosper.
The only promising avenue for achieving this latter outcome, in the view of the Gathering Storm committee and many others, is through innovation. Fortunately, this nation has in the past demonstrated considerable prowess in this regard. Unfortunately, it has increasingly placed shackles on that prowess such that, if not relieved, the nation’s ability to provide financially and personally rewarding jobs for its own citizens can be expected to decline at an accelerating pace. The recommendations made five years ago, the highest priority of which was strengthening the public school system and investing in basic scientific research, appears to be as appropriate today as then.
The Gathering Storm Committee’s overall conclusion is that in spite of the efforts of both those in government and the private sector, the outlook for America to compete for quality jobs has further deteriorated over the past five years.
The Gathering Storm increasingly appears to be a Category 5.
The White House announced today the creation of Change the Equation, a 501(c)3 organization born from last year’s Educate to Innovate initiative. Change the Equation is a response by 100 CEOs to the Administration’s call to action on STEM education.
Change the Equation will take proven, privately-funded education programs and replicate them at 100 high needs schools around the country. Some of the areas listed in a press statement are “allow more students to engage in robotics competitions, improve professional development for math and science teachers, increase the number of students that take and pass rigorous Advanced Placement (AP) math and science courses, increase the number of teachers who enter the profession with a STEM undergraduate degree and provide new opportunities to traditionally underrepresented students and underserved communities.” It will also “score” each state’s STEM education to help target the areas in need of improvement for member companies.
The CEOs’ effort is in response to President Obama’s speech last year at the National Academy of Science. Specific programs being rolled out under Change the Equation can be found here. More information on the companies involved is available here.
The PCAST met yesterday for the September meeting and the morning was devoted to network and information technology. PCAST member David Shaw and CCC Chair Ed Lazowska are co-chairing a PCAST report on the Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) program.
Dr. Wing used three stories to illustrate her talk: Google, model checking, and machine learning. She pointed out that the Google story shows the immense importance of federal funding of basic research and its potential payoff. She cautioned that basic research can take decades to payoff but when it does it can do so exponentially, which was also a point in the model checking story. She also said it was important to remember that innovation cannot always be planned. Machine learning was used to illustrate the importance of computing in all of the science disciplines and in every day life. This is why agencies other than NSF and DARPA need to start investing in basic computing research to address their sciences’ needs going forward.
Dr. Wing also talked about potential areas in computing such as cloud computing, cyberphysical systems, molecular machines, and socially intelligent computing. When questioned, she stated that cybersecurity needs a great deal of attention because of the implications to national security and the societal impacts of failure in that space.
Education was also a big theme and the focus of many questions from PCAST members. Dr. Wing said that computer science is part of STEM and that all future generations need to know computational thinking. She pointed out that there are computer science standards available from the CSTA and ACM. She also mentioned that NSF is involved in the effort to overhaul the CS AP course.
Now that it’s August and Members of Congress have, for the most part, gone home to their districts or states for some much-needed campaigning (though they may be coming back early), we thought we’d take the opportunity to take a look at one particularly key area of interest to the computing research community that’s generated much attention this session: cyber security. Recent months have seen a number of well-publicized cyber security proposals emerge, both in Congress and in the Administration – comprehensive bills introduced by Sens. Rockefeller (D-WV) and Snowe (R-ME), and Sen. Lieberman (I-CT); more focused bills in the House, and a variety of reports and proposals from GAO, the White House and federal agencies. In this post, we’ll try to bring you up to speed on the legislative proposals that impact cyber security research – what’s in them, who’s behind them, and where they’re headed. For a broader look at some of these bills (i.e., a look beyond the research provisions), others have done some great analysis. In particular the folks at USACM and Bruce Schneier have some very thoughtful commentary.
In this 111th session of Congress, there have been a number of bills introduced that would impact cyber security research specifically in a meaningful way, including two passed by the House Science and Technology Committee that were ultimately folded in one bill –the “Cyber Security Enhancement Act of 2010”. But three bills – all in play in the Senate – have really garnered the most attention and are worth a closer look: A bill introduced by Lieberman (S. 3480), who is Chair of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, the Senate version of the America COMPETES Reauthorization (S. 3605) introduced by Sen. Rockefeller, Chair of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, and another, more comprehensive bill introduced by Sen. Rockefeller and Republican Sen. Olympia Snowe, (S. 773). Of these, COMPETES would seem the most likely to pass – but with appropriations looking like it will end in one giant omnibus bill, any of these proposals might sneak to passage tucked in between the pages of the 1000-page+ must-pass bill.
