The National Science Foundation Authorization Act of 2007 (H.R. 1867), which we’ve discussed previously, will be on the House floor today. The bill authorizes appropriations at the agency (which is not the same as actually funding the agency — only the appropriations committee can do that — but is still a necessary (and symbolic) step in getting funding for the agency) at the levels called for in the President’s American Competitiveness Initiative and the Democratic Innovation Agenda — a trajectory that would double the agency’s budget over the next seven years.
It’s likely the bill will pass today without much difficulty. There are, however, a whole slate of amendments proposed, some of which are pretty awful (though not likely to pass). For example, there are amendments from Reps. Scott Garrett (R-NJ) and John Campbell (R-CA) that would specifically prohibit funding of nine already-funded grants in NSF’s Social, Behavioral and Economics directorate, based apparently on their “silly” titles. Here are the grants targeted:
the reproductive aging and symptom experience at midlife among Bangladeshi Immigrants, Sedentees, and White London Neighbors;
the diet and social stratification in ancient Puerto Rico;
archives of Andean Knotted-String Records;
the accuracy in the cross-cultural understanding of others emotions;
bison hunting on the late prehistoric Great Plains;
team versus individual play;
sexual politics of waste in Dakar, Senegal;
social relationships and reproductive strategies of Phayres Leaf Monkeys; and
cognitive model of superstitious belief.
There are a number of reasons amendments like this are a bad idea. The primary one is that the NSF peer-review system, while arguably not perfect (well, far from perfect), is still likely a much more reliable way of choosing meritorious research than Congressional intervention. It’s also pretty reasonable to assert that titles are not the best way to judge the worthiness of research.
Additionally, there’s an interesting (and bad) amendment proposed by Rep. Dave Weldon (R-FL) that would tie any increases in the NSF budget to proportional increases at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The amendment, Weldon says in a press release, would “ensure that NASA’s budget is not raided to fund the NSF increase.” As someone who has been doing science policy work for the better part of a decade, it amuses a little to think of NASA in the role of victim to NSF, as I’ve watched innumerable times in the past as NASA increases swallowed up all the available funding room in VA/HUD appropriations bills that shortchanged NSF and NIST. But the Weldon amendment is an innovative approach to “protecting” NASA, by trying to link the two agencies’ budgets. It might, however, set an awkward precedent. One could imagine linking the National Institutes of Health and NASA, or NIH and NSF, or NSF and DOE, or NSF and NIST and NIH…the number of permutations just among the science agencies are enormous. But why stop there? We could link NSF and the Veterans Administration. The Department of Labor to NIH. Or NASA and the Department of Transportation (wait, that could almost make sense). In any case, the idea of linking two agencies with disparate missions together is probably not sound policy, and I would argue that the best way to “protect” NASA funding (which isn’t actually at risk because of the NSF Authorization) is to ensure NASA is pursuing a compelling mission for the Nation.
You can find a complete list of amendments being considered today on THOMAS. We’ll try to keep score here throughout the day.
One other piece of news about the bill is that it appears H.R. 1867 will get conferenced with the Senate as part of the S. 761 (the “America COMPETES Act“) conference. This is actually very good news as it means the NSF Authorization has a real chance of enactment. While the bill is expected to pass the House without much difficulty, it wasn’t clear that the Senate had much of an interest in moving it’s own version of the bill, simply because they’d already passed an NSF authorization as part of S. 761. Now it appears that there’s an inclination to take the NSF-specific portions of that bill out and use them as a conference vehicle for H.R. 1867. We’ll have more as we learn more, but in short, this means that there’s a potential path to enactment that is relatively free of big bumps…. Update: (5/3/07 12:20 am) — The bill passed overwhelmingly (399-17). The Garrett and Campbell amendments both failed, and the Weldon amendment was subject to a point of order that the NASA provisions weren’t germane to the bill — a point of order that was sustained. So great news all around!
