CRA’s Jay Vegso has the details of the latest National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) survey on the job market for new graduates, which shows CS graduates among best paid among all majors for 2007. CS grads in 2007 earned an average salary offer of $53,051, a 4.5 percent increase over 2006.
Check out the CRA Bulletin for the full list of degrees and salaries….
Long-time readers of this blog, or anyone familiar with CRA’s policy efforts, will know that we’ve spent a lot of time raising concerns about policy shifts at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) that have cut university participation rates in DARPA-funded computer science research. In congressional testimony and blog posts, we’ve pointed out that a shift at DARPA — a focus on nearer-term efforts with an emphasis on go/no-go milestones at relatively short intervals and an increased use of classification — has sharply reduced the amount of DARPA-supported research being performed in U.S. universities. In fact, between FY 2001 and FY 2004 (the last year for which we have good data), the amount of funding from DARPA to U.S. universities for computer science research fell by half — and informal evidence suggests university shares are even lower today.
There are a number of reasons we’re concerned about this trend. For one, DARPA’s diminished support for university CS leaves a hole in the federal IT R&D portfolio — both in funding, but maybe more importantly, in the loss of the “DARPA model” of research support. Since the early 1960s, the country (indeed, the world) has reaped the benefits of the diverse approaches to funding IT research represented by the two leading agencies — NSF and DARPA. While NSF has primarily focused on small grants for individual researchers at a wide range of institutions — and support for computing infrastructure at America’s universities — DARPA’s approach has been to identify key problems of interest to the agency and then assemble and nurture communities of researchers to address them. The combination of models has been enormously beneficial — DARPA-supported research in computing over the last four decades has laid down the foundations for the modern microprocessor, the internet, the graphical user interface, single-user workstations and a whole host of other innovations that have made the U.S. military the best in the world, driven the new economy, changed the conduct of science and enabled whole new scientific disciplines.
But DARPA’s policy shift also impacts its own mission, which is to ensure the U.S. never again suffers the sort of technological surprise marked by the Soviet launch of Sputnik (which motivated the establishment of the agency nearly 50 years ago). DARPA’s move away from support of university researchers means that many of the brightest minds of the country (indeed, the world) are no longer working on defense-related problems. This loss of mindshare — the percentage of people working on DARPA-related problems — is very worrisome to those in the community who understand how much of America’s advantage on the battlefield (and in the marketplace) is owed to a network-centric strategy. I hear concerns from the “old guard” in many of America’s top university CS departments that there’s a whole generation of young researchers who have no experience working with DARPA or the Defense Department and who are not attuned to defense problems — a fact that doesn’t bode well for the future of the U.S. technological advantage and DARPA’s goal of preventing technological surprise.
To their credit, the folks at DARPA recognize that this lack of awareness among younger faculty of the types of problems DARPA would really like to solve is a situation that needs addressing. And one way they’re approaching the problem is very direct — they’re finding young faculty with research areas of interest to the agency and, well, taking them on a little tour of the DOD. The Computer Science Study Group, run by the Institute for Defense Analysis for DARPA, serves to “acclimate a generation of researchers to the needs and priorities of the DOD,” by mentoring, holding workshops, field trips to DOD facilities and fairly elaborate (and pretty kewl) show-and-tells. An interesting article today on Rensselaer ECSE professor Rich Radke’s experience has some details on CSSG goals and methods:
The multi-year program familiarizes up-and-coming faculty from American universities with DoD practices, challenges, and risks. Participants are encouraged to view their own research through this new perspective, and then to explore and develop technologies that have the potential to transition innovative and revolutionary computer science and technology advances to the government.
“The basic idea is to expose young faculty to Department of Defense-related activities, via briefings by military and intelligence officers and field trips to military and industrial bases,” Radke said. “It is truly a hard-core experience filled with days of interesting briefings and up-close show-and-tell with vehicles and equipment.”
Read the whole piece for details of his adventures.
2007 was the first year for the CSSG and the $4.5 million program supported about a dozen young researchers. DARPA has requested an increase in the program for FY 08 ($7 million) and FY 09 ($7.7 million), so hopefully we’ll see that number start to rise.
The DARPA CSSG program is one part of addressing the overall problem. The larger concern is the importance of bringing DARPA back into the university research fold — not because it would benefit academic researchers, but because it impacts the mission success of the Department of Defense (and hence our national security). A number of factors suggest that maybe it’s time to focus on the goal of increasing mindshare of the best brains working on U.S. defense-related problems. For one, because of U.S. visa policies, increasingly the best minds in the world won’t necessarily be coming to the U.S. Second, the research capacity of our potential adversaries increases daily. And finally, the increase in foreign investment in U.S. university research departments means that competition for U.S. university mindshare is only increasing, and in some cases, maybe from countries we’d rather not gain a competitive leg-up on us. So, programs like CSSG are really important. But maybe so are some bigger policy issues across the agency….
