Just a quick placeholder here…. The House Science and Technology Committee is holding a hearing today on “Globalization of R&D and Innovation.” Here’s the hearing website. CRA has provided written testimony for the hearing record, which you can read here (pdf).
We’ll have more when we’re back from the hearing.
The Commerce, Justice and Science appropriations subcommittee marked up their portion of the appropriations bills yesterday evening. The full Appropriations Committee will mark up the bill on Monday, June 18. NSF did very well with a total appropriation of $6.509 billion, an increase of 10 percent over FY07 and $80 million more than the President requested.
Research and Related Activities got $5.14 billion in the subcommittee markup7.9 percent over FY07 and $8 million more than the Presidents request (but that $8 million is apparently going to the EPSCoR program, which the committee has apparently moved into R&RA from Education and Human Resources). Education and Human Resources received $822.6 million or 17.9 percent over FY07 and $72 million over the request for FY08. Major Research Equipment and Facilities Construction received $244.7 million, the level that the President requested and 28.2 percent more than FY07.
No details were provided for the various programs within each account but well know more as the process moves forward through the House and when the Senate takes it up and well keep you updated here.
DARPA once liked to boast that it took on impossible problems and wasn’t interested in the merely difficult. But in recent years, the scientists argued, DARPA has become nearly as cautious and prone to micromanagement as the government’s science behemoth, the National Institutes of Health. Before making most of its grants, the NIH demands such detailed evidence of success that it is “funding the past, not the future,” one scientist complained.
“DARPA seems to be shifting to the NIH model — more near-term, more risk-averse,” said Don Ingber, a professor of pathology at Harvard.
For more background, in addition to all the links above, be sure to check out CRA’s Information Technology R&D page which has tons of links to previous press reports on the issue….
The so-called “302(b) allocations” for the House Appropriations committee have been released and they look very positive for those of us anxious to see whether Congress will continue its commitment to double the budgets of some key federal science agencies. The 302(b)’s are the allocations each of the subcommittees responsible for producing the 12 appropriations bills necessary to keep the federal government operating each year gets to spend on their particular bill. If the Budget Resolution determined the overall size of the federal discretionary spending “pie,” the 302(b) allocations determine the size of each slice.
For FY 2008, the subcommittees that have jurisdiction over some of the science agencies we care about — NSF, NIST, DOE Sci, NIH, NASA, and DOD — have each gotten pretty reasonable-sized slices. The House Commerce, Science, Justice subcommittee, which determines funding for NSF, NIST, NASA and NOAA, received from the Congressional leadership a bump of $3 billion to their allocation compared with last year — $53.35 billion for FY 08 vs. $50.34 for FY 07 — a level $2.11 billion higher than the President requested for FY 08.
The Energy and Water Committee received a $1.30 billion bump — enough to support a healthy increase to the Department of Energy’s Office of Science in the first FY 08 appropriations bill to get marked up, as we reported previously. The Labor/HHS/Education committee, which funds NIH, received a $5.53 billion bump — more than $9 billion higher than the Administration requested for FY 08.
While these increases don’t guarantee the appropriators will continue Congress’ commitment to doubling the budgets of NSF, NIST and DOE Sci, as called for in both the President’s American Competitiveness Initiative and the Democratic Innovation Agenda, it certainly does make the job of finding money to fund the increases a whole lot easier. We’ll keep an eye on the process and let you know how it goes. So far, so good.
While we see articles about the decline of computer science majors, particularly women, almost daily, the latest issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education has an interesting piece (sub. reqd.) about what a couple of universities are doing to attract and retain women in computer science programs.
Lucy Sanders of the National Center for Women in Information Technology has perhaps the key quote in the piece about the problem of recruiting and retaining computer science majors. “You walk into an intro class, and you start learning a programming language that eventually gets a machine to spit out a string of numbers,” says Lucy Sanders, chief executive of the women-and-technology center. “That’s not what computing is about. Computing is about solving real problems in medicine, or oceanography, and that’s what people who do it love. But the intro courses don’t teach that at all.”
We’ve also noted on CRA’s Computing Research Policy Tumble Log a couple of related articles in the last few days. One from Ars Technica, and another that’s an AP story. Update: The article does confuse enrollment and interest in computing at one point. Interest in computer science as a major among women dropped 70 percent between 2000 and 2005, not actual enrollment….
The Department of Energy’sOffice of Science would see significant increases under the FY 2008 House Energy and Water Development Appropriations bill marked up by the E&W Approps Subcommittee yesterday. Though we don’t yet have all the detail about increases in individual accounts, we do know that the Office of Science would see an overall increase to $4.516 billion in FY 2008, which is $120 million above the President’s request for FY 2008 and $719 million above the FY 2007 level, or an increase of 18.9 percent.