The Lieberman bill has gained some notoriety in the popular press because it would grant the president a so-called ‘kill switch’ to the Internet. Besides the power to bring us back to the Stone Age, this bill has a number of provisions for computing research. Firstly, the bill creates a National Center for Cybersecurity (NCC) within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The bill also initializes a plan for the NCC to develop age-appropriate curriculums in cyber safety, security, and ethics for k-university students. The NCC would be in charge of all cybersecurity research DHS, with specific projects in a variety of areas ranging from secure domain name addressing to the protection of privacy and civil liberties in cybersecurity technology. The bill would authorize research at the agency, but assigns no specific dollar amounts.
The Lieberman bill seems to have a benign impact on computing research. While the bill will focus DHS’s cybersecurity research efforts, the changes made are operational, not pedagogical. Both the type of R&D supported by DHS, and the amount of money for it will likely remain constant. It is neither clear what age-appropriate cybersecurity education is nor clear if this provision will affect this community.
The America COMPETES Reauthorization act of 2010, introduced by Senator Rockefeller, is also getting a lot of attention. The bill’s main goal is to reauthorize an increase in funding for three key science agencies – the National Science Foundation, National Institute of Standards and Technology, and Department of Energy’s Office of Science – and programs aimed at increase U.S. student participation in science and engineering disciplines. For a variety of reasons, the bill’s path to passage was more than a little rocky. The Senate bill includes some additional language focused on cyber security research at NSF – language that’s identical to the research-oriented portions contained in Rockefeller’s comprehensive cyber security bill, S. 773 (baring the omission of some legislation on federally funded cybersecurity competitions).
Both COMPETES and Rockefeller-Snowe describe the focus areas of future cybersecurity research, and the need for secure coding instruction. Universities receiving over one million dollars in grant funding from the NSF will be audited, a year after either bills enactment, on their secure coding education practices. Each bill calls for ‘cybersecurity testbeds capable of realistic modeling of real-time cyber attacks and defenses’, and appends a sentence to the NITRD act on developing standards and guidelines for cybersecurity. Both bills provide some specific reauthorizations for cyber security research at NSF over the next five years, including:
-$800 million for NSF Computer And Network Security Grants
-$270 million for Computer and Network Security centers
-$200 million for Computing and Network Security Capacity Building Grants
-$35 million for Scientific and Advanced Technology Act Grants
-$120 million for Traineeships in Graduate Computer and Network Security Research
There is both “good” and “worrisome” in both bills. On the “good” side, the funding authorizations demonstrate a significant commitment to cyber security research over the next five years. On the “worrisome” front, the secure coding language has raised concerns in the computing research community and is sufficiently vague to be scary. It is not obvious which ‘graduates have a substantial probability of developing software after graduation’. Does this legislation apply to entire computer science departments? Does it apply specifically to software engineers? The proposals don’t specify the punishment for not teaching secure coding. All told, the impact of this proposal on departments is not clear, and will depend largely on either bills implementation.
Given that both the Senate and the House have versions of the COMPETES Reauthorization, it’s a good bet that some version of the bill will see passage before the end of the session. The House included no specific cyber security language in its version of the bill, so it will be up to the Senate conferees to insist on inclusion of their cyber security language for it to make it in the final package. We’ll keep you up to date on all the developments there, and we’ll also keep you up to date on other developments in the cyber security research scene.
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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:
Revisiting “The Gathering Storm”…now Approaching Cat 5 Status
/In: Funding, FY11 Appropriations, R&D in the Press /by Peter HarshaThe same committee that gathered five years ago to produce the highly-influential “Rising Above the Gathering Storm” National Academies study has reassembled to revisit the report and has come to even gloomier conclusions about the state of our innovation ecosystem. They’ve released a new version of the report at a congressional briefing today.
