Senator Barack Obama responded to fourteen science questions asked by Science Debate 2008 regarding how an Obama White House would lead the US in areas vital to our competitiveness and innovation. All fourteen questions and Obama’s answers in their entirety can be found here. Some highlights of most importance to the computing community include:
Q 1. Innovation. Science and technology have been responsible for half of the growth of the American economy since WWII. But several recent reports question America’s continued leadership in these vital areas. What policies will you support to ensure that America remains the world leader in innovation?
Ensuring that the U.S. continues to lead the world in science and technology will be a central priority for my administration. Our talent for innovation is still the envy of the world, but we face unprecedented challenges that demand new approaches. For example, the U.S. annually imports $53 billion more in advanced technology products than we export. China is now the world’s number one high technology exporter. This competitive situation may only worsen over time because the number of U.S. students pursuing technical careers is declining. The U.S. ranks 17th among developed nations in the proportion of college students receiving degrees in science or engineering; we were in third place thirty years ago.
My administration will increase funding for basic research in physical and life sciences, mathematics, and engineering at a rate that would double basic research budgets over the next decade. We will increase research grants for early-career researchers to keep young scientists entering these fields. We will increase support for high-risk, high-payoff research portfolios at our science agencies. And we will invest in the breakthrough research we need to meet our energy challenges and to transform our defense programs.
A vigorous research and development program depends on encouraging talented people to enter science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) and giving them the support they need to reach their potential. My administration will work to guarantee to students access to strong science curriculum at all grade levels so they graduate knowing how science works – using hands-on, IT-enhanced education. As president, I will launch a Service Scholarship program that pays undergraduate or graduate teaching education costs for those who commit to teaching in a high-need school, and I will prioritize math and science teachers. Additionally, my proposal to create Teacher Residency Academies will also add 30,000 new teachers to high-need schools – training thousands of science and math teachers. I will also expand access to higher education, work to draw more of these students into science and engineering, and increase National Science Foundation (NSF) graduate fellowships. My proposals for providing broadband Internet connections for all Americans across the country will help ensure that more students are able to
bolster their STEM achievement.
Progress in science and technology must be backed with programs ensuring that U.S. businesses have strong incentives to convert advances quickly into new business opportunities and jobs. To do this, my administration will make the R&D tax credit permanent. Q 13. Research. For many years, Congress has recognized the importance of science and engineering research to realizing our national goals. Given that the next Congress will likely face spending constraints, what priority would you give to investment in basic research in upcoming budgets?
Federally supported basic research, aimed at understanding many features of nature- from the size of the universe to subatomic particles, from the chemical reactions that support a living cell to interactions that sustain ecosystems-has been an essential feature of American life for over fifty years. While the outcomes of specific projects are never predictable, basic research has been a reliable source of new knowledge that has fueled important developments in fields ranging from telecommunications to medicine, yielding remarkable rates of economic return and ensuring American leadership in industry, military power, and higher education. I believe that continued investment in fundamental research is essential for ensuring healthier lives, better sources of energy, superior military capacity, and high-wage jobs for our nation’s future.
Yet, today, we are clearly under-investing in research across the spectrum of scientific and engineering disciplines. Federal support for the physical sciences and engineering has been declining as a fraction of GDP for decades, and, after a period of growth of the life sciences, the NIH budget has been steadily losing buying power for the past six years. As a result, our science agencies are often able to support no more than one in ten proposals that they receive, arresting the careers of our young scientists and blocking our ability to pursue many remarkable recent advances. Furthermore, in this environment, scientists are less likely to pursue the risky research that may lead to the most important breakthroughs. Finally, we are reducing support for science at a time when many other nations are increasing it, a situation that already threatens our leadership in many critical areas of science.
This situation is unacceptable. As president, I will increase funding for basic research in physical and life sciences, mathematics, and engineering at a rate that would double basic research budgets over the next decade.
Sustained and predictable increases in research funding will allow the United States to accomplish a great deal. First, we can expand the frontiers of human knowledge. Second, we can provide greater support for high-risk, high-return research and for young scientists at the beginning of their careers. Third, we can harness science and technology to address the “grand challenges” of the 21st century: energy, health, food and water, national security, information technology, and manufacturing capacity.
The other twelve questions and answers are worth taking a look at as well.
Thomas G. Dolan, editorial page editor for Barron’s asserts in an editorial yesterday that federal support for basic research is overrated — what’s really needed to drive innovation in this country are R&D tax cuts for American business and “permanently opening the golden door for foreign scientists and engineers.” And while he’s not wrong that both tax cuts and improved visa policies are probably key pieces keeping America’s innovation ecosystem powering along, his understanding of the (crucial) role of basic research in that process is somewhat lacking.
Fortunately, CCC Council Chair Ed Lazowska (who is also the Bill and Melinda Gates Chair in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington), has penned this response to help fill out the picture a bit. Here, with permission, is the note he sent to Barron’s:
Your editorial tackles a critical issue.