…on Jim Horning’s Nothing is as simple as we hope it will be blog. The first, on a recent cyber security hearing on the Hill has a nice extended quote from the Chairman of the Subcommittee on Emerging Threats, Cybersecurity, and S&T of the House Committee on Homeland Security, complaining about the gutting of the cyber security R&D budget at DHS. The second is a summary of a paper by Robert Meyer and Michel Cukier on the impact of (perceived) user gender on the cyber attack threat (quick summary: “females” are much more likely to get attacked), which concludes with this great quote from Jim:
If this hostility is anywhere near the typical Internet experience, is it any wonder that computing and IT are increasingly losing the women?”
A resolution to honor Frances E. Allen, the 2006 recipient of ACM’s A.M. Turing Award, passed the House today. House Concurrent Resolution 95 was introduced by Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-CA) and reported out of the House Science and Technology Committee last week.
We wrote about Dr. Allen here when the Turning Award was announced in February. She was the first woman to receive the award since it was first given forty years ago. Dr. Allen was an IBM Fellow at the TJ Watson Research Center.
A press release from the House Science and Technology Committee stated:
H. Con. Res. 95 recognizes her achievements in computer research and development while working at IBM Corporation, and salutes the Turing Award Committee for recognizing the contributions of women to the field of computing.
“It is certainly telling that women, who earn more than half of all undergraduate degrees in this country and make up more than half of the professional workforce, represent only 25% percent of all information technology workers,” Woolsey said. “Dr. Allen has been an inspirational mentor to younger researchers and a leader within the computing community and it is clear that Dr. Allen deserves recognition for all of the tireless work she has done to promote women’s role in computing.”
Interesting article (requires free registration) on the innovation agenda in the San Jose Mercury News. While it does focus mostly on the energy and environmental areas that could be helped, it also touches on almost all aspects of the overall innovation agenda such as funding basic research and increasing STEM K-12 teachers. There is also a good quote from Sen. John Ensign (R-NV) who said, “I’m a fiscal conservative, but the dollars we invest in basic research will come back to us in spades in terms of stimulating economic activity and helping the United States remain at the forefront of global innovation.”
The Council of Graduate Schools yesterday released a report regarding the role of graduate education in Americas competitiveness. The report makes five key findings:
1. A highly skilled workforce operating at the frontiers of knowledge creation and professional practice is key to Americas competitiveness and national security. Universities, governments, and private industry each play an essential role in providing the expertise and resources necessary to achieve this objective.
2. The expanded participation of U.S. citizens, particularly from underrepresented minority groups, should be a priority in fields that are essential to our nations success. Development of STEM careers should be emphasized.
3. Interdisciplinary research preparation and education are central to future competitiveness, because knowledge creation and innovation frequently occur at the interface of disciplines.
4. U.S. graduate schools must be able to attract the best and brightest students from around the world.
5. The quality of graduate programs drives the success of Americas higher education system. Efforts to evaluate and improve all aspects of the quality of the U.S. graduate education enterprise must be advanced and supported in order to foster innovation.
The report makes a series of recommendations for policymakers, calling for:
Collaboration among leaders in government, business, and higher education to develop a highly-educated workforce and encourage entrepreneurship in graduate education.
The creation of incentives for students, particularly from underrepresented groups, to pursue graduate education in STEM fields, the social sciences, and humanities, and identify best practices to reduce attrition and shorten the time required to complete a degree.
Support for innovative graduate education programs, such as professional masters degrees, which respond to workforce needs in such critical fields as science, engineering, technology and mathematics (STEM), as well as in social sciences and the humanities.
Expanding opportunities for graduate students to pursue interdisciplinary study at the frontier of knowledge creation, using models such as those pioneered by the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health.
Continuing to improve and reform the visa process so that the worlds top international talent can pursue graduate study in the U.S. and contribute to our nations research and innovation.
Increasing federal funds for graduate education programs by at least 10% at every agency.