This is good timing by the committee as Congress tries to figure out a strategy to pass the America COMPETES Act reauthorization this session and preserve increases for NSF, NIST and DOE in the approps process. It’s looking increasingly likely that any chance for passage for COMPETES will have to come during the lame-duck session, after the November elections. But even then it’s unclear how it will move forward, especially if the House changes hands (as is looking increasingly likely). We’ll know a little more soon. In any case, the report paints a pretty bleak picture of where we stand now, and hopefully that resonates with Members. I’d recommend at least looking through the executive summary and the list of factoids. Sobering stuff.
Here’s a snippet from the executive summary:
Here’s the full report: Rising Above the Gathering Storm Revisited (pdf)
White House Announces STEM Education Organization
/In: Computing Education /by MelissaNorrThe White House announced today the creation of Change the Equation, a 501(c)3 organization born from last year’s Educate to Innovate initiative. Change the Equation is a response by 100 CEOs to the Administration’s call to action on STEM education.
Change the Equation will take proven, privately-funded education programs and replicate them at 100 high needs schools around the country. Some of the areas listed in a press statement are “allow more students to engage in robotics competitions, improve professional development for math and science teachers, increase the number of students that take and pass rigorous Advanced Placement (AP) math and science courses, increase the number of teachers who enter the profession with a STEM undergraduate degree and provide new opportunities to traditionally underrepresented students and underserved communities.” It will also “score” each state’s STEM education to help target the areas in need of improvement for member companies.
The CEOs’ effort is in response to President Obama’s speech last year at the National Academy of Science. Specific programs being rolled out under Change the Equation can be found here. More information on the companies involved is available here.
PCAST Focuses on Computing at Meeting
/In: General /by MelissaNorrThe PCAST met yesterday for the September meeting and the morning was devoted to network and information technology. PCAST member David Shaw and CCC Chair Ed Lazowska are co-chairing a PCAST report on the Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) program.
Jeannette Wing, former acting director of NSF’s Computing and Information Sciences and Engineering directorate, gave a presentation on computer science. Dr. Wing spoke to the economic and social impacts of computer science and pointed out how far computing has come in such a short time.
Dr. Wing used three stories to illustrate her talk: Google, model checking, and machine learning. She pointed out that the Google story shows the immense importance of federal funding of basic research and its potential payoff. She cautioned that basic research can take decades to payoff but when it does it can do so exponentially, which was also a point in the model checking story. She also said it was important to remember that innovation cannot always be planned. Machine learning was used to illustrate the importance of computing in all of the science disciplines and in every day life. This is why agencies other than NSF and DARPA need to start investing in basic computing research to address their sciences’ needs going forward.
Dr. Wing also talked about potential areas in computing such as cloud computing, cyberphysical systems, molecular machines, and socially intelligent computing. When questioned, she stated that cybersecurity needs a great deal of attention because of the implications to national security and the societal impacts of failure in that space.
Education was also a big theme and the focus of many questions from PCAST members. Dr. Wing said that computer science is part of STEM and that all future generations need to know computational thinking. She pointed out that there are computer science standards available from the CSTA and ACM. She also mentioned that NSF is involved in the effort to overhaul the CS AP course.
A webcast of the meeting can be found here.
Cybersecurity R&D in review
/In: Policy /by Brian MosleyNow that it’s August and Members of Congress have, for the most part, gone home to their districts or states for some much-needed campaigning (though they may be coming back early), we thought we’d take the opportunity to take a look at one particularly key area of interest to the computing research community that’s generated much attention this session: cyber security. Recent months have seen a number of well-publicized cyber security proposals emerge, both in Congress and in the Administration – comprehensive bills introduced by Sens. Rockefeller (D-WV) and Snowe (R-ME), and Sen. Lieberman (I-CT); more focused bills in the House, and a variety of reports and proposals from GAO, the White House and federal agencies. In this post, we’ll try to bring you up to speed on the legislative proposals that impact cyber security research – what’s in them, who’s behind them, and where they’re headed. For a broader look at some of these bills (i.e., a look beyond the research provisions), others have done some great analysis. In particular the folks at USACM and Bruce Schneier have some very thoughtful commentary.