The steps that you focus on — tax policy (particularly, making permanent the R&D tax credit) and immigration policy — are important elements of a solution.
But improvements to our education system, to federal support of fundamental research, and to various policies that create “friction” in the innovation ecosystem, are equally important.
There have been several authoritative studies of how innovation actually occurs in information technology — my own field.
Let me focus on research here, although there is just as much to say about the other elements of the innovation ecosystem. America is the world leader in IT innovation due to a complex interplay of universities, industry, and the federal government. Essentially every aspect of IT upon which we rely today – every billion-dollar sub-category of the IT industry – bears the clear stamp of federally-supported university-based research. See, for example, the figure on pages 6 and 7 of this National Academies study.
Continued investment is necessary to maintain our leadership and competitiveness. Achieving many of the “societal grand challenges” of this century will depend critically on further fundamental advances in IT: the engineering of new tools that will transform scientific discovery; advancing personalized learning; shifting towards predictive, preventive, personalized, participatory medicine; enhancing national security; developing smart controls and smart electric grids needed to address energy and climate challenges. Many of the “grand challenges” of IT itself will have broad implications for society: securing cyberspace; designing truly scalable systems; enhancing virtual reality; creating the future of networking; infusing “computational thinking” into a wide variety of disciplines which are themselves becoming “information sciences”; driving advances in entirely new approaches to computing such as quantum computing.
Research is the key to making progress on these grand challenges. Both industry and the federal government have important, but different, roles to play. It is crucial to avoid confusing the IT industry’s research and development (R&D) expenditures with fundamental research that is guiding our way to the future. The vast majority of corporate R&D in IT – far more than 95% – involves the engineering of the next version of a product. This “development” is essential. But the transformative ideas – and our nation’s long-term leadership – come from long-range research. It is a natural and essential role of government to support this fundamental research – R&D that looks out 5, 10, or 15 years, rather than just one product cycle. This federally-supported research takes place primarily in America’s universities and has the benefit of producing not just the ideas that will power the nation and the world, but the people who will make them happen. The relatively modest federal investment in IT research has played an essential role in the past, and will play an equally essential role in the future.
=====
Ed Lazowska
Bill & Melinda Gates Chair in Computer Science & Engineering
University of Washington http://lazowska.cs.washington.edu
The Chronicle of Higher Ed yesterday covered the release of a National Science Foundation Info Brief on the decline of U.S. funding for academic research for the second straight year, noting that NSF declares the decline “unprecedented for this data series, which began in 1972.”
Though federal funding for academic research technically increased from FY 2006 to FY 2007 by 1.1 percent to $30.4 billion in constant dollars, once adjusted for inflation the “increase” actually represents at 1.6 percent decline. This follows a 0.2 percent adjusted decrease between FY 2006 and FY 2005. And, though NSF isn’t reporting it yet, we already know (barring a surprising 2nd second emergency supplemental appropriations) that FY 2008 will continue that negative trend.
The Chronicle piece notes that industry’s support for academic research has ramped up and actually covered most of the federal decline overall. But that was not the case in Computer Science, which still saw a decrease of 1.4 percent in academic funding from all sources. It remains to be seen how some recenthighly-publicized university-industry partnerships in computing will affect FY 08 and beyond, but at this point, every little (and big) bit helps.
As the Chronicle piece also points out, it’s also too soon to know how the next President might handle the situation. What we do know is that the FY 2009 appropriations bills that Congress ought to be moving in advance of the Oct 1, 2008 beginning of the fiscal year are hopelessly mired in budget politics that won’t likely get resolved until post November at the very earliest (and more likely next February or later). That’s more bad news for science, which was again slated for big increases in those FY 09 bills. We’ll keep an eye on all developments here and keep you posted.
Senator John McCain released his technology agenda this week. He supports some of the ideas that have high importance to the S&T community. McCains plan includes:
Making the R&D tax credit permanent
Lowering the corporate tax rate to 25%
Allowing companies to write off of new equipment and technology in the first year
Keeping the Internet tax-free
Limiting taxes on wireless services
Fully funding the America COMPETES Act
Expanding H1B visas
A crack down on piracy
Increased funding for Patent Office
Protecting intellectual property around the world
Increasing broadband to underserved areas
Increasing S&T expertise and use in government
Of course, a big focus of the computing research advocacy community has been seeing the funding commitments approved as part of the COMPETES act, which include doubling the budgets of three key federal science agencies — NSF, NIST, and DOE Science — over the next seven years fully realized. And it appears that McCain supports that goal. However, his senior policy staff has sent mixed messages. Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a senior policy advisor to McCain told NPR that “Doubling is a nice fun number for political purposes. It’s clean, it’s smooth. But it doesn’t reflect a balancing of political priorities. There will be competing demands for funds.”