Presumably the increases in DOE Science will be spread reasonably equitably throughout the agency, which would mean the agency’s Advanced Scientific Computing Research program should see an equally significant increase in FY 08. But we won’t see real detail until the full appropriations committee marks up the bill in June.
For now, it’s good to know that the appropriators appear prepared to continue their commitment to doubling the budgets of key federal science agencies, as spelled out in the President’s American Competitiveness Initiative and the Democratic Innovation Agenda. Next up should be the House version of the Commerce, Science, Justice appropriations, which will include funding for the National Science Foundation, National Institute of Standards and Technology, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. We’ll have all the details as we get ’em…
Link to E&W Appropriations Chair Peter Visclosky’s (D-IN) statement on the markup (pdf). (Doesn’t say much about the research portion of the bill, however.)
The National Science Foundation today announced it has selected BBN Technologies to create and run the project office for its proposed Global Environment for Networking Innovations (GENI) research facility. BBN, which won the original government contract to build the ARPANET in 1969, will manage the planning and design of the GENI network facility, in consultation with the research community and the GENI Science Council.
GENI is conceived as a large-scale research instrument to test and mature a wide range of research ideas in data communications and distributed systems. While GENI itself isn’t a replacement for the current Internet (or any other communications technology), it is designed to create an environment within which researchers can pursue ideas and develop technologies that might lead to an Internet fundamentally better than the current one.
Initially, the job of the GENI Program Office (GPO) will be to develop detailed engineering plans and costs for the facility. NSF’s original solicitation for the GPO estimated a budget of up to $12.5 million a year for four years ($2.5 million a year for administrative costs, $10 million for development and prototyping). GENI still has quite a few hurdles to jump in the NSF approval process, but the naming of a GPO contractor, coupled with the CCC’s naming of a GENI Science Council in March, should provide more heft to the effort.
The GPO is online now and includes this useful FAQ.
The BBN press release is here.
NSF’s Press Release: Three Wishes for a Future Internet? GENI Project Will Soon Be At Your Command
The House and Senate have announced a conference agreement of the Joint Budget Resolution for FY08 (PDF), a key step in the annual appropriations process once it’s passed by both chambers. The General Science, Space and Technology account, known as Function 250, is the total budget amount for NASA (except aviation programs), NSF, DOE Office of Science and DHS S&T. Research funding in Function 250 fares well in the conference agreement, growing by $1.7 billion over the FY 2007 level, which budget committee members intend to use to provide significant increases for NSF and the DOE Office of Science and fully fund the Presidents FY2008 request for NASA at $17.3 billion (according to the report accompanying the resolution).
While this sounds like great news, like everything in Washington, it isnt nearly as simple as it sounds. As we wrote in this space on the FY07 budget resolution (PDF), the budget resolution really only helps the appropriators and the congressional leadership set the overall level of funding for the year, not the agency-by-agency numbers. The leadership will use the resolution to determine how much money goes to each appropriations subcommittee and the subcommittee will then decide how much each agency in their jurisdiction gets. This all means that we need to continue working to ensure that everyone on the Hill knows how important basic research funding is and that the Appropriations bills should fully fund the American Competitiveness Initiative.
We will keep you updated as the Appropriations process moves forward.
The House Armed Services Committee Friday passed its version of the FY 2008 Defense Authorization bill (H.R. 1585). The authorization includes increases for Army and Navy basic research and keeps Air Force basic research funding level. Defense wide basic research, which includes DARPA, is up $22.25 million with an increase of $8 million for semiconductor focus research in the Defense Research Sciences.
The committee released a report Monday for the authorization bill and it includes language stating the committees concern with the Department of Defense science and technology research budget requests, specifically basic research. The committee requests a report from the Secretary of Defense that shall also outline a long-term, strategic plan for how the Department believes a sustained increase in funding for DOD basic research could be effectively utilized.
It also included language regarding the education programs at the department and shifted funds between the programs that the department requested while staying at the same total level of funding. The committee gave a lower authorization to the Pre-engineering modules, a new program, at $3.5 million and transferred that money to the Science, Mathematics, and Research for Transformation (SMART) funded at $27 million, Materials World Modules (MWM) funded at $3.5 million, and the National Security Science and Engineering Faculty Fellowships funded at $7.4 million.
Thanks to Jason Van Wey of MIT for providing the breakdown and report language information.