In this 111th session of Congress, there have been a number of bills introduced that would impact cyber security research specifically in a meaningful way, including two passed by the House Science and Technology Committee that were ultimately folded in one bill –the “Cyber Security Enhancement Act of 2010”. But three bills – all in play in the Senate – have really garnered the most attention and are worth a closer look: A bill introduced by Lieberman (S. 3480), who is Chair of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, the Senate version of the America COMPETES Reauthorization (S. 3605) introduced by Sen. Rockefeller, Chair of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, and another, more comprehensive bill introduced by Sen. Rockefeller and Republican Sen. Olympia Snowe, (S. 773). Of these, COMPETES would seem the most likely to pass – but with appropriations looking like it will end in one giant omnibus bill, any of these proposals might sneak to passage tucked in between the pages of the 1000-page+ must-pass bill.
The Lieberman bill has gained some notoriety in the popular press because it would grant the president a so-called ‘kill switch’ to the Internet. Besides the power to bring us back to the Stone Age, this bill has a number of provisions for computing research. Firstly, the bill creates a National Center for Cybersecurity (NCC) within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The bill also initializes a plan for the NCC to develop age-appropriate curriculums in cyber safety, security, and ethics for k-university students. The NCC would be in charge of all cybersecurity research DHS, with specific projects in a variety of areas ranging from secure domain name addressing to the protection of privacy and civil liberties in cybersecurity technology. The bill would authorize research at the agency, but assigns no specific dollar amounts.
The Lieberman bill seems to have a benign impact on computing research. While the bill will focus DHS’s cybersecurity research efforts, the changes made are operational, not pedagogical. Both the type of R&D supported by DHS, and the amount of money for it will likely remain constant. It is neither clear what age-appropriate cybersecurity education is nor clear if this provision will affect this community.
The America COMPETES Reauthorization act of 2010, introduced by Senator Rockefeller, is also getting a lot of attention. The bill’s main goal is to reauthorize an increase in funding for three key science agencies – the National Science Foundation, National Institute of Standards and Technology, and Department of Energy’s Office of Science – and programs aimed at increase U.S. student participation in science and engineering disciplines. For a variety of reasons, the bill’s path to passage was more than a little rocky. The Senate bill includes some additional language focused on cyber security research at NSF – language that’s identical to the research-oriented portions contained in Rockefeller’s comprehensive cyber security bill, S. 773 (baring the omission of some legislation on federally funded cybersecurity competitions).
Both COMPETES and Rockefeller-Snowe describe the focus areas of future cybersecurity research, and the need for secure coding instruction. Universities receiving over one million dollars in grant funding from the NSF will be audited, a year after either bills enactment, on their secure coding education practices. Each bill calls for ‘cybersecurity testbeds capable of realistic modeling of real-time cyber attacks and defenses’, and appends a sentence to the NITRD act on developing standards and guidelines for cybersecurity. Both bills provide some specific reauthorizations for cyber security research at NSF over the next five years, including:
-$800 million for NSF Computer And Network Security Grants
-$270 million for Computer and Network Security centers
-$200 million for Computing and Network Security Capacity Building Grants
-$35 million for Scientific and Advanced Technology Act Grants
-$120 million for Traineeships in Graduate Computer and Network Security Research
There is both “good” and “worrisome” in both bills. On the “good” side, the funding authorizations demonstrate a significant commitment to cyber security research over the next five years. On the “worrisome” front, the secure coding language has raised concerns in the computing research community and is sufficiently vague to be scary. It is not obvious which ‘graduates have a substantial probability of developing software after graduation’. Does this legislation apply to entire computer science departments? Does it apply specifically to software engineers? The proposals don’t specify the punishment for not teaching secure coding. All told, the impact of this proposal on departments is not clear, and will depend largely on either bills implementation.
Given that both the Senate and the House have versions of the COMPETES Reauthorization, it’s a good bet that some version of the bill will see passage before the end of the session. The House included no specific cyber security language in its version of the bill, so it will be up to the Senate conferees to insist on inclusion of their cyber security language for it to make it in the final package. We’ll keep you up to date on all the developments there, and we’ll also keep you up to date on other developments in the cyber security research scene.