Senator Barack Obama has had a technology agenda on his campaign web site for awhile but now that McCain has come out with his the comparisons can begin. There are several areas of agreement between the two such as making the R&D tax credit permanent, increasing broadband to underserved areas, and increasing the protection of intellectual property around the world. Obama, however, supports Net neutrality (though he doesnt use that term) and flatly states he would double the funding for basic science research. Obamas plan also calls for allowing foreign students who earn degrees at US higher education institutions to stay in the country and earn citizenship and emphasizes the need to increase the number of American students, particularly women and minorities, who obtain undergraduate degrees in STEM fields. Also, in addition to increasing the intellectual property protections around the world, Obama calls for reforming the patent system.
While most of this sounds great, there is very little in either plan about how to accomplish these goals. However, knowing that science and technology issues are being discussed at the highest levels of campaign politics means the messages the community are sending are getting through.
As mentioned in this space on Wednesday, the House Science and Technology Committee held a hearing Thursday morning to review the federal Networking and Information Technology Research and Development program (NITRD — alternately pronounced “NIGHT-erd” or “NIGHTER-dee”), the 13 agency, $3.3 billion budget activity that represents the federal government’s investment in IT research and development. The hearing mainly focused on the recommendations issued last year by the President’s Council of Advisors for Science and Technology (PCAST) in their review of the federal IT R&D ecosystem, Leadership Under Challenge: Information Technology R&D in a Competitive World (pdf) (which we’ve also covered here). The hearing represents the first step in a process that will result in legislation next year that will attempt to once again amend the High Performance Computing Act of 1991 (most recently amended as part of the America COMPETES Act, passed in Aug 2007) to codify some of those recommendations.
(You can watch an archived webcast of the hearing and see copies of each witnesses’ written testimony at the House S&T Committee website.)
Testifying before the members were Chris Greer, Director of the NITRD National Coordination Office; Dan Reed, CRA Board Chair; Craig Stewart, Associate Dean of Research Technologies at Indiana University and representing the Coalition for Academic Scientific Computation (CASC); and Don C. Winter, VP of Engineering and IT at Boeing’s Phantom Works. Greer was there to talk about what the NITRD NCO is doing and intends to do about acting on the recommendations of the PCAST report; Reed was there as both someone who was deeply involved in writing the PCAST recommendations and who also has a strong connection to the computing research community; Stewart was there to speak for the academic HPC users and researchers; and Winter was there to bring a corporate/private sector perspective to the panel. All filled their assigned roles well.
Chairman Bart Gordon (D-TN) opened the hearing by noting his favorable impression of the NITRD program. From his opening remarks:
I believe the NITRD program has been largely a success. It has made a substantial contribution to moving computation to an equal place along side theory and experiment for conducting research in science and engineering.
In addition, it has developed the computing and networking infrastructure needed to support leading edge research and to drive the technology forward for a range of commercial applications that benefit society broadly.
The technical advances that led to todays computing devices and networks, and the software that drive them, evolved from past research sponsored by industry and government, often in partnership, and conducted by industry, universities, and federal labs.
Greer used his opening remarks to detail the efforts NITRD NCO has already undertaken in response to the PCAST recommendations (though he indicated that they would probably have embarked on the process even without a recommendation), including a strategic planning process that will produce a plan for NITRD for release in 2009. Greer also didn’t take issue with any of the PCAST recommendations — in fact, no witness (or Member of Congress) took issue with the recommendations in general — and largely agreed that the program needs to improve it’s interagency planning.
Reed emphasized a few concerns about the overall IT R&D ecosystem in his remarks, noting in particular his concern that the federal portfolio for IT R&D has lost a key piece of what made it such a success with the withdrawal of DARPA support for much university computer science research. Historically, the diversity of funding approaches and mission needs at both DARPA and NSF drove some truly innovative research in computing. With DARPA’s absence, university computing research has become a “monoculture” of research supported by a single agency: NSF. Indeed, NSF now supports 86 percent of federal obligations for computer science research in U.S. universities. As a result, Reed argued, the process has gotten more conservative — more incremental and evolutionary rather than revolutionary research proposals. This lack of diversity in approaches and mission-needs threaten to constrain the robust pace of innovation in the space, he noted. (Dan posts some additional thoughts on his testimony on his blog today.)
Stewart opened by endorsing fully the recommendations of the PCAST on behalf of CASC, but focused some of his remarks specifically on the workforce issues faced by the field. The declining interest of U.S. students in S&E — and particularly IT fields — represents a huge challenge for America’s future competitiveness, he argued. Programs that could increase the participation of American students in the STEM fields (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) should be a strong focus of the committee, and he commended the Members for their work in getting such strong emphasis on STEM education in the America COMPETES Act.
Winter really focused his remarks on the importance of the PCAST recommendation to emphasize cyber/physical systems (CPS) as a research area in the IT research and development portfolio. CPS are very important to the aviation industry, he argued, and the industry badly needs advances in technology development and tool development in the space and are reliant on the research community to get that work done.