Recognizing that the Pentagon’s science and technology investment “may be inadequate to meet the imposing security threats that challenge our Nation and may not be adequately robust to take advantage of key scientific and technological opportunities that offer breakthrough advantages to our warfighters,” John Young, the current Director of Defense Research and Engineering, has written a pretty remarkable memo to the Secretary of Defense asking for a substantial increase in funding. In his request, he singles out several “priority science and technology areas,” along with about $9.5 billion in suggested increases. IT R&D figures prominently in his “straw man” proposal: Foundational Sciences (including computing sciences) — $300 – $500 M a year increase (he notes that DOD has been “coasting on the basic science investments of the last century” and writes what we’ve been saying for quite a while: “The DOD must dramatically re-energize and re-invigorate the nation’s foremost scientific minds, especially those in early and mid-career, to focus on discovery, innovation, and synthesis in the physical and analytical sciences most crucial to our Nation’s security.”) Information Warfare — $100-200 M per year increase Information Assurance – $100-200 M per year increase Networking Technologies — $40-70 M per year increase Organiziation, Fusion, and Mining Large Data Sets — $40-60M per year increase Software Development Technology — $40-70M per year increase Autonomous Operation of Networks of Unmanned Vehicles in Complex Environments — $100 M per year Disparate Sensors, Communication and Spectrum Management — $500 M per year
The memo containing the complete list of priorities is available from InsideDefense.com (subscription required). Overall, Young is proposing about $9.5 billion in increases from FY09-FY13 that would get DOD S&T spending close to 3 percent of the agency’s budget (it’s at about 2.2 percent right now). While there’s no guarantee that the comptroller or the SecDef will give him anywhere close to that amount (though the current SecDef is perhaps more sympathetic to S&T than his predecessor), this sort of stage-setting from the DDR&E is pretty remarkable.
InsideDefense also has an article (sub. req’d) detailing the memo with some reaction from think-tanky-types, which is also worth reading if you’ve got a subscription.
Forbes.com has an interesting article about a survey on the role of women in patents. The survey (PDF), from the National Center for Women & Information Technology, shows that patents by mixed-gender teams are cited more often than those of single-gender teams.
Not a lot of new information in the article but it points out something that CRA and NCWIT have been saying for a long time: a diverse workforce is an asset to American business.
“Our data show that diversity of thought matters to innovation,” says NCWIT Chief Executive Lucinda Sanders, who holds six telecom software patents. “We can say involving women is important because women are half the population and have good ideas, but our study shows the impact for companies.”
John Schwartz of the New York Times has an interesting piece today on the rise in complexity of networked applications and the risks that complexity poses. Headlined Who Needs Hackers?, the piece makes the point that the biggest threat to these systems isn’t malicious users, but complexity itself. Understanding how these giant interconnected systems work (or not) is a great challenge for the community.
“We have gone from fairly simple computing architectures to massively distributed, massively interconnected and interdependent networks,” [Andreas M. Antonopoulos, a founding partner at Nemertes Research] said, adding that as a result, flaws have become increasingly hard to predict or spot. Simpler systems could be understood and their behavior characterized, he said, but greater complexity brings unintended consequences.
“On the scale we do it, it’s more like forecasting weather,” he said.
The long-awaited follow-up review of the NITRD program — the first since the 1999 PITAC report Investing in Our Future — has been released and is available from the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy. It’s called Leadership Under Challenge: Information Technology R&D in a Competitive World (pdf). We’ve discussed in depth a draft version of the report previously, but this final version is far more fleshed out.
We’ll have more after we’ve had a chance to look at it more thoroughly. But if you don’t have time to read the whole thing, you can just check out the back cover, upon which are printed the committee’s four overarching recommendations:
To sustain U.S. leadership, the Federal government should:
Address the demand for skilled IT professionals by revamping curricula, increasing fellowships, and simplifying visa processes.
Emphasize larger-scale, longer-term, multidisciplinary IT R&D and innovative, higher-risk research
Give priority to R&D in IT systems connected with the physical world, software, digital data, and networking
Develop and implement strategic and technical plans for the NITRD Program
Also check ACM’s Technology Policy Blog where Cameron Wilson has more on IT education and workforce coverage in the report. Update: (9/14/07) — PCAST IT Subcommittee Co-Chair (and CRA Chair) Dan Reed, one of the principal authors of Leadership Under Challenge, has posted his take on the new report. Definitely worth a read.