Enhancing the quality of graduate education through ongoing evaluation and research, and supporting risk-taking research programs that prepare highly-trained professionals for a knowledge-based global economy.
While the findings and recommendations echo a lot of recent reports — the National Academies Rising Above the Gathering Storm, the Council on Competitiveness’ Innovate America, the Task Force on the Future of American Innovation’s Measuring the Moment — it’s very useful to have another perspective on innovation policy from another “sector” of the U.S. innovation ecosystem. And as innovation policy continues to swirl around the Hill, these reports provide the sort of buttressing policymakers need to continue to champion pro-innovation ideas.
Speaker Pelosi has re-released the House Democrats Innovation Agenda, which we have talked about before in this space. The Agenda was first announced in November 2005 and includes many of the provisions called for in the National Academies Rising Above the Gathering Storm report and that subsequently ended up in the American Competitiveness Initiative. With this re-release of the Agenda, Speaker Pelosi also released a statement saying:
To meet the challenges of today and to create the jobs and economic security of tomorrow, the time to act is now, Speaker Nancy Pelosi said. This week, the House is taking the first steps in an Innovation Agenda that will help spur the next generation of discovery and invention. Democrats will continue throughout the 110th Congress to move forward on legislation that asserts our global economic leadership, creates new business ventures and jobs, and gives future generations increased opportunity to achieve the American Dream.
The President’s Council of Advisors for Science and Technology met today to approve a draft set of recommendations concerning the federal Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) program. In reviewing the program and the overall IT “ecosystem” in the U.S. and abroad for the first time since the PITAC review in 1999, the committee came to the conclusion that while the U.S. continues to hold a dominant leadership position in the IT sector, that leadership is at risk unless steps are taken now to shore up our innovation footing long-term.
The committee, composed of 35 leaders of industry and academia appointed by the President, approved recommendations in four general areas:
Revamp networking and information technology education and training;
Rebalance the federal NITRD portfolio;
Re-prioritize some NITRD topics;
Improve interagency planning and coordination.
PCAST members Dan Reed (Director of the Renaissance Computing Institute at UNC, and Chair of CRA) and George Scalise (President, Semiconductor Industry Association) both co-chair the subcommittee charged with producing the report and led the other members of PCAST through the draft recommendations during PCAST’s meeting today at the National Academies.
Reed began by noting that America’s current global success relies in large part on our lead in IT, but that our favorable position in developing and adopting new networking and IT technologies is not assured. Other nations have recognized the value of leadership in IT and are mounting challenges. Our current success rests on our leadership throughout the IT ecosystem — in the market positions of US IT firms, in our IT commercialization systems, and in the position of U.S. higher education and research systems. The enabling foundation for that ecosystem is clear — early and continuing federal investments.
Three independent areas must be strengthened to ensure continued leadership, Reed said: education and training; the structure of the federal NITRD portfolio; and prioritization among research areas. Education and Training: The U.S. demand for IT professionals in the coming decade is likely to grow more rapidly than most other employment categories. The current IT curricula do not adequately meet employer and student needs. In addition, women and other underrepresented groups constitute a declining proportion of new IT graduates. The committee recommends assessing the current state of and future requirements for IT graduate and undergraduate education, revising IT curricula, increasing fellowship opportunities, and ease visa processes for students and R&D visitors and green card processes for IT professionals. Evolving Nature of IT R&D: The committee finds (as the PITAC did in 1999) that the NITRD program is currently imbalanced in favor of projects that are low risk, small-scale and short term. In addition, universities continue to miss research opportunities because of organizational structures and incentives that emphasize disciplinary studies rather than inter-disciplinary research. The committee will call on NITRD and federal agencies to identify important IT problems and put in place appropriately balanced programs that stress innovation and longer term, multidisciplinary projects. The committee also concluded that universities must rethink their structures — their organizations as well as their merit and tenure systems — to become more open to and rewarding of multidisciplinary work. Technology R&D Priorities for NITRD: The committee identified eight general research areas it deemed worthy of priority in the NITRD portfolio:
Networking and IT systems connecting with the physical world. This includes software monitoring/control via sensors and actuators. The committee recommends that the National Science and Technology Council develop a federal plan for a coordinated multi-agency R&D effort to maximize the effectiveness of federal investments and ensure future U.S. competitiveness in this area.