The member questions tended to focus on how best to get NITRD agencies to collaborate on research agendas and how to set priorities given limited funding. Of particular interest to Chairman Gordon was how the NITRD program could embrace the PCAST recommendation that the program ought to be rebalanced to emphasize more high-risk, long-range research efforts. Would this require new money, he asked? Greer thought that through better coordination, the agencies could do a lot to re-prioritize existing funding, but that new money was also likely required. Reed noted that it’s not just an agency problem, there’s also a cultural component within the computing research community that needs to change, too. Researchers need to think more audaciously in their research proposals and reviewers need to be willing to reward those proposals that are high-risk, but potentially high-payoff. More funding would ease some of the pressure to award conservative proposals rather than risky ones, of course, but this still requires a mindset change within the computing community — something Reed said the community is starting to focus on.
Rep. Jerry McNerny (D-CA) raised a question related to Reed’s testimony about the undesirability of a research monoculture in the long-term part of the IT R&D portfolio. Wouldn’t a single agency, assuming it’s well run, manage and coordinate the long-range research better than if that research were spread among different agencies, he asked? Reed explained that, while its true that a single agency could certainly take on that piece of the portfolio by itself, historically, having a diversity of different funding models and agency missions available to researchers has proven to be an incredibly productive way to enable innovation in the IT sector. NSF is very good at individual investigator initiated research, for example, and DARPA was very good at placing big bets on hard problems and hand-picking communities of researchers to focus on them. Between just these two diverse approaches an enormous number of innovations resulted.
There was also a recurring focus on cyber security in the member questions, in part spurred by the discussion about the ubiquitousness of computing devices and the increased access we now have to them. Winter pointed out that cyber security wasn’t always a concern for a company like Boeing, despite a widespread use of embedded computing devices in things like avionics systems. But now, these systems increasingly communicate with the world outside the airplane — exchanging data with other aircraft and other assets in the battlespace, enhancing the effectiveness of the systems, but also increasing their vulnerability to cyber attacks. There is much research to be done, the panelists agreed, on understanding how to secure these cyber-physical systems, and there were great concerns expressed that the current and projected workforce in the area is inadequate to the task ahead. Support for research in the area helps produce that workforce, the panelists noted.
Finally, there was also brief discussion about Reed’s recommendation, as someone who has served on both PCAST and the President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC) before it was folded into PCAST, in support of reconstituting PITAC in order to really get adequate oversight of the NITRD program. Though there are some within the Administration who oppose the push to reconstitute PITAC, there was no objection from the committee members to the suggestion — in fact, Chairman Gordon pointed out that their reauthorization of HPCC in the America COMPETES Act actually called for the same thing. So perhaps we can look forward to the return of PITAC in the next Administration.
And that was about it. Despite a good turnout among Members of Congress for the hearing (I counted 11 present at various times), the committee managed to wrap up its review of the program in just 56 minutes — a record, in my experience, for a full-committee hearing of the House S&T committee. I take that as a good sign, however. The issues confronting the program are pretty clear, the steps required to address them aren’t terribly controversial, it just remains to do them. In the next few weeks/months, we hope to see the direction the committee plans to take regarding the PCAST recommendations.
As always, we’ll have all the details here….
Yesterday, Yahoo, Hewlett-Packard, and Intel announced they are partnering with three universities and their governments in United States, Germany, and Singapore to build a new cloud-computing research initiative. Google and IBM launched a similar program last fall, which centered around six American universities. (Microsoft and Intel also launched a different university research partnership earlier this year.)
The new program will provide researchers with six test-bed data centers (one at each of the university and industry partners), each furnished with between 1,000 and 4,000 processors. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will represent American academia in the partnership, and will be supported in part by the NSF.
As the New York Times Steve Lohr points out, This is competition at its best.
Tomorrow Dan Reed, CRAs Board chair will testify before the House Science and Technology Committee on the state of the Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) program. Dan is a part of the Presidents Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), which released a reportlast summer on the state of NITRD.
Testifying along side Dan will be Dr. Chris Greer, Director of the National Coordination Office of NITRD, Dr. Craig Stewart, Associate Dean of Research Technologies at Indiana University and representing the Coalition for Academic Scientific Computation, and Don C. Winter, Vice President of Engineering & Information Technology at Phantom Works, a Boeing Company.
The hearing charter is available online and the witness testimony should be posted soon. The hearing will be web cast so you can watch it live at 10 am. Well bring you highlights here after the hearing.
A couple of small announcements:
First, those of you who attended CRA’s biennial conference at Snowbird last week already heard this call, but for those who didn’t (or who need to be reminded), we want your research highlights! CRA and the Computing Community Consortium are in the process of gathering recent computing research highlights to feature prominently in CRA and CCC publications — on the web, in our advocacy efforts, and in our print publications — and we’d like yours.