Previously:
The Department of Defense Research and Engineering released its 2007 Strategic Plan this week. Its pretty high-level and doesnt appear to contain any surprises. The DDR&E strategy focuses on countering four different types of threats with research and engineering efforts: traditional, irregular, catastrophic, and disruptive. The plan acknowledges that the DOD has a pretty good handle on dealing with the traditional (ie, Cold War-oriented) threats, but has much work to do to counter the other three. As a result, DDR&E is shifting its priorities slightly to focus more effort on addressing irregular threats (urban operations, war on terror, etc), catastrophic threats (WMDs), and disruptive technologies (“those that could render our most significant weapons systems less effective”).
Fortunately, the Department still sees both basic research and research in information technologies as critical to all four efforts. In its list of “enabling technologies that should receive the highest level of corporate attention and coordination,” information technology, persistent surveillance technologies, networks and communications, software research, “organization, fusion and mining data,” cognitive enhancements, robotics, autonomous systems technologies, and large data set analysis tools all figure prominently. In fact, IT figures in almost all the DOD’s “desired capabilities” in the plan.
The whole plan can be found here and is worth a read.
The National Coordinating Office for Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) — the ~$3 billion, 14 agency program that constitutes the federal effort in IT research and development — is looking for comment by the end of September on its draft plan for advanced networking research and development. Here’s the notice:
We are seeking your help in revising the Draft Federal Plan for Advanced Networking Research and Development. This document was developed to provide guidance to Federal agency networking programs on networking research priorities over the next 7-8 years. We seek your views on priority areas of networking research and development. Could you, or someone knowledgeable of networking needs in your organization, please review the draft plan and provide us with comments by September 30, 2007?
In January 2007, Dr. John Marburger, Director of OSTP, charged the NSTC Committee on Technology to establish the Interagency Task Force on Advanced Networking (ITFAN). The Charge and Terms of Reference directed ITFAN to develop an interagency Federal Plan for Advanced Networking Research and Development to provide input to the FY 2009 Federal budget planning cycle. A Draft Interim Report was delivered May 15.
To finalize this report we are seeking inputs from the wide spectrum of the networking research and development communities including university, Federal laboratory, and commercial researchers and developers. The final report will provide input to the Federal agencies for the FY 2010 and beyond Federal budget planning cycles. The report including the Charge, Terms of Reference, and findings can be found at the Web site: www.nitrd.gov/advancednetworkingplan
or at: www.nitrd.gov under Whats New, Solicitation for comment
In addition to providing the Draft Interim Report, this Web site provides guidance and formats for providing comments.
Please provide, by September 30, 2007, your comments, suggestions, and additions on the information and networking research priorities to finalize this report. Your comments and perspective are important to provide a broad understanding and perspective on future networking needs and priorities.
If you’ve got something to say about the federal government’s approach to networking research, this is your chance….
The BizTech blog at the Wall Street Journal had a good post today on women in IT. Some of the comments by readers are interesting but some of them are clearly part of the problem. Check it out here.
It’s done! It’s done! By now, I expect that everyone has heard that both the House and Senate have agreed on the conference report for H.R. 2272, The America COMPETES Act and that the measure is headed to the President for his signature.
Word comes from the White House today that the President will sign the bill in a small signing-ceremony tomorrow with the Members of Congress who were instrumental in moving the bill along. While it’s a bit of a bummer that the President isn’t making a big “to-do” about this with representatives from industry and academia and lots of press — it does, after all, enact many portions of his own American Competitiveness Initiative, and it’s also an issue that polls really well, a fact you’d think would be important to both a Congress and a President who could use a few good examples of positive, bi-partisan legislation to show off — the important thing is it’s getting signed. After nearly two years of wrangling over this particular set of proposals — and a lot longer than that to get the Administration and the Congress to understand the import of the problems addressed — the President will sign the bill and its provisions will be law.
That deserves some kudos, back-patting, and maybe one or two loud “whoo-hoo’s.”