Software. Software is at the center of everything and rapid changes in hardware, like the advent and widespread use of multiple processors per chip, has “strong implications for how we produce software.” The committee recommends that academia, industry and government jointly identify the critical issues limiting advances in reliable, efficient software design and development.
Networking: The committee simply endorsed the call by the Director of OSTP for an interagency federal plan for Advanced Networking R&D and noted that a key element of the plan should be R&D for advancing the internet.
Data/Data Stores and Data Streams: Recognizing that we’re facing a “data deluge,” the committee recommends that the federal government should develop and implement a national strategy and associated plan to assure the long-term preservation, stewardship, and widespread availability of data important to scientific engineering and technology R&D.
High-end Computing: Essentially just reiterated that it should remain a strategic priority and echoed the recommendations of the previous PITAC report (pdf) that called for the development of a federal HPC strategic plan and roadmap.
Human Computer Interaction: The science and engineering of HCI underlies nearly all IT applications.
IT and the Social Sciences: NITRD should continue to inform public understanding and policymaking.
The Federal NITRD Program: The committee found that, in general, NITRD has been very effective. However, the NITRD program’s current coordination process are inadequate to meet anticipated national needs and to maintain U.S. leadership in a globally competitive world. The NITRD program must evolve to support the challenges of developing and applying advanced networking and IT capabilities that require larger scale, longer term and multidisciplinary R&D. PCAST will call upon the NSTC NITRD Subcommittee to develop a strategic plan — a vision — and the roadmap to get it done. To help this process along, the PCAST is calling on the NITRD subcommittee to meet annually with broad agency participation to discuss the plan and roadmap. Technology Transfer: Scalise delivered this portion of the presentation and noted that the ability to transition ideas from the nation’s R&D institutions to the marketplace has been a key strength of America’s science and technology base. However, it wasn’t clear to PCAST that there was adequate structure within the NITRD program to maximize transfer possibilities. Scalise said the program needs a technology strategy committee, with representatives from industry and academia, to manage the process of technology transfer, not just oversee it. He sees the FOCUS Center Research Program — a research partnership between the federal government, the semiconductor industry, and academia — as a good model. With such a management structure in place, he argued, “the technology transfer problem becomes moot, because it becomes imbedded in the process.”
Scalise also noted that there’s one key issue that is missing from the draft report and that’s whether the current federal investment of $3.1 billion per year in IT R&D is adequate. It’s missing, he said, because the committee didn’t feel like it had enough information available to it to assess whether that level of spending is appropriate. The report also doesn’t appear to contain any proposals for new agency or federal government-wide initiatives in information technology. Both were key aspects of the 1999 PITAC report — recommendations that helped propel the growth of the NITRD program and led to the creation the National Science Foundation’s Information Technology Research program, a program that ultimately helped more than double the budget of the NSF Computer and Information Science and Engineering directorate over 5 years.
But otherwise, the report appears to be pretty solid. The committee discussion after the presentation was very positive, with much of the conversation focused on strengthening the recommendations with the addition of some sort of metrics. Identifying exactly what those metrics might be will likely prove challenging, though. One example given by Scalise was again in the area of semiconductors — the metric for the FOCUS Center program is essentially “are we keeping pace with Moore’s law?” PCAST Co-chair Floyd Kvamme asked if it was conceivable that one could envision a “moore’s law” type of metric for each component area, or each strategic area — something that might force the agencies to agree that the key to area “A” is challenge “X.” Scalise responded that he thought that methodology could address “90 percent of the problem.”
