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.
AAAS released a report last week regarding the NSF’sBroadening Participation in Computing (BPC) program and it’s findings are very good news for the computing community. While we have only begun to increase overall enrollments in the field, colleges and universities that are part of the BPC program have begun to increase the number of women and minorities working toward computing degrees. The report talks about all 11 BPC Alliances, including the CRA-W/CDC Alliance and NCWIT in which CRA is heavily involved.
The report is an interesting look into the various BPC efforts and how they have reached students who might otherwise never consider computing as a major or career. It can be downloaded here. There is also a nice write up on the report on the CCC Blog.
This legislation will fund grants to look at the condition of computer science education in each state and come up with a plan specific to each state that will address the specific reforms needed. There would also be a commission to look at computer science education nationally and design teacher preparation programs for colleges and universities.
K – 12 computer science education faces many problems that need to be addressed. The number of courses is declining, standards either do not exist or are far less rigorous in some states than others, there is very little professional development and certification is problematic for computer science teachers. All of this is happening while computing is projected to be one of the fastest growing career paths in the next decade.
More information is available here and a fact sheet on the bill can be found here.
This morning, the House Committee on Science and Technology’s subcommittee on Technology and Innovation held a hearing entitled “Planning for the Future of Cyber Attack Attribution”. The hearing contained a panel of four witnesses — Dr. David Wheeler, a Research Staff Member of the Information Technology and Systems Division at the Institute for Defense Analyses, Mr. Robert Knake an International Affairs Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, Mr. Ed Giorgio, the President and Co-Founder of Ponte Technologies, Mr. Marc Rotenberg, the President of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.
The purpose of the hearing was to “discuss attribution in cyber attacks, and how attribution technologies have the potential to affect the anonymity and privacy of internet users.” Witnesses answered questions ranging from ‘Can attack attribution play a role in deterring cyber attacks?’, to ‘If attribution is futile, what other methods can we use to prevent cyber attacks?’ Witnesses emphasized that while attribution is important, it is not a cure-all, and should only be a part of the security tool box.
They claimed that automatic attack attribution — e.g. having computers automatically determine the origin of an attack — was dangerous because of the possibility for failure and the assignment of wrong identities to attackers. They also, thankfully, mentioned that the internet should not be ‘locked down’, and that different segments should have varying degrees of security and privacy.
The panel stressed that anonymity on the internet conflicts with attribution. A common sentiment was that attribution must not come at the cost of normal legal internet user-privacy. Witnesses went on to posit various methods to create attack attribution without a total loss of privacy.
While the hearing touched on many topics, one of personal interest was the role of the Government in limiting the amount of data that private companies, such as Google, can record on their users. The panel claimed that increased restrictions on private companies would better secure citizens in the face of company breakdown, like the Chinese hack on Google earlier this year.
Peter Lee, current head of DARPA’s innovative Transformational Convergence Technology Office (TCTO), will leave the agency in September to run Microsoft Research’s Redmond Lab. Before joining DARPA, Lee was Chair of the computer science department at Carnegie Mellon University, as well as Chair of CRA (and head of CRA’s Government Affairs Committee). In a press release announcing the move, Lee had this to say about this new opportunity:
“Microsoft Research is an incredible place. The researchers are truly world-class and doing work that is expanding the frontiers of knowledge,” Lee said. “And, while Microsoft Research’s revolutionary advances affect just about every desktop, enterprise and mobile system in the world, what I find most exciting is Microsoft Research’s ability to influence and inspire countless numbers of researchers, students and technology leaders. This unique combination of world-class research, impact on billions of systems and influential thought leadership is simply exhilarating. I can hardly wait to get started.”
Lee did a fantastic job as Chair of CRA, Chair of my Government Affairs Committee, and PI of the Computing Innovations Fellowship program through CCC. We have no doubt he’ll excel at Microsoft just as he has everywhere else he’s been.
It’s not known whether Lee, an avid Pittsburgh Penguin fan, will alter his hockey allegiance with his change in residency to the Pacific Northwest, but we’ll keep you updated.
This week the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report urging the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) to come up with a clear and comprehensive cybersecurity R & D strategy. The report, prepared by request of the House Committee on Homeland Securty, called upon OSTP to show more leadership in the creation of an R & D plan.
There’s been some presscoverage of the report. Here’s a good snippet from Infoweek:
“The report notes that officials within the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy’s Subcommittee on Networking and Information Technology (NITRD) are endowed with a leadership role in terms of coordinating cybersecurity R&D efforts, they haven’t taken advantage of that role. Despite GAO recommendations and responsibilities laid out in legislation, NITRD has never prioritized a national or federal R&D agenda.”
“The report recommends that the White House follow the Bush administration’s National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace, which urged the creation of near-term, mid-term and long-term goals for cybersecurity R&D. The report notes that OSTP is only in the beginning stages of creating such an agenda and updating its 5-year plan for cybersecurity R&D.”