Especially because this bill has a lot of good things in it. As Cameron Wilson points out over on the USACM Technology Policy Blog, the bill takes two basic routes to fostering the innovation the country will require to stay competitive in an increasingly global world. It addresses federal support for research — both authorizing large amounts of new funding for three key science agencies (National Science Foundation, NIST, and the Department of Energy’s Office of Science), setting a target to double the agencies budgets over 7 years, and by creating a new high-risk research agency at the Department of Energy (called the Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy, or ARPA-E, in a nod to the DARPA-like character Congress hopes the agency will adopt). And the bill addresses a diversity of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) Education efforts. For these, I’ll simply steal what Cameron has already written:
The bill authorizes $43.3 billion over the next three fiscal years for STEM education programs across the federal government. The variety is impressive ranging from new k-12 teacher programs to new opportunities for undergraduate and graduate STEM students. Here is a sampling of the proposals:
Expands the Robert Noyce program which links students in STEM fields up with education degrees so they can teach STEM in K-12;
Authorizes two new competitive grant programs that will enable partnerships to implement courses of study in mathematics, science, engineering, technology or critical foreign languages in ways that lead to a baccalaureate degree with concurrent teacher certification;
Authorizes competitive grants to increase the number of teachers serving high-need schools and expand access to AP and IB classes and to increase the number of qualified AP and IB teachers in high-need schools; and,
Expands early career grant programs and provides additional support for outstanding young investigators at both NSF and DOE.
In addition, the legislation has several provisions that expand outreach to women and minorities in STEM fields. The lack of females and minorities has been a key problem in computing, so this is another welcome effort.
In addition, the bill contains two particular provisions I wanted to highlight because they’re of particular interest to the computing community:
The first is Section 7024, “High-performance Computing and Networking” (if you’re following along at home (pdf)) — the inclusion of the High-Performance Computing Research and Development Act that has been much discussed on these pages since some of the earliest days of this blog. The bill has been proposed in various forms in every session of Congress since the 106th (we’re now in the 110th) and has never gained the full approval of the Congress — almost always for reasons unrelated to the bill. The bill has, in sessions past, been approved by the House only to languish in the Senate due to jurisdictional fights over other bills, approved by the House Science committee only to run afoul of budget disputes with the GOP Leadership, and been held hostage over fights about NASA between the House and Senate. In fact, until the approval of the conference report last week, it was assumed that this version HPC R&D Act might meet a similar fate as word escaped that some of the Senate conferees thought its inclusion might cause some jurisdictional friction between two Senate committees (Energy and Commerce, who both claim HPC jurisdiction). But those problems were resolved, and the bill includes the full House-approved language, plus an extra section that authorizes efforts in “Advanced Information and Communications Technology Research” at NSF, including research on:
affordable broadband access, including wireless technologies;
network security and reliability;
communications interoperability;,
networking protocols and architectures, including resilience to outages or attacks;
trusted software;
privacy;
nanoelectronics for communications applicaitons;
low-power communications electronics;
implementation of equitable access to natinoal advanced fiber optic research and educational networks in noncontiguous States; and
other areas the Director [of NSF] finds appropriate.
The provision also allows NSF to fund multiyear, multidisciplinary “Centers for Communications Research” to “generate innovative approaches to problems in information and communications technology research.”
Otherwise, the HPC R&D Act remains essentially unchanged, which means it includes two provisions we particularly like: it requires the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy to develop and maintain a research, development, and deployment roadmap for the provision of federal high-performance computing systems; and there’s now an explicit requirement that the President’s advisory committee for IT (now PCAST) review not only the goals of the federal Networking and Information Technology Research and Development program, but the funding levels as well and report the results of that review to Congress every two years.
The second noteworthy provision in the COMPETES bill is one (Sec. 7012) that was originally included in the House-passed NSF Authorization Act of 2007 (H.R. 1867), that should help clarify NSF’s role in supporting efforts that seek to encourage the participation of women and underrepresented groups in computing, science, technology, engineering and mathematics. As we noted back in March, this is a response to long-standing concerns from CRA and other members of the computing and science communities about NSF’s role. Basically, NSF’s general policy is to only support efforts that represent novel approaches. Yet, what’s often needed in these cases isn’t a novel approach, just a sustained one. The House Science and Technology Committee agreed and included language in the NSF Authorization that addresses the issue by allowing the Director of NSF to review such programs one year before their grants expire and issue extensions of up to three years without recompetition to those efforts that appear to be successful at meeting their stated goals. It also emphasizes that the committee believes this sort of effort — maintaining the strength and vitality of the U.S. science and engineering workforce — is appropriately part of the agency’s mission. So, we’re thrilled that the provision survived the conference and will become law with the President’s signature tomorrow.
This is, of course, not the end of innovation efforts in the Congress or the Administration. While this bill sets nice, juicy funding targets for NSF, NIST and DOE Office of Science, it doesn’t actually appropriate a single dime, so the focus will continue to be on House and Senate appropriators as they wind their way through the appropriations process later this year. We’re still expecting a meltdown in that process, so nothing is guaranteed, despite all the supportive words from Congress and the President. And there will be further efforts to address some of the pieces of the various innovation agendas that aren’t represented in H.R. 2272 — like a permanent extension of the R&D tax credit.