One other interesting area of discussion centered around the workforce issue. PCAST member Norm Augustine (former Lockheed Martin CEO and Chair of the National Academies Rising Above the Gathering Storm report) asked the committee to “suppose we produce more high-quality IT professionals — and so do other countries. Why then, under the pressures of the marketplace, won’t industry continue to shift work abroad?” Scalise answered that he thought the rate of change of salaries worldwide meant that salaries and costs are going to equalize. So he thought it was a problem, but not an overwhelming one. He said he was convinced that if we decided to compete with China in the semiconductor world — and we could equalize the one area where there’s a substantial imbalance…namely tax policy — then you could build a fab plant in China and one here in the U.S. and the one in the U.S. would compete favorably. Stratton Sclavos, CEO of Verisign, added another data point in support of the “salaries will equalize” argument by noting that his company’s “R&D salaries” in the U.S. are rising at 6 – 8 percent per year; but in India, the rate is closer to 30 to 40 percent a year. Verisign expects the offshore salaries to equalize within 10 years.
In the end, the committee reached consensus on all the recommendations as presented. The report now goes back to the PCAST IT subcommittee for “final” drafting in preparation for its release this summer. Update: (4/26/07) — Dan Reed has posted his take on the meeting over at his blog. Update 2:: (5/2/2007) — Dan’s slides are now up on the OSTP website.
The New York Times yesterday had a nice piece on the declining interest of women in computer science, the impact on the field, and some efforts to reverse the trend. Here’s a snippet:
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. For decades, undergraduate women have been moving in ever greater numbers into science and engineering departments at American universities. Yet even as they approach or exceed enrollment parity in mathematics, biology and other fields, there is one area in which their presence relative to men is static or even shrinking: computer science.
Women received about 38 percent of the computer science bachelors degrees awarded in the United States in 1985, the peak year, but in 2003, the figure was only about 28 percent, according to the National Science Foundation.
At universities that also offer graduate degrees in computer science, only 17 percent of the fields bachelors degrees in the 2003-4 academic year went to women, according to the Taulbee Survey, conducted annually by an organization for computer science research. [That’s CRA’s survey, by the way…]
Since then, many in the field say, the situation has worsened. They say computing is the only realm of science or technology in which women are consistently giving ground. They also worry that the number of women is dropping in graduate programs and in industry.
They are concerned about this trend, they say, not just because they want to see young women share the fields challenges and rewards, but also because they regard the relative absence of women as a troubling indicator for American computer science generally and for the economic competitiveness that depends on it.
This is perhaps the trend that’s most disturbing to those in the computing community who care about the issue:
Basically, the interest of women in computing has never been lower. In a previous posting, we’ve described some of the ways the community is trying to address the problem, including hiring an “Image Strategist” to focus on improving the image of computing. (Jill K. Ross is that new strategist and she’ll have an update on the efforts of the “Image of Computing National Task Force” in May at a meeting of the National Center for Women & Information Technology in Boulder.) Efforts like those described in the article are also crucially important. The National Science Foundation supports many such efforts in computing under its Broadening Participation in Computing program in the Computer and Information Science and Engineering directorate. (And we’ve mentioned recently that pending legislation in the House would help programs with the goals of increasing the participation of underrepresented groups in computing such as those supported by BPC (or science and engineering generally) have an easier time getting renewed funding from NSF, as long as they are deemed to be effective.)
We’ll keep you informed on the progress of these efforts — both programmatic and legislative — in the coming weeks. In the meantime, CRA’s Jay Vegso has posted links to some further discussion of the issues cited in the Times piece over at the CRA Bulletin. The Bulletin is a good one-stop shop to lots of data about the state of IT and the IT workforce and pipeline.
Finally, we’ve got a lot of additional information on the state of the IT workforce over at our IT Workforce page, including:
and, Degrees Granted and Job Openings in Broad S&E Fields, 2002-2012, which shows the Department of Labor projections for S&E job growth through 2012, along with projected degree production. (The Bulletin has more detail on the most recent set of projections — through 2014.)
