The Senate began consideration of the Commerce, Justice, Science appropriation bill yesterday but put off further consideration of the bill until October 15. Despite the delay, President Bush has released a Statement of Administration Policy (SAP) stating — no surprise — he will veto the bill if it is passed at the current funding levels.
The bill includes $5.156 billion for NSFs Research and Related Activities including $52 million for the Cyber Enabled Discovery and Innovation program, $244.6 million for Major Research Equipment and Facilities Construction, and $850.6 million for Education and Human Resources Directorate – a $100 million increase over the Presidents request. During consideration, an amendment adding $1 billion to the funding of NASA was passed, bringing NASAs total to $18.5 billion within the bill. The bill includes $863 million for NIST including $110 million for the Manufacturing Extension Programs (MEP) and $100 million for the Advanced Technology Program (ATP).
The Administration has many concerns with this bill although they mostly are with the Commerce and Justice parts of the bill. The SAP does oppose the increase to NASA and the extra $100 million for NSFs EHR. The SAP also states opposition to the funding amounts for the MEP and ATP programs, as he has in recent budget years.
Related posts on this topic can be found here.
Good Op-Ed at Forbes.com about the need to invest in science and math education at the K-12 level to keep the US lead in science and technology. It points out that the current challenge to Americas competitive status is not a single high profile event that can galvanize the population but a slow decline in our education process and commitment to science and technology fields that has been happening for years.
Once again, our nation’s educational system has been called into question, as international assessments indicate that our K-12 students lag far behind their peers from dozens of other nations in science and mathematics.
Furthermore, the impending retirement of baby-boom scientists and engineers trained during the post-Sputnik era has led to concerns over potential high-tech workforce shortages. Only 4.7% of undergraduate degrees awarded in the U.S. are in the field of engineering, compared to a staggering 38.6% of those awarded in China. Clearly, our national commitment to engineering and other high-tech fields has waned. As these jobs are playing a larger and larger part in the world economy, our timing is particularly bad.
Furthermore, their success does not spell doom for the U.S. economy as long as we react accordingly: with public investments that allow our students and workers to compete with their international counterparts. By building a solid bedrock of science and math education in grades K-12, we can assure a problem-solving, technically adroit workforce that will keep the U.S. in a position of global leadership.
Computerworld has fantastic coverage of the 50th anniversary of the Sputnik launch (Oct. 4th, 1957) and why, in a sense, we can thank the Soviets for helping create the conditions that led the U.S. to become the technological superpower we’ve become.
Computerworld’s Gary Anthes’ piece “Happy Birthday Sputnik! (Thanks for the Internet)” does a great job of chronicling how the federal government’s reaction to the surprising Soviet launch created an agency and a research funding culture that proved so extraordinarily productive that nearly every billion-dollar sub-sector of the IT economy today bears its stamp. In the process, he checks in with a number of important figures from computer science who note that the productive culture within DARPA responsible for much of that early innovation seems to have waned — and perhaps isn’t even possible today.
Rather than quote snippets from the piece, I’d just encourage you to read all of it — it’s the piece I would’ve tried to write in honor of Sputnik’s 50th if Anthens hadn’t (I’m glad he did…it’s assuredly better than anything I would’ve come up with).
Two other portions of the coverage are worth checking out, too. Computerworld did a pretty good job of simplifying the CSTB’s “tire tracks” chart that shows the development of technologies from the initial research in university or industry labs to the time the products that resulted became billion-dollar industries.
And there’s a good interview with former (D)ARPA director Charles M. Herzfeld on the state of IT research now.
It’s all definitely worth a read.
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.
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Senate CJS Approps Considered, Veto Threat Issued
/In: American Competitiveness Initiative, Funding, FY08 Appropriations /by MelissaNorrThe Senate began consideration of the Commerce, Justice, Science appropriation bill yesterday but put off further consideration of the bill until October 15. Despite the delay, President Bush has released a Statement of Administration Policy (SAP) stating — no surprise — he will veto the bill if it is passed at the current funding levels.
The bill includes $5.156 billion for NSFs Research and Related Activities including $52 million for the Cyber Enabled Discovery and Innovation program, $244.6 million for Major Research Equipment and Facilities Construction, and $850.6 million for Education and Human Resources Directorate – a $100 million increase over the Presidents request. During consideration, an amendment adding $1 billion to the funding of NASA was passed, bringing NASAs total to $18.5 billion within the bill. The bill includes $863 million for NIST including $110 million for the Manufacturing Extension Programs (MEP) and $100 million for the Advanced Technology Program (ATP).
The Administration has many concerns with this bill although they mostly are with the Commerce and Justice parts of the bill. The SAP does oppose the increase to NASA and the extra $100 million for NSFs EHR. The SAP also states opposition to the funding amounts for the MEP and ATP programs, as he has in recent budget years.
Related posts on this topic can be found here.
Sputnik Anniversary Compels Look at K-12 Education
/In: American Competitiveness Initiative /by MelissaNorrGood Op-Ed at Forbes.com about the need to invest in science and math education at the K-12 level to keep the US lead in science and technology. It points out that the current challenge to Americas competitive status is not a single high profile event that can galvanize the population but a slow decline in our education process and commitment to science and technology fields that has been happening for years.
It also calls on the government to implement the recommendations of the National Science Board report A National Action Plan for Addressing the Critical Needs of the U.S. Science, Technoloogy, Engineering, and Mathematics Education System. (PDF)
Computerworld on Sputnik, DARPA and Computing
/In: Funding, People, Policy, R&D in the Press, Research, Security /by Peter HarshaComputerworld has fantastic coverage of the 50th anniversary of the Sputnik launch (Oct. 4th, 1957) and why, in a sense, we can thank the Soviets for helping create the conditions that led the U.S. to become the technological superpower we’ve become.
Computerworld’s Gary Anthes’ piece “Happy Birthday Sputnik! (Thanks for the Internet)” does a great job of chronicling how the federal government’s reaction to the surprising Soviet launch created an agency and a research funding culture that proved so extraordinarily productive that nearly every billion-dollar sub-sector of the IT economy today bears its stamp. In the process, he checks in with a number of important figures from computer science who note that the productive culture within DARPA responsible for much of that early innovation seems to have waned — and perhaps isn’t even possible today.
Rather than quote snippets from the piece, I’d just encourage you to read all of it — it’s the piece I would’ve tried to write in honor of Sputnik’s 50th if Anthens hadn’t (I’m glad he did…it’s assuredly better than anything I would’ve come up with).
Two other portions of the coverage are worth checking out, too. Computerworld did a pretty good job of simplifying the CSTB’s “tire tracks” chart that shows the development of technologies from the initial research in university or industry labs to the time the products that resulted became billion-dollar industries.
And there’s a good interview with former (D)ARPA director Charles M. Herzfeld on the state of IT research now.
It’s all definitely worth a read.
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.