But for now, I think it’s probably appropriate to take a deep breath and savor this win for a day or two. This is a big victory for the science community and a long-time coming for those of us who have been working these issues around the Hill over the better part of the last decade. We commend the President and the Congress for having the vision and the commitment to push ahead on these issues, even when it didn’t seem as politically popular as it is today. And we commend the members of the science community for speaking up on these issues, serving on the advisory committees, and partipating in the grassroots efforts to make Congress aware of the issues. Now, just make sure you go out and do world-leading science — take risks, think audaciously…demonstrate as you’ve done so well in the past why America needs to continue to be an incubator for invention, discovery, and innovation.
And keep it tuned here for all the details… 🙂 Update: (8/9/07) — It’s official!:
President George W. Bush signs H.R. 2272, The America Competes Act, Thursday, Aug. 9, 2007, in the Oval Office. Pictured with the President are, from left: Director John Marburger of the Office of Science and Technology Policy; Senator Jeff Bingaman of N.M.; Congressman Bart Gordon of Tenn.; and Senator Pete Domenici of N.M. White House photo by Chris Greenberg Update2: (8/10/07) — Here are the President’s comments about the bill and ACI, as well as an OSTP-produced fact sheet.
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Starting Salaries for CS Grads Continue to Rise
/In: People /by Peter HarshaCRA’s Jay Vegso has the details of the latest National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) survey on the job market for new graduates, which shows CS graduates among best paid among all majors for 2007. CS grads in 2007 earned an average salary offer of $53,051, a 4.5 percent increase over 2006.
Check out the CRA Bulletin for the full list of degrees and salaries….
CS Profs and the DOD
/In: People, Policy, R&D in the Press, Research /by Peter HarshaLong-time readers of this blog, or anyone familiar with CRA’s policy efforts, will know that we’ve spent a lot of time raising concerns about policy shifts at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) that have cut university participation rates in DARPA-funded computer science research. In congressional testimony and blog posts, we’ve pointed out that a shift at DARPA — a focus on nearer-term efforts with an emphasis on go/no-go milestones at relatively short intervals and an increased use of classification — has sharply reduced the amount of DARPA-supported research being performed in U.S. universities. In fact, between FY 2001 and FY 2004 (the last year for which we have good data), the amount of funding from DARPA to U.S. universities for computer science research fell by half — and informal evidence suggests university shares are even lower today.
There are a number of reasons we’re concerned about this trend. For one, DARPA’s diminished support for university CS leaves a hole in the federal IT R&D portfolio — both in funding, but maybe more importantly, in the loss of the “DARPA model” of research support. Since the early 1960s, the country (indeed, the world) has reaped the benefits of the diverse approaches to funding IT research represented by the two leading agencies — NSF and DARPA. While NSF has primarily focused on small grants for individual researchers at a wide range of institutions — and support for computing infrastructure at America’s universities — DARPA’s approach has been to identify key problems of interest to the agency and then assemble and nurture communities of researchers to address them. The combination of models has been enormously beneficial — DARPA-supported research in computing over the last four decades has laid down the foundations for the modern microprocessor, the internet, the graphical user interface, single-user workstations and a whole host of other innovations that have made the U.S. military the best in the world, driven the new economy, changed the conduct of science and enabled whole new scientific disciplines.
But DARPA’s policy shift also impacts its own mission, which is to ensure the U.S. never again suffers the sort of technological surprise marked by the Soviet launch of Sputnik (which motivated the establishment of the agency nearly 50 years ago). DARPA’s move away from support of university researchers means that many of the brightest minds of the country (indeed, the world) are no longer working on defense-related problems. This loss of mindshare — the percentage of people working on DARPA-related problems — is very worrisome to those in the community who understand how much of America’s advantage on the battlefield (and in the marketplace) is owed to a network-centric strategy. I hear concerns from the “old guard” in many of America’s top university CS departments that there’s a whole generation of young researchers who have no experience working with DARPA or the Defense Department and who are not attuned to defense problems — a fact that doesn’t bode well for the future of the U.S. technological advantage and DARPA’s goal of preventing technological surprise.