Time Magazine has a pretty decent piece on NSF’s Global Environment for Networking Innovations program, which has the goal of “[enabling] the research community to invent and demonstrate a global communications network and related services that will be qualitatively better than today’s Internet.”
Although it has already taken nearly four decades to get this far in building the Internet, some university researchers with the federal government’s blessing want to scrap all that and start over.
The idea may seem unthinkable, even absurd, but many believe a “clean slate” approach is the only way to truly address security, mobility and other challenges that have cropped up since UCLA professor Leonard Kleinrock helped supervise the first exchange of meaningless test data between two machines on Sept. 2, 1969.
The Internet “works well in many situations but was designed for completely different assumptions,” said Dipankar Raychaudhuri, a Rutgers University professor overseeing three clean-slate projects. “It’s sort of a miracle that it continues to work well today.”
No longer constrained by slow connections and computer processors and high costs for storage, researchers say the time has come to rethink the Internet’s underlying architecture, a move that could mean replacing networking equipment and rewriting software on computers to better channel future traffic over the existing pipes.
Even Vinton Cerf, one of the Internet’s founding fathers as co-developer of the key communications techniques, said the exercise was “generally healthy” because the current technology “does not satisfy all needs.”
We’ve covered the progress ofGENIpreviouslyinthisspace, including the most recent announcement by the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) of the naming of the initial members of the GENI science council. As it stands now, GENI is a “Horizon” project in NSF’s 2007 Facilities Plan — a step away from “Readiness Stage,” which would allow for extensive pre-construction planning. There are currently 10 projects listed in the plan as “Horizon” projects, and just one in the “Readiness Stage” for FY 2008 (the Advanced Technology Solar Telescope). For FY 2008, NSF has requested $20 million to ramp up GENI pre-construction planning — so the program is moving forward, but still has some distance to go before it’s ready to be included in the queue of projects being considered for the “Major Research Equipment and Facilities Construction” account in future budget years.
The Task Force on the Future of American Innovation and the House R&D Caucus are hosting a lunch briefing on Tuesday, April 17 at noon. The Role of Basic Research in Innovation, Economic Competitiveness and National Security will include speakers from industry and academia and will be based on the second Benchmarks report, Measuring the Moment: Innovation, National Security, and Economic Competitiveness that we have previously covered in this space.
Speakers will include: Dr. Anita Jones from the University of Virginia giving a presentation called, The Role of Defense Research in the Innovation and Competitiveness Debate Dr. C. Dan Mote, President of the University of Maryland . His presentation is Progress Since the Rising Above the Gathering Storm Report and What Still Needs Attention
Amy Burke from Texas Instruments speaking on Industry Perspective on the Importance of Federal Investment in Basic Research
Task Force Chair Doug Comer, the director of legal affairs and technology policy at Intel, will do the welcome, introductions, and speak to the Benchmarks report.
Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ) and Rep. Judy Biggert (R-IL), the co-chairs of the House R&D Caucus will also make remarks at the briefing.
Anyone with an interest in innovation and competitiveness is welcome to attend. RSVP to Jessica Delucchi at 202.646.5046 or delucchij@battelle.org by Monday, April 16. Space is limited so reservations are on a first come basis. Update: Doug Comer, Dr. Mote, and Amy Burke spoke to a packed room at the Task Force on the Future of American Innovation and House R&D Caucus briefing ” The Role of Basic Research in Innovation, Economic Competitiveness and National Security.” Over 100 people attended from industry, academia, and the Hill, including Representatives Judy Biggert (R-IL), Rush Holt (D-NJ), and Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA). Comer discussed the Measuring the Moment report issued last year by the Task Force and gave an overview of the continued importance of federal funding for basic research to the economy as a whole.
As one of the Rising Above the Gathering Storm authors, Dr. Mote discussed the impact the report has had and what is still undone. He emphasized that the states need to be actively engaged in support of basic research at the university level and vocal about their support to their federal delegations.