What we’re asking is that you add this e-mail address — highlights@cra.org — to any press release distribution list your department or institution may have to publicize your exciting research results. We’re gathering those interesting stories, putting them into a searchable database, and then highlighting selected ones on the CRA and CCC websites. The model here is something like the very popular Astronomy Photo of the Day, where each day a new photo or graphic (or video) having something to do with astronomy is featured along with a nice succinct description. While we don’t anticipate being able to feature new computing research daily, we hope to refresh it frequently enough (weekly?) to make it worth checking back often. But, to do that, we need your highlights.
To fill the pot, we’re accepting any release your department or institution may have sent in the last 24 months or so. Obviously, we’d like to feature the most timely ones, but we don’t mind pushing the clock back a bit for anything truly exciting. So, please submit yours today, and make sure your press offices have highlights@cra.org on their distribution lists.
In other news, we’ve created some new CRA-related “groups” on two popular social networking sites: LinkedIn and Facebook. Both are for those involved in, or just fans of, CRA. To join the LinkedIn one, go here and we’ll approve you. On Facebook, you can find us here. We hope you’ll take a look!
Last Tuesday, NYT science commentator John Tierney discussed how Congress has recently ramped up enforcement of Title IX among universities’ science departments. Will a “quota system”–an idea Tierney floats in the third paragraph of his piece–be an outcome of Title IX enforcement?
So far, the increased enforcement has only consisted of periodic compliance reviews, which had been long-neglected by the NSF, Department of Energy, and NASA, according to a 2004 Government Accountability Office report. These reviews are intended to make sure grantee departments are not discriminatory.
Of course, since some fields like computer science have many more men than women–both among students and faculty–there is concern that the government might start considering everyone “discriminatory” using the yardstick of proportionality and quotas. For athletics departments, such rigorous Title IX enforcement has led to a huge increase in the participation and achievement of women athletes, but at the expense of some male sports.
The sciences are not necessarily in the same boat as sports: although most would agree that women face an uphill battle in the sciences, how much of the gap can be explained by discrimination remains an open question. “60 percent of biology majors and 70 percent of psychology Ph.D.’s” are women, raising the possibility that more women simply prefer other fields, as psychologist Susan Pinker argues.
Another possibility is that if discrimination is having any effect, most of it happens before girls reach college. One study suggests that differences at adolescence explain different outcomes 20 years later.
For now, though, the compliance reviews haven’t rocked any boats. But the threat of a Title IX bludgeon hanging over departments’ heads is sure to add urgency to debates about the shortage of women in fields like computer science and what to do about it.
Voters ballots may be more partisan than ever, but the vast majority of Americans can agree that we need to invest in science and technology, according to a recent poll. 71 percent of polled voters said they would be more likely to vote for a candidate who is committed to making sure the federal budget invests in scientific research. And a whopping 86 percent said they would be more likely to vote for a candidate committed to public investments in science and technology education.
Such investments have majority support among democrats as well as republicans (and independents, too), demonstrating the broad bipartisan consensus behind funding for science. Hat tip: Gene Spafford
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Obama Answers Science Debate 2008
/In: American Competitiveness Initiative, Funding, Policy, R&D in the Press /by MelissaNorrSenator Barack Obama responded to fourteen science questions asked by Science Debate 2008 regarding how an Obama White House would lead the US in areas vital to our competitiveness and innovation. All fourteen questions and Obama’s answers in their entirety can be found here. Some highlights of most importance to the computing community include:
The other twelve questions and answers are worth taking a look at as well.
Barron’s Editorial Slags Federal Support for Basic Research, Lazowska Replies
/In: R&D in the Press /by Peter HarshaThomas G. Dolan, editorial page editor for Barron’s asserts in an editorial yesterday that federal support for basic research is overrated — what’s really needed to drive innovation in this country are R&D tax cuts for American business and “permanently opening the golden door for foreign scientists and engineers.” And while he’s not wrong that both tax cuts and improved visa policies are probably key pieces keeping America’s innovation ecosystem powering along, his understanding of the (crucial) role of basic research in that process is somewhat lacking.
Fortunately, CCC Council Chair Ed Lazowska (who is also the Bill and Melinda Gates Chair in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington), has penned this response to help fill out the picture a bit. Here, with permission, is the note he sent to Barron’s:
NSF Study Confirms that Federal R&D and CS Funding Decreased for Second Straight Year
/In: Funding, FY08 Appropriations, FY09 Appropriations, Policy, R&D in the Press /by Peter HarshaThe Chronicle of Higher Ed yesterday covered the release of a National Science Foundation Info Brief on the decline of U.S. funding for academic research for the second straight year, noting that NSF declares the decline “unprecedented for this data series, which began in 1972.”
Though federal funding for academic research technically increased from FY 2006 to FY 2007 by 1.1 percent to $30.4 billion in constant dollars, once adjusted for inflation the “increase” actually represents at 1.6 percent decline. This follows a 0.2 percent adjusted decrease between FY 2006 and FY 2005. And, though NSF isn’t reporting it yet, we already know (barring a surprising 2nd second emergency supplemental appropriations) that FY 2008 will continue that negative trend.