These conclusions about NITRD’s role aren’t surprising. The computing research community has had long-standing concerns about the ability of the NITRD NCO to exercise a leadership role in coordinating the federal IT R&D investment. A big part of that inability to lead comes down to the NCO’s lack of budgetary authority, but that’s a reality of the federal budget process — there’s no way federal agencies will cede control of a piece of their budgets to some central coordinating office (other than OMB). As a result, NITRD becomes less about leadership and coordination and more about agencies reporting what they plan to do and the NCO collecting that information.
It will be interesting to see whether the PCAST’s new look at NITRD, now underway and due in late August or September, will address these cyber security concerns. That review is being shepherded by PCAST members Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, and Shirley Ann Jackson, President of RPI, and driven by a subcommittee led by Ed Lazowska, Chair of CRA’s Computing Community Consortium and professor computer science at University of Washington, and David E. Shaw, head of D.E. Shaw and Co. (We’ll have more on the PCAST study in a later post…).
The federal government’s role in spurring innovation continues to be a hot topic on Capitol Hill.
Last Tuesday, the Senate Committee on Commerce Science, and Transportation’s subcommittee on Competitiveness, Innovation, and Export Promotion heard experts ranging from Aneesh P. Chopra, the Chief Technology Officer and Associated Director for Technology from the Office of Science and Technology Policy to Mr. Rhys L. Williams, President of New World Angels, Inc., talk about the difficulties the U.S. faces in spurring private sector innovation. The hearing, “Innovation in America: Opportunities and Obstacles,” featured two panels testifying on the current challenges in innovation and possible solutions to fix the situation. Both panels agreed that it is imperative the United States create an innovation strategy. They also agreed that innovation in America would be greatly enhanced by better translation of ideas from academia to the private sector.
Then on Thursday, the Coalition for National Science Funding (of which CRA is a member) and the National Science Foundation partnered to put together an event for lawmakers on the House side to highlight some of NSF’s successes in funding basic research. The event, “NSF: Investing in America’s Future,” featured Doctor Erin Santini Bell, Assistant Professor of Civil Engineering at the University of New Hampshire, who has developed “new methods of incorporating structural modeling, instrumentation and non-destructive testing to asses the structural health of bridges”, and Doctor Laura Landweber, Professor of Biology at Princeton University, who studies “the roles of RNA in epigenetic inheritance”, who talked about the importance of NSF in supporting their research.
Attendance was great at both events, despite a packed legislative schedule, which bodes well for those interested in seeing the U.S. stay committed to fostering innovation. Though perhaps a more definitive sign of support was the approval Tuesday by the House Commerce, Justice, Science of a significant increase for the NSF budget in FY11.
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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.
NSF’s Broadening Participation in Computing Program Works
/In: General /by MelissaNorrAAAS released a report last week regarding the NSF’s Broadening Participation in Computing (BPC) program and it’s findings are very good news for the computing community. While we have only begun to increase overall enrollments in the field, colleges and universities that are part of the BPC program have begun to increase the number of women and minorities working toward computing degrees. The report talks about all 11 BPC Alliances, including the CRA-W/CDC Alliance and NCWIT in which CRA is heavily involved.
The report is an interesting look into the various BPC efforts and how they have reached students who might otherwise never consider computing as a major or career. It can be downloaded here. There is also a nice write up on the report on the CCC Blog.
Computer Science Education Act Introduced in House
/In: Computing Education, CRA, Policy /by MelissaNorrHR 5929, the Computer Science Education Act, was introduced in Congress today by Rep. Jared Polis (D-CO). CRA, the Association for Computing Machinery, the Computer Science Teachers Association, the National Center for Women and Information Technology, the Anita Borg Institute, Microsoft, Google, Intel and SAS are all organizations that support this bill to address the concerns regarding computer science education at the K-12 level.
This legislation will fund grants to look at the condition of computer science education in each state and come up with a plan specific to each state that will address the specific reforms needed. There would also be a commission to look at computer science education nationally and design teacher preparation programs for colleges and universities.
K – 12 computer science education faces many problems that need to be addressed. The number of courses is declining, standards either do not exist or are far less rigorous in some states than others, there is very little professional development and certification is problematic for computer science teachers. All of this is happening while computing is projected to be one of the fastest growing career paths in the next decade.
More information is available here and a fact sheet on the bill can be found here.
House Panel Examines Cyber Attack Attribution
/In: Security /by Brian MosleyThis morning, the House Committee on Science and Technology’s subcommittee on Technology and Innovation held a hearing entitled “Planning for the Future of Cyber Attack Attribution”. The hearing contained a panel of four witnesses — Dr. David Wheeler, a Research Staff Member of the Information Technology and Systems Division at the Institute for Defense Analyses, Mr. Robert Knake an International Affairs Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, Mr. Ed Giorgio, the President and Co-Founder of Ponte Technologies, Mr. Marc Rotenberg, the President of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.
The purpose of the hearing was to “discuss attribution in cyber attacks, and how attribution technologies have the potential to affect the anonymity and privacy of internet users.” Witnesses answered questions ranging from ‘Can attack attribution play a role in deterring cyber attacks?’, to ‘If attribution is futile, what other methods can we use to prevent cyber attacks?’ Witnesses emphasized that while attribution is important, it is not a cure-all, and should only be a part of the security tool box.