Last June, CRA and he National Institutes of Health jointly hosted a workshop motivated by the following two observations (from the 2004 NIH Roadmap):
The success of computational biology is shown by the fact that computation has become integral and critical to modern biomedical research.
…
Because computation is integral to biomedical research, its deficiencies have become significant limiters on the rate of progress of biomedical research.
It seems rational to conclude (as the attendees of the workshop concluded) that the productive synergies between the two fields can accelerate research in both, but only if the challenges are addressed through cooperative effort. So, the workshop attendees — leaders in computing and biomedicine, along with NIH Program Directors — aimed to address these challenges by developing a “list of focused recommendations and action items that would guide the NIH and computing communities in addressing current impediments to fully realizing effective collaborations at the interface between computing and biomedical research.” Those recommendations are now available (pdf) as a 14 page report.
The workshop participants ultimately came to agreement on six recommendations, which are listed in some detail in the report but that I’ll attempt to summarize here:
Recommendation 1: NIH, the National Science Foundation and Department of Energy Office of Science should support biomedicine and computing research collaborations by:
Initiating small, interdisciplinary planning grants that require conceptual proof-of-principal, but minimal or no preliminary results and that involve both computing and biomedical researchers as full partners;
creating (or expanding current programs) to fund computing and biomedicine research projects at the PI level, as well as larger collaborative projects with multiple PIs, that reflect the maturation of teams and projects from the small grants above;
establishing a cross-disciplinary, multiagency working group to identify, explore and recommend individual agency opportunities and define and coordinate joint agency programs.
Recommendation 2: Federal agencies should enhance support for “training at the interface.” These mechanisms would include summer schools for students, post-docs, and professors; increased emphasis on extant undergrad and grad training programs; and funding to transform existing “silo” disciplinary education into new, multidisciplinary structures that support the integration of computing and biomedicine.
Recommendation 3: NIH should create a cross-institute software program to create and maintain high-quality, well-engineered biomedical computing software, to assess the quality of existing software, and to create and support for repositories.
Recommendation 4: NIH should fund a number of large, distributed transformational centers — distinct from and somewhat orthogonal to the NIH National Centers for Biomedical Computing program — to act as “expeditions to the future.
Recommendation 5: NIH should invest in a range of computing research technologies (specified in detail in the report) that are motivated by current and future biomedical research and healthcare needs.
Recommendation 6: NIH, NSF, DOE and CRA should create a joint “Interface Task Force” (ITF) — perhaps using the Computing Community Consortium to involve the community — to recommend specific ways to support advances at the interface between computing and biomedicine.
The report includes much more detail for each of the recommendations, including a timeline for implementation and an estimated cost for each. The report also includes more detail on the particular computing research areas the participants thought deserved particular attention.
The whole thing is only 14 pages and is a quick read — well worth it.
House Science Committee on Globalization of R&D
/In: Policy /by Peter HarshaJust a quick placeholder here…. The House Science and Technology Committee is holding a hearing today on “Globalization of R&D and Innovation.” Here’s the hearing website. CRA has provided written testimony for the hearing record, which you can read here (pdf).
We’ll have more when we’re back from the hearing.
Initial NSF Approps Numbers
/In: American Competitiveness Initiative, Funding, FY08 Appropriations /by MelissaNorrThe Commerce, Justice and Science appropriations subcommittee marked up their portion of the appropriations bills yesterday evening. The full Appropriations Committee will mark up the bill on Monday, June 18. NSF did very well with a total appropriation of $6.509 billion, an increase of 10 percent over FY07 and $80 million more than the President requested.
Research and Related Activities got $5.14 billion in the subcommittee markup7.9 percent over FY07 and $8 million more than the Presidents request (but that $8 million is apparently going to the EPSCoR program, which the committee has apparently moved into R&RA from Education and Human Resources). Education and Human Resources received $822.6 million or 17.9 percent over FY07 and $72 million over the request for FY08. Major Research Equipment and Facilities Construction received $244.7 million, the level that the President requested and 28.2 percent more than FY07.
No details were provided for the various programs within each account but well know more as the process moves forward through the House and when the Senate takes it up and well keep you updated here.
Washington Post Op-Ed on DARPA Short-term Thinking
/In: R&D in the Press /by Peter HarshaThe computing community has had these concerns for quite a while, so it’s not surprising to see other disciplines noting similar issues with DARPA in this OpEd written by David Ignatius in Friday’s Washington Post:
For more background, in addition to all the links above, be sure to check out CRA’s Information Technology R&D page which has tons of links to previous press reports on the issue….