The Chronicle piece notes that industry’s support for academic research has ramped up and actually covered most of the federal decline overall. But that was not the case in Computer Science, which still saw a decrease of 1.4 percent in academic funding from all sources. It remains to be seen how some recent highly-publicized university-industry partnerships in computing will affect FY 08 and beyond, but at this point, every little (and big) bit helps.
As the Chronicle piece also points out, it’s also too soon to know how the next President might handle the situation. What we do know is that the FY 2009 appropriations bills that Congress ought to be moving in advance of the Oct 1, 2008 beginning of the fiscal year are hopelessly mired in budget politics that won’t likely get resolved until post November at the very earliest (and more likely next February or later). That’s more bad news for science, which was again slated for big increases in those FY 09 bills. We’ll keep an eye on all developments here and keep you posted.
A Look at the Presidential Candidates Technology Agendas
/In: American Competitiveness Initiative, Funding, People, Policy /by MelissaNorrSenator John McCain released his technology agenda this week. He supports some of the ideas that have high importance to the S&T community. McCains plan includes:
Of course, a big focus of the computing research advocacy community has been seeing the funding commitments approved as part of the COMPETES act, which include doubling the budgets of three key federal science agencies — NSF, NIST, and DOE Science — over the next seven years fully realized. And it appears that McCain supports that goal. However, his senior policy staff has sent mixed messages. Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a senior policy advisor to McCain told NPR that “Doubling is a nice fun number for political purposes. It’s clean, it’s smooth. But it doesn’t reflect a balancing of political priorities. There will be competing demands for funds.”
Senator Barack Obama has had a technology agenda on his campaign web site for awhile but now that McCain has come out with his the comparisons can begin. There are several areas of agreement between the two such as making the R&D tax credit permanent, increasing broadband to underserved areas, and increasing the protection of intellectual property around the world. Obama, however, supports Net neutrality (though he doesnt use that term) and flatly states he would double the funding for basic science research. Obamas plan also calls for allowing foreign students who earn degrees at US higher education institutions to stay in the country and earn citizenship and emphasizes the need to increase the number of American students, particularly women and minorities, who obtain undergraduate degrees in STEM fields. Also, in addition to increasing the intellectual property protections around the world, Obama calls for reforming the patent system.
While most of this sounds great, there is very little in either plan about how to accomplish these goals. However, knowing that science and technology issues are being discussed at the highest levels of campaign politics means the messages the community are sending are getting through.
House S&T Committee Reviews Federal IT R&D Program
/In: Events, Funding, Policy, Research /by Peter HarshaAs mentioned in this space on Wednesday, the House Science and Technology Committee held a hearing Thursday morning to review the federal Networking and Information Technology Research and Development program (NITRD — alternately pronounced “NIGHT-erd” or “NIGHTER-dee”), the 13 agency, $3.3 billion budget activity that represents the federal government’s investment in IT research and development. The hearing mainly focused on the recommendations issued last year by the President’s Council of Advisors for Science and Technology (PCAST) in their review of the federal IT R&D ecosystem, Leadership Under Challenge: Information Technology R&D in a Competitive World (pdf) (which we’ve also covered here). The hearing represents the first step in a process that will result in legislation next year that will attempt to once again amend the High Performance Computing Act of 1991 (most recently amended as part of the America COMPETES Act, passed in Aug 2007) to codify some of those recommendations.
(You can watch an archived webcast of the hearing and see copies of each witnesses’ written testimony at the House S&T Committee website.)
Testifying before the members were Chris Greer, Director of the NITRD National Coordination Office; Dan Reed, CRA Board Chair; Craig Stewart, Associate Dean of Research Technologies at Indiana University and representing the Coalition for Academic Scientific Computation (CASC); and Don C. Winter, VP of Engineering and IT at Boeing’s Phantom Works. Greer was there to talk about what the NITRD NCO is doing and intends to do about acting on the recommendations of the PCAST report; Reed was there as both someone who was deeply involved in writing the PCAST recommendations and who also has a strong connection to the computing research community; Stewart was there to speak for the academic HPC users and researchers; and Winter was there to bring a corporate/private sector perspective to the panel. All filled their assigned roles well.
Chairman Bart Gordon (D-TN) opened the hearing by noting his favorable impression of the NITRD program. From his opening remarks:
Greer used his opening remarks to detail the efforts NITRD NCO has already undertaken in response to the PCAST recommendations (though he indicated that they would probably have embarked on the process even without a recommendation), including a strategic planning process that will produce a plan for NITRD for release in 2009. Greer also didn’t take issue with any of the PCAST recommendations — in fact, no witness (or Member of Congress) took issue with the recommendations in general — and largely agreed that the program needs to improve it’s interagency planning.