Burke presented a specific picture of why federally funded basic research is important to Texas Instruments and how that translates to industry as a whole. She gave specific examples of technologies that have had major economic impact and were begun through basic research. Maybe just as importantly, each attendee left with a copy of the Benchmarks report (pdf) and other Task Force material and at least one Member of Congress was seen toting the report around later that day….
All in all, a good, well-attended event.
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NSF Authorization on the Floor Today
/In: American Competitiveness Initiative, Funding, FY08 Appropriations, Policy /by Peter HarshaThe National Science Foundation Authorization Act of 2007 (H.R. 1867), which we’ve discussed previously, will be on the House floor today. The bill authorizes appropriations at the agency (which is not the same as actually funding the agency — only the appropriations committee can do that — but is still a necessary (and symbolic) step in getting funding for the agency) at the levels called for in the President’s American Competitiveness Initiative and the Democratic Innovation Agenda — a trajectory that would double the agency’s budget over the next seven years.
It’s likely the bill will pass today without much difficulty. There are, however, a whole slate of amendments proposed, some of which are pretty awful (though not likely to pass). For example, there are amendments from Reps. Scott Garrett (R-NJ) and John Campbell (R-CA) that would specifically prohibit funding of nine already-funded grants in NSF’s Social, Behavioral and Economics directorate, based apparently on their “silly” titles. Here are the grants targeted:
There are a number of reasons amendments like this are a bad idea. The primary one is that the NSF peer-review system, while arguably not perfect (well, far from perfect), is still likely a much more reliable way of choosing meritorious research than Congressional intervention. It’s also pretty reasonable to assert that titles are not the best way to judge the worthiness of research.
Additionally, there’s an interesting (and bad) amendment proposed by Rep. Dave Weldon (R-FL) that would tie any increases in the NSF budget to proportional increases at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The amendment, Weldon says in a press release, would “ensure that NASA’s budget is not raided to fund the NSF increase.” As someone who has been doing science policy work for the better part of a decade, it amuses a little to think of NASA in the role of victim to NSF, as I’ve watched innumerable times in the past as NASA increases swallowed up all the available funding room in VA/HUD appropriations bills that shortchanged NSF and NIST. But the Weldon amendment is an innovative approach to “protecting” NASA, by trying to link the two agencies’ budgets. It might, however, set an awkward precedent. One could imagine linking the National Institutes of Health and NASA, or NIH and NSF, or NSF and DOE, or NSF and NIST and NIH…the number of permutations just among the science agencies are enormous. But why stop there? We could link NSF and the Veterans Administration. The Department of Labor to NIH. Or NASA and the Department of Transportation (wait, that could almost make sense). In any case, the idea of linking two agencies with disparate missions together is probably not sound policy, and I would argue that the best way to “protect” NASA funding (which isn’t actually at risk because of the NSF Authorization) is to ensure NASA is pursuing a compelling mission for the Nation.
You can find a complete list of amendments being considered today on THOMAS. We’ll try to keep score here throughout the day.
One other piece of news about the bill is that it appears H.R. 1867 will get conferenced with the Senate as part of the S. 761 (the “America COMPETES Act“) conference. This is actually very good news as it means the NSF Authorization has a real chance of enactment. While the bill is expected to pass the House without much difficulty, it wasn’t clear that the Senate had much of an interest in moving it’s own version of the bill, simply because they’d already passed an NSF authorization as part of S. 761. Now it appears that there’s an inclination to take the NSF-specific portions of that bill out and use them as a conference vehicle for H.R. 1867. We’ll have more as we learn more, but in short, this means that there’s a potential path to enactment that is relatively free of big bumps….
Update: (5/3/07 12:20 am) — The bill passed overwhelmingly (399-17). The Garrett and Campbell amendments both failed, and the Weldon amendment was subject to a point of order that the NASA provisions weren’t germane to the bill — a point of order that was sustained. So great news all around!
Two Interesting Posts…
/In: Diversity in Computing, Funding, Policy