House Appropriations Allocations Are Out
/In: American Competitiveness Initiative, Funding, FY08 Appropriations /by Peter HarshaThe so-called “302(b) allocations” for the House Appropriations committee have been released and they look very positive for those of us anxious to see whether Congress will continue its commitment to double the budgets of some key federal science agencies. The 302(b)’s are the allocations each of the subcommittees responsible for producing the 12 appropriations bills necessary to keep the federal government operating each year gets to spend on their particular bill. If the Budget Resolution determined the overall size of the federal discretionary spending “pie,” the 302(b) allocations determine the size of each slice.
For FY 2008, the subcommittees that have jurisdiction over some of the science agencies we care about — NSF, NIST, DOE Sci, NIH, NASA, and DOD — have each gotten pretty reasonable-sized slices. The House Commerce, Science, Justice subcommittee, which determines funding for NSF, NIST, NASA and NOAA, received from the Congressional leadership a bump of $3 billion to their allocation compared with last year — $53.35 billion for FY 08 vs. $50.34 for FY 07 — a level $2.11 billion higher than the President requested for FY 08.
The Energy and Water Committee received a $1.30 billion bump — enough to support a healthy increase to the Department of Energy’s Office of Science in the first FY 08 appropriations bill to get marked up, as we reported previously. The Labor/HHS/Education committee, which funds NIH, received a $5.53 billion bump — more than $9 billion higher than the Administration requested for FY 08.
While these increases don’t guarantee the appropriators will continue Congress’ commitment to doubling the budgets of NSF, NIST and DOE Sci, as called for in both the President’s American Competitiveness Initiative and the Democratic Innovation Agenda, it certainly does make the job of finding money to fund the increases a whole lot easier. We’ll keep an eye on the process and let you know how it goes. So far, so good.
Attracting Women to Computer Science
/In: Diversity in Computing, People /by MelissaNorrWhile we see articles about the decline of computer science majors, particularly women, almost daily, the latest issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education has an interesting piece (sub. reqd.) about what a couple of universities are doing to attract and retain women in computer science programs.
Lucy Sanders of the National Center for Women in Information Technology has perhaps the key quote in the piece about the problem of recruiting and retaining computer science majors. “You walk into an intro class, and you start learning a programming language that eventually gets a machine to spit out a string of numbers,” says Lucy Sanders, chief executive of the women-and-technology center. “That’s not what computing is about. Computing is about solving real problems in medicine, or oceanography, and that’s what people who do it love. But the intro courses don’t teach that at all.”
We’ve also noted on CRA’s Computing Research Policy Tumble Log a couple of related articles in the last few days. One from Ars Technica, and another that’s an AP story.
Update: The article does confuse enrollment and interest in computing at one point. Interest in computer science as a major among women dropped 70 percent between 2000 and 2005, not actual enrollment….
First FY08 Approps Numbers: DOE Office of Science Does Well
/In: American Competitiveness Initiative, Funding, FY08 Appropriations, Policy /by Peter HarshaThe Department of Energy’s Office of Science would see significant increases under the FY 2008 House Energy and Water Development Appropriations bill marked up by the E&W Approps Subcommittee yesterday. Though we don’t yet have all the detail about increases in individual accounts, we do know that the Office of Science would see an overall increase to $4.516 billion in FY 2008, which is $120 million above the President’s request for FY 2008 and $719 million above the FY 2007 level, or an increase of 18.9 percent.
Presumably the increases in DOE Science will be spread reasonably equitably throughout the agency, which would mean the agency’s Advanced Scientific Computing Research program should see an equally significant increase in FY 08. But we won’t see real detail until the full appropriations committee marks up the bill in June.
For now, it’s good to know that the appropriators appear prepared to continue their commitment to doubling the budgets of key federal science agencies, as spelled out in the President’s American Competitiveness Initiative and the Democratic Innovation Agenda. Next up should be the House version of the Commerce, Science, Justice appropriations, which will include funding for the National Science Foundation, National Institute of Standards and Technology, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. We’ll have all the details as we get ’em…
BBN Wins Bid to Run GENI Program Office
/In: Computing Community Consortium (CCC), Funding, Research /by Peter HarshaThe National Science Foundation today announced it has selected BBN Technologies to create and run the project office for its proposed Global Environment for Networking Innovations (GENI) research facility. BBN, which won the original government contract to build the ARPANET in 1969, will manage the planning and design of the GENI network facility, in consultation with the research community and the GENI Science Council.