They claimed that automatic attack attribution — e.g. having computers automatically determine the origin of an attack — was dangerous because of the possibility for failure and the assignment of wrong identities to attackers. They also, thankfully, mentioned that the internet should not be ‘locked down’, and that different segments should have varying degrees of security and privacy.
The panel stressed that anonymity on the internet conflicts with attribution. A common sentiment was that attribution must not come at the cost of normal legal internet user-privacy. Witnesses went on to posit various methods to create attack attribution without a total loss of privacy.
While the hearing touched on many topics, one of personal interest was the role of the Government in limiting the amount of data that private companies, such as Google, can record on their users. The panel claimed that increased restrictions on private companies would better secure citizens in the face of company breakdown, like the Chinese hack on Google earlier this year.
Check out the hearing’s website and the webcast.
Ex-CRA Chair Peter Lee to Leave DARPA for Microsoft Research
/In: CRA, People, Research /by Peter HarshaPeter Lee, current head of DARPA’s innovative Transformational Convergence Technology Office (TCTO), will leave the agency in September to run Microsoft Research’s Redmond Lab. Before joining DARPA, Lee was Chair of the computer science department at Carnegie Mellon University, as well as Chair of CRA (and head of CRA’s Government Affairs Committee). In a press release announcing the move, Lee had this to say about this new opportunity:
Lee did a fantastic job as Chair of CRA, Chair of my Government Affairs Committee, and PI of the Computing Innovations Fellowship program through CCC. We have no doubt he’ll excel at Microsoft just as he has everywhere else he’s been.
It’s not known whether Lee, an avid Pittsburgh Penguin fan, will alter his hockey allegiance with his change in residency to the Pacific Northwest, but we’ll keep you updated.
Here’s Wired’s coverage of the news.
GAO releases report on cybersecurity strategy
/In: General /by Brian MosleyThis week the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report urging the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) to come up with a clear and comprehensive cybersecurity R & D strategy. The report, prepared by request of the House Committee on Homeland Securty, called upon OSTP to show more leadership in the creation of an R & D plan.
There’s been some press coverage of the report. Here’s a good snippet from Infoweek:
These conclusions about NITRD’s role aren’t surprising. The computing research community has had long-standing concerns about the ability of the NITRD NCO to exercise a leadership role in coordinating the federal IT R&D investment. A big part of that inability to lead comes down to the NCO’s lack of budgetary authority, but that’s a reality of the federal budget process — there’s no way federal agencies will cede control of a piece of their budgets to some central coordinating office (other than OMB). As a result, NITRD becomes less about leadership and coordination and more about agencies reporting what they plan to do and the NCO collecting that information.
It will be interesting to see whether the PCAST’s new look at NITRD, now underway and due in late August or September, will address these cyber security concerns. That review is being shepherded by PCAST members Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, and Shirley Ann Jackson, President of RPI, and driven by a subcommittee led by Ed Lazowska, Chair of CRA’s Computing Community Consortium and professor computer science at University of Washington, and David E. Shaw, head of D.E. Shaw and Co. (We’ll have more on the PCAST study in a later post…).
Innovation on Capitol Hill
/In: Events /by Brian MosleyThe federal government’s role in spurring innovation continues to be a hot topic on Capitol Hill.
Last Tuesday, the Senate Committee on Commerce Science, and Transportation’s subcommittee on Competitiveness, Innovation, and Export Promotion heard experts ranging from Aneesh P. Chopra, the Chief Technology Officer and Associated Director for Technology from the Office of Science and Technology Policy to Mr. Rhys L. Williams, President of New World Angels, Inc., talk about the difficulties the U.S. faces in spurring private sector innovation. The hearing, “Innovation in America: Opportunities and Obstacles,” featured two panels testifying on the current challenges in innovation and possible solutions to fix the situation. Both panels agreed that it is imperative the United States create an innovation strategy. They also agreed that innovation in America would be greatly enhanced by better translation of ideas from academia to the private sector.
Then on Thursday, the Coalition for National Science Funding (of which CRA is a member) and the National Science Foundation partnered to put together an event for lawmakers on the House side to highlight some of NSF’s successes in funding basic research. The event, “NSF: Investing in America’s Future,” featured Doctor Erin Santini Bell, Assistant Professor of Civil Engineering at the University of New Hampshire, who has developed “new methods of incorporating structural modeling, instrumentation and non-destructive testing to asses the structural health of bridges”, and Doctor Laura Landweber, Professor of Biology at Princeton University, who studies “the roles of RNA in epigenetic inheritance”, who talked about the importance of NSF in supporting their research.
Attendance was great at both events, despite a packed legislative schedule, which bodes well for those interested in seeing the U.S. stay committed to fostering innovation. Though perhaps a more definitive sign of support was the approval Tuesday by the House Commerce, Justice, Science of a significant increase for the NSF budget in FY11.