Reed emphasized a few concerns about the overall IT R&D ecosystem in his remarks, noting in particular his concern that the federal portfolio for IT R&D has lost a key piece of what made it such a success with the withdrawal of DARPA support for much university computer science research. Historically, the diversity of funding approaches and mission needs at both DARPA and NSF drove some truly innovative research in computing. With DARPA’s absence, university computing research has become a “monoculture” of research supported by a single agency: NSF. Indeed, NSF now supports 86 percent of federal obligations for computer science research in U.S. universities. As a result, Reed argued, the process has gotten more conservative — more incremental and evolutionary rather than revolutionary research proposals. This lack of diversity in approaches and mission-needs threaten to constrain the robust pace of innovation in the space, he noted. (Dan posts some additional thoughts on his testimony on his blog today.)
Stewart opened by endorsing fully the recommendations of the PCAST on behalf of CASC, but focused some of his remarks specifically on the workforce issues faced by the field. The declining interest of U.S. students in S&E — and particularly IT fields — represents a huge challenge for America’s future competitiveness, he argued. Programs that could increase the participation of American students in the STEM fields (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) should be a strong focus of the committee, and he commended the Members for their work in getting such strong emphasis on STEM education in the America COMPETES Act.
Winter really focused his remarks on the importance of the PCAST recommendation to emphasize cyber/physical systems (CPS) as a research area in the IT research and development portfolio. CPS are very important to the aviation industry, he argued, and the industry badly needs advances in technology development and tool development in the space and are reliant on the research community to get that work done.
The member questions tended to focus on how best to get NITRD agencies to collaborate on research agendas and how to set priorities given limited funding. Of particular interest to Chairman Gordon was how the NITRD program could embrace the PCAST recommendation that the program ought to be rebalanced to emphasize more high-risk, long-range research efforts. Would this require new money, he asked? Greer thought that through better coordination, the agencies could do a lot to re-prioritize existing funding, but that new money was also likely required. Reed noted that it’s not just an agency problem, there’s also a cultural component within the computing research community that needs to change, too. Researchers need to think more audaciously in their research proposals and reviewers need to be willing to reward those proposals that are high-risk, but potentially high-payoff. More funding would ease some of the pressure to award conservative proposals rather than risky ones, of course, but this still requires a mindset change within the computing community — something Reed said the community is starting to focus on.
Rep. Jerry McNerny (D-CA) raised a question related to Reed’s testimony about the undesirability of a research monoculture in the long-term part of the IT R&D portfolio. Wouldn’t a single agency, assuming it’s well run, manage and coordinate the long-range research better than if that research were spread among different agencies, he asked? Reed explained that, while its true that a single agency could certainly take on that piece of the portfolio by itself, historically, having a diversity of different funding models and agency missions available to researchers has proven to be an incredibly productive way to enable innovation in the IT sector. NSF is very good at individual investigator initiated research, for example, and DARPA was very good at placing big bets on hard problems and hand-picking communities of researchers to focus on them. Between just these two diverse approaches an enormous number of innovations resulted.
There was also a recurring focus on cyber security in the member questions, in part spurred by the discussion about the ubiquitousness of computing devices and the increased access we now have to them. Winter pointed out that cyber security wasn’t always a concern for a company like Boeing, despite a widespread use of embedded computing devices in things like avionics systems. But now, these systems increasingly communicate with the world outside the airplane — exchanging data with other aircraft and other assets in the battlespace, enhancing the effectiveness of the systems, but also increasing their vulnerability to cyber attacks. There is much research to be done, the panelists agreed, on understanding how to secure these cyber-physical systems, and there were great concerns expressed that the current and projected workforce in the area is inadequate to the task ahead. Support for research in the area helps produce that workforce, the panelists noted.
Finally, there was also brief discussion about Reed’s recommendation, as someone who has served on both PCAST and the President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC) before it was folded into PCAST, in support of reconstituting PITAC in order to really get adequate oversight of the NITRD program. Though there are some within the Administration who oppose the push to reconstitute PITAC, there was no objection from the committee members to the suggestion — in fact, Chairman Gordon pointed out that their reauthorization of HPCC in the America COMPETES Act actually called for the same thing. So perhaps we can look forward to the return of PITAC in the next Administration.
And that was about it. Despite a good turnout among Members of Congress for the hearing (I counted 11 present at various times), the committee managed to wrap up its review of the program in just 56 minutes — a record, in my experience, for a full-committee hearing of the House S&T committee. I take that as a good sign, however. The issues confronting the program are pretty clear, the steps required to address them aren’t terribly controversial, it just remains to do them. In the next few weeks/months, we hope to see the direction the committee plans to take regarding the PCAST recommendations.
As always, we’ll have all the details here….
GOVERNMENT, INDUSTRY, AND ACADEMIA COLLABORATE TO STUDY CLOUD COMPUTING
/In: Research /by MelissaNorrYesterday, Yahoo, Hewlett-Packard, and Intel announced they are partnering with three universities and their governments in United States, Germany, and Singapore to build a new cloud-computing research initiative. Google and IBM launched a similar program last fall, which centered around six American universities. (Microsoft and Intel also launched a different university research partnership earlier this year.)