GENI is conceived as a large-scale research instrument to test and mature a wide range of research ideas in data communications and distributed systems. While GENI itself isn’t a replacement for the current Internet (or any other communications technology), it is designed to create an environment within which researchers can pursue ideas and develop technologies that might lead to an Internet fundamentally better than the current one.
Initially, the job of the GENI Program Office (GPO) will be to develop detailed engineering plans and costs for the facility. NSF’s original solicitation for the GPO estimated a budget of up to $12.5 million a year for four years ($2.5 million a year for administrative costs, $10 million for development and prototyping). GENI still has quite a few hurdles to jump in the NSF approval process, but the naming of a GPO contractor, coupled with the CCC’s naming of a GENI Science Council in March, should provide more heft to the effort.
The GPO is online now and includes this useful FAQ.
The BBN press release is here.
NSF’s Press Release: Three Wishes for a Future Internet? GENI Project Will Soon Be At Your Command
FY08 Joint Budget Conference
/In: American Competitiveness Initiative, Funding, FY08 Appropriations /by MelissaNorrThe House and Senate have announced a conference agreement of the Joint Budget Resolution for FY08 (PDF), a key step in the annual appropriations process once it’s passed by both chambers. The General Science, Space and Technology account, known as Function 250, is the total budget amount for NASA (except aviation programs), NSF, DOE Office of Science and DHS S&T. Research funding in Function 250 fares well in the conference agreement, growing by $1.7 billion over the FY 2007 level, which budget committee members intend to use to provide significant increases for NSF and the DOE Office of Science and fully fund the Presidents FY2008 request for NASA at $17.3 billion (according to the report accompanying the resolution).
While this sounds like great news, like everything in Washington, it isnt nearly as simple as it sounds. As we wrote in this space on the FY07 budget resolution (PDF), the budget resolution really only helps the appropriators and the congressional leadership set the overall level of funding for the year, not the agency-by-agency numbers. The leadership will use the resolution to determine how much money goes to each appropriations subcommittee and the subcommittee will then decide how much each agency in their jurisdiction gets. This all means that we need to continue working to ensure that everyone on the Hill knows how important basic research funding is and that the Appropriations bills should fully fund the American Competitiveness Initiative.
We will keep you updated as the Appropriations process moves forward.
House Committee Passes FY08 Defense Authorization
/In: Funding, FY08 Appropriations /by MelissaNorrThe House Armed Services Committee Friday passed its version of the FY 2008 Defense Authorization bill (H.R. 1585). The authorization includes increases for Army and Navy basic research and keeps Air Force basic research funding level. Defense wide basic research, which includes DARPA, is up $22.25 million with an increase of $8 million for semiconductor focus research in the Defense Research Sciences.
The committee released a report Monday for the authorization bill and it includes language stating the committees concern with the Department of Defense science and technology research budget requests, specifically basic research. The committee requests a report from the Secretary of Defense that shall also outline a long-term, strategic plan for how the Department believes a sustained increase in funding for DOD basic research could be effectively utilized.
It also included language regarding the education programs at the department and shifted funds between the programs that the department requested while staying at the same total level of funding. The committee gave a lower authorization to the Pre-engineering modules, a new program, at $3.5 million and transferred that money to the Science, Mathematics, and Research for Transformation (SMART) funded at $27 million, Materials World Modules (MWM) funded at $3.5 million, and the National Security Science and Engineering Faculty Fellowships funded at $7.4 million.
Thanks to Jason Van Wey of MIT for providing the breakdown and report language information.
Computing Research Challenges in Biomedicine
/In: CRA, Policy, Research /by Peter HarshaLast June, CRA and he National Institutes of Health jointly hosted a workshop motivated by the following two observations (from the 2004 NIH Roadmap):
It seems rational to conclude (as the attendees of the workshop concluded) that the productive synergies between the two fields can accelerate research in both, but only if the challenges are addressed through cooperative effort. So, the workshop attendees — leaders in computing and biomedicine, along with NIH Program Directors — aimed to address these challenges by developing a “list of focused recommendations and action items that would guide the NIH and computing communities in addressing current impediments to fully realizing effective collaborations at the interface between computing and biomedical research.” Those recommendations are now available (pdf) as a 14 page report.
The workshop participants ultimately came to agreement on six recommendations, which are listed in some detail in the report but that I’ll attempt to summarize here:
The report includes much more detail for each of the recommendations, including a timeline for implementation and an estimated cost for each. The report also includes more detail on the particular computing research areas the participants thought deserved particular attention.
The whole thing is only 14 pages and is a quick read — well worth it.
Update: (5/29/07) — Dan Reed has a lot more of the backstory for the report on his blog today.