To their credit, the folks at DARPA recognize that this lack of awareness among younger faculty of the types of problems DARPA would really like to solve is a situation that needs addressing. And one way they’re approaching the problem is very direct — they’re finding young faculty with research areas of interest to the agency and, well, taking them on a little tour of the DOD. The Computer Science Study Group, run by the Institute for Defense Analysis for DARPA, serves to “acclimate a generation of researchers to the needs and priorities of the DOD,” by mentoring, holding workshops, field trips to DOD facilities and fairly elaborate (and pretty kewl) show-and-tells. An interesting article today on Rensselaer ECSE professor Rich Radke’s experience has some details on CSSG goals and methods:
Read the whole piece for details of his adventures.
2007 was the first year for the CSSG and the $4.5 million program supported about a dozen young researchers. DARPA has requested an increase in the program for FY 08 ($7 million) and FY 09 ($7.7 million), so hopefully we’ll see that number start to rise.
The DARPA CSSG program is one part of addressing the overall problem. The larger concern is the importance of bringing DARPA back into the university research fold — not because it would benefit academic researchers, but because it impacts the mission success of the Department of Defense (and hence our national security). A number of factors suggest that maybe it’s time to focus on the goal of increasing mindshare of the best brains working on U.S. defense-related problems. For one, because of U.S. visa policies, increasingly the best minds in the world won’t necessarily be coming to the U.S. Second, the research capacity of our potential adversaries increases daily. And finally, the increase in foreign investment in U.S. university research departments means that competition for U.S. university mindshare is only increasing, and in some cases, maybe from countries we’d rather not gain a competitive leg-up on us. So, programs like CSSG are really important. But maybe so are some bigger policy issues across the agency….
DDR&E Asks SECDEF for Lots More S&T Money
/In: Funding, Policy, Research, Security /by Peter HarshaRecognizing that the Pentagon’s science and technology investment “may be inadequate to meet the imposing security threats that challenge our Nation and may not be adequately robust to take advantage of key scientific and technological opportunities that offer breakthrough advantages to our warfighters,” John Young, the current Director of Defense Research and Engineering, has written a pretty remarkable memo to the Secretary of Defense asking for a substantial increase in funding. In his request, he singles out several “priority science and technology areas,” along with about $9.5 billion in suggested increases. IT R&D figures prominently in his “straw man” proposal:
Foundational Sciences (including computing sciences) — $300 – $500 M a year increase (he notes that DOD has been “coasting on the basic science investments of the last century” and writes what we’ve been saying for quite a while: “The DOD must dramatically re-energize and re-invigorate the nation’s foremost scientific minds, especially those in early and mid-career, to focus on discovery, innovation, and synthesis in the physical and analytical sciences most crucial to our Nation’s security.”)
Information Warfare — $100-200 M per year increase
Information Assurance – $100-200 M per year increase
Networking Technologies — $40-70 M per year increase
Organiziation, Fusion, and Mining Large Data Sets — $40-60M per year increase
Software Development Technology — $40-70M per year increase
Autonomous Operation of Networks of Unmanned Vehicles in Complex Environments — $100 M per year
Disparate Sensors, Communication and Spectrum Management — $500 M per year
The memo containing the complete list of priorities is available from InsideDefense.com (subscription required). Overall, Young is proposing about $9.5 billion in increases from FY09-FY13 that would get DOD S&T spending close to 3 percent of the agency’s budget (it’s at about 2.2 percent right now). While there’s no guarantee that the comptroller or the SecDef will give him anywhere close to that amount (though the current SecDef is perhaps more sympathetic to S&T than his predecessor), this sort of stage-setting from the DDR&E is pretty remarkable.
InsideDefense also has an article (sub. req’d) detailing the memo with some reaction from think-tanky-types, which is also worth reading if you’ve got a subscription.
Patent team diversity good for business
/In: Diversity in Computing, R&D in the Press, Research /by MelissaNorrForbes.com has an interesting article about a survey on the role of women in patents. The survey (PDF), from the National Center for Women & Information Technology, shows that patents by mixed-gender teams are cited more often than those of single-gender teams.
Not a lot of new information in the article but it points out something that CRA and NCWIT have been saying for a long time: a diverse workforce is an asset to American business.
Its worth a read.
NY Times on the Challenges of Network Complexity
/In: R&D in the Press, Research, Security /by Peter HarshaJohn Schwartz of the New York Times has an interesting piece today on the rise in complexity of networked applications and the risks that complexity poses. Headlined Who Needs Hackers?, the piece makes the point that the biggest threat to these systems isn’t malicious users, but complexity itself. Understanding how these giant interconnected systems work (or not) is a great challenge for the community.
By the way, addressing this challenge is one of the goals of those proposing the Global Enivronment for Networking Innovations research network that we’ve discussed before in this space.