The new program will provide researchers with six test-bed data centers (one at each of the university and industry partners), each furnished with between 1,000 and 4,000 processors. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will represent American academia in the partnership, and will be supported in part by the NSF.
As the New York Times Steve Lohr points out, This is competition at its best.
CRA Board Chair to Testify at House Science and Technology Hearing
/In: Funding, People, Policy, Research /by MelissaNorrTomorrow Dan Reed, CRAs Board chair will testify before the House Science and Technology Committee on the state of the Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) program. Dan is a part of the Presidents Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), which released a report last summer on the state of NITRD.
Testifying along side Dan will be Dr. Chris Greer, Director of the National Coordination Office of NITRD, Dr. Craig Stewart, Associate Dean of Research Technologies at Indiana University and representing the Coalition for Academic Scientific Computation, and Don C. Winter, Vice President of Engineering & Information Technology at Phantom Works, a Boeing Company.
The hearing charter is available online and the witness testimony should be posted soon. The hearing will be web cast so you can watch it live at 10 am. Well bring you highlights here after the hearing.
We Want Your Research Highlights!
/In: Computing Community Consortium (CCC), CRA, People, R&D in the Press, Research /by Peter HarshaA couple of small announcements:
First, those of you who attended CRA’s biennial conference at Snowbird last week already heard this call, but for those who didn’t (or who need to be reminded), we want your research highlights! CRA and the Computing Community Consortium are in the process of gathering recent computing research highlights to feature prominently in CRA and CCC publications — on the web, in our advocacy efforts, and in our print publications — and we’d like yours.
What we’re asking is that you add this e-mail address — highlights@cra.org — to any press release distribution list your department or institution may have to publicize your exciting research results. We’re gathering those interesting stories, putting them into a searchable database, and then highlighting selected ones on the CRA and CCC websites. The model here is something like the very popular Astronomy Photo of the Day, where each day a new photo or graphic (or video) having something to do with astronomy is featured along with a nice succinct description. While we don’t anticipate being able to feature new computing research daily, we hope to refresh it frequently enough (weekly?) to make it worth checking back often. But, to do that, we need your highlights.
To fill the pot, we’re accepting any release your department or institution may have sent in the last 24 months or so. Obviously, we’d like to feature the most timely ones, but we don’t mind pushing the clock back a bit for anything truly exciting. So, please submit yours today, and make sure your press offices have highlights@cra.org on their distribution lists.
In other news, we’ve created some new CRA-related “groups” on two popular social networking sites: LinkedIn and Facebook. Both are for those involved in, or just fans of, CRA. To join the LinkedIn one, go here and we’ll approve you. On Facebook, you can find us here. We hope you’ll take a look!
Title IX’s Growing Interest in Science
/In: Diversity in Computing, Funding, Policy, R&D in the Press /by MelissaNorrLast Tuesday, NYT science commentator John Tierney discussed how Congress has recently ramped up enforcement of Title IX among universities’ science departments. Will a “quota system”–an idea Tierney floats in the third paragraph of his piece–be an outcome of Title IX enforcement?
So far, the increased enforcement has only consisted of periodic compliance reviews, which had been long-neglected by the NSF, Department of Energy, and NASA, according to a 2004 Government Accountability Office report. These reviews are intended to make sure grantee departments are not discriminatory.
Of course, since some fields like computer science have many more men than women–both among students and faculty–there is concern that the government might start considering everyone “discriminatory” using the yardstick of proportionality and quotas. For athletics departments, such rigorous Title IX enforcement has led to a huge increase in the participation and achievement of women athletes, but at the expense of some male sports.
The sciences are not necessarily in the same boat as sports: although most would agree that women face an uphill battle in the sciences, how much of the gap can be explained by discrimination remains an open question. “60 percent of biology majors and 70 percent of psychology Ph.D.’s” are women, raising the possibility that more women simply prefer other fields, as psychologist Susan Pinker argues.
Another possibility is that if discrimination is having any effect, most of it happens before girls reach college. One study suggests that differences at adolescence explain different outcomes 20 years later.
For now, though, the compliance reviews haven’t rocked any boats. But the threat of a Title IX bludgeon hanging over departments’ heads is sure to add urgency to debates about the shortage of women in fields like computer science and what to do about it.
Voters Overwhelmingly Support Investing in Science
/In: Computing Education, Funding, Policy, Research /by MelissaNorrVoters ballots may be more partisan than ever, but the vast majority of Americans can agree that we need to invest in science and technology, according to a recent poll.
71 percent of polled voters said they would be more likely to vote for a candidate who is committed to making sure the federal budget invests in scientific research. And a whopping 86 percent said they would be more likely to vote for a candidate committed to public investments in science and technology education.
Such investments have majority support among democrats as well as republicans (and independents, too), demonstrating the broad bipartisan consensus behind funding for science.
Hat tip: Gene Spafford