PCAST Report on the Federal Networking and IT R&D Program Released
/In: Funding, People, Policy, Research /by Peter HarshaThe long-awaited follow-up review of the NITRD program — the first since the 1999 PITAC report Investing in Our Future — has been released and is available from the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy. It’s called Leadership Under Challenge: Information Technology R&D in a Competitive World (pdf). We’ve discussed in depth a draft version of the report previously, but this final version is far more fleshed out.
We’ll have more after we’ve had a chance to look at it more thoroughly. But if you don’t have time to read the whole thing, you can just check out the back cover, upon which are printed the committee’s four overarching recommendations:
Also check ACM’s Technology Policy Blog where Cameron Wilson has more on IT education and workforce coverage in the report.
Update: (9/14/07) — PCAST IT Subcommittee Co-Chair (and CRA Chair) Dan Reed, one of the principal authors of Leadership Under Challenge, has posted his take on the new report. Definitely worth a read.
Previously:
DDR&E Strategic Plan Released
/In: Misc., Policy, Research, Security /by MelissaNorrThe Department of Defense Research and Engineering released its 2007 Strategic Plan this week. Its pretty high-level and doesnt appear to contain any surprises. The DDR&E strategy focuses on countering four different types of threats with research and engineering efforts: traditional, irregular, catastrophic, and disruptive. The plan acknowledges that the DOD has a pretty good handle on dealing with the traditional (ie, Cold War-oriented) threats, but has much work to do to counter the other three. As a result, DDR&E is shifting its priorities slightly to focus more effort on addressing irregular threats (urban operations, war on terror, etc), catastrophic threats (WMDs), and disruptive technologies (“those that could render our most significant weapons systems less effective”).
Fortunately, the Department still sees both basic research and research in information technologies as critical to all four efforts. In its list of “enabling technologies that should receive the highest level of corporate attention and coordination,” information technology, persistent surveillance technologies, networks and communications, software research, “organization, fusion and mining data,” cognitive enhancements, robotics, autonomous systems technologies, and large data set analysis tools all figure prominently. In fact, IT figures in almost all the DOD’s “desired capabilities” in the plan.
The whole plan can be found here and is worth a read.
Feds Seeking Input on Networking Research Plan
/In: Policy, Research /by Peter HarshaThe National Coordinating Office for Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) — the ~$3 billion, 14 agency program that constitutes the federal effort in IT research and development — is looking for comment by the end of September on its draft plan for advanced networking research and development. Here’s the notice:
If you’ve got something to say about the federal government’s approach to networking research, this is your chance….
Women and IT in BizTech
/In: Diversity in Computing /by MelissaNorrThe BizTech blog at the Wall Street Journal had a good post today on women in IT. Some of the comments by readers are interesting but some of them are clearly part of the problem. Check it out here.
President Will Sign COMPETES Act, Will Be Law Tomorrow!
/In: American Competitiveness Initiative, Diversity in Computing, Funding, Policy, R&D in the Press /by Peter HarshaIt’s done! It’s done! By now, I expect that everyone has heard that both the House and Senate have agreed on the conference report for H.R. 2272, The America COMPETES Act and that the measure is headed to the President for his signature.
Word comes from the White House today that the President will sign the bill in a small signing-ceremony tomorrow with the Members of Congress who were instrumental in moving the bill along. While it’s a bit of a bummer that the President isn’t making a big “to-do” about this with representatives from industry and academia and lots of press — it does, after all, enact many portions of his own American Competitiveness Initiative, and it’s also an issue that polls really well, a fact you’d think would be important to both a Congress and a President who could use a few good examples of positive, bi-partisan legislation to show off — the important thing is it’s getting signed. After nearly two years of wrangling over this particular set of proposals — and a lot longer than that to get the Administration and the Congress to understand the import of the problems addressed — the President will sign the bill and its provisions will be law.
That deserves some kudos, back-patting, and maybe one or two loud “whoo-hoo’s.”
Especially because this bill has a lot of good things in it. As Cameron Wilson points out over on the USACM Technology Policy Blog, the bill takes two basic routes to fostering the innovation the country will require to stay competitive in an increasingly global world. It addresses federal support for research — both authorizing large amounts of new funding for three key science agencies (National Science Foundation, NIST, and the Department of Energy’s Office of Science), setting a target to double the agencies budgets over 7 years, and by creating a new high-risk research agency at the Department of Energy (called the Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy, or ARPA-E, in a nod to the DARPA-like character Congress hopes the agency will adopt). And the bill addresses a diversity of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) Education efforts. For these, I’ll simply steal what Cameron has already written:
In addition, the bill contains two particular provisions I wanted to highlight because they’re of particular interest to the computing community:
The first is Section 7024, “High-performance Computing and Networking” (if you’re following along at home (pdf)) — the inclusion of the High-Performance Computing Research and Development Act that has been much discussed on these pages since some of the earliest days of this blog. The bill has been proposed in various forms in every session of Congress since the 106th (we’re now in the 110th) and has never gained the full approval of the Congress — almost always for reasons unrelated to the bill. The bill has, in sessions past, been approved by the House only to languish in the Senate due to jurisdictional fights over other bills, approved by the House Science committee only to run afoul of budget disputes with the GOP Leadership, and been held hostage over fights about NASA between the House and Senate. In fact, until the approval of the conference report last week, it was assumed that this version HPC R&D Act might meet a similar fate as word escaped that some of the Senate conferees thought its inclusion might cause some jurisdictional friction between two Senate committees (Energy and Commerce, who both claim HPC jurisdiction). But those problems were resolved, and the bill includes the full House-approved language, plus an extra section that authorizes efforts in “Advanced Information and Communications Technology Research” at NSF, including research on:
The provision also allows NSF to fund multiyear, multidisciplinary “Centers for Communications Research” to “generate innovative approaches to problems in information and communications technology research.”
Otherwise, the HPC R&D Act remains essentially unchanged, which means it includes two provisions we particularly like: it requires the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy to develop and maintain a research, development, and deployment roadmap for the provision of federal high-performance computing systems; and there’s now an explicit requirement that the President’s advisory committee for IT (now PCAST) review not only the goals of the federal Networking and Information Technology Research and Development program, but the funding levels as well and report the results of that review to Congress every two years.
The second noteworthy provision in the COMPETES bill is one (Sec. 7012) that was originally included in the House-passed NSF Authorization Act of 2007 (H.R. 1867), that should help clarify NSF’s role in supporting efforts that seek to encourage the participation of women and underrepresented groups in computing, science, technology, engineering and mathematics. As we noted back in March, this is a response to long-standing concerns from CRA and other members of the computing and science communities about NSF’s role. Basically, NSF’s general policy is to only support efforts that represent novel approaches. Yet, what’s often needed in these cases isn’t a novel approach, just a sustained one. The House Science and Technology Committee agreed and included language in the NSF Authorization that addresses the issue by allowing the Director of NSF to review such programs one year before their grants expire and issue extensions of up to three years without recompetition to those efforts that appear to be successful at meeting their stated goals. It also emphasizes that the committee believes this sort of effort — maintaining the strength and vitality of the U.S. science and engineering workforce — is appropriately part of the agency’s mission. So, we’re thrilled that the provision survived the conference and will become law with the President’s signature tomorrow.
This is, of course, not the end of innovation efforts in the Congress or the Administration. While this bill sets nice, juicy funding targets for NSF, NIST and DOE Office of Science, it doesn’t actually appropriate a single dime, so the focus will continue to be on House and Senate appropriators as they wind their way through the appropriations process later this year. We’re still expecting a meltdown in that process, so nothing is guaranteed, despite all the supportive words from Congress and the President. And there will be further efforts to address some of the pieces of the various innovation agendas that aren’t represented in H.R. 2272 — like a permanent extension of the R&D tax credit.
But for now, I think it’s probably appropriate to take a deep breath and savor this win for a day or two. This is a big victory for the science community and a long-time coming for those of us who have been working these issues around the Hill over the better part of the last decade. We commend the President and the Congress for having the vision and the commitment to push ahead on these issues, even when it didn’t seem as politically popular as it is today. And we commend the members of the science community for speaking up on these issues, serving on the advisory committees, and partipating in the grassroots efforts to make Congress aware of the issues. Now, just make sure you go out and do world-leading science — take risks, think audaciously…demonstrate as you’ve done so well in the past why America needs to continue to be an incubator for invention, discovery, and innovation.
And keep it tuned here for all the details… 🙂
Update: (8/9/07) — It’s official!:
President George W. Bush signs H.R. 2272, The America Competes Act, Thursday, Aug. 9, 2007, in the Oval Office. Pictured with the President are, from left: Director John Marburger of the Office of Science and Technology Policy; Senator Jeff Bingaman of N.M.; Congressman Bart Gordon of Tenn.; and Senator Pete Domenici of N.M. White House photo by Chris Greenberg
Update2: (8/10/07) — Here are the President’s comments about the bill and ACI, as well as an OSTP-produced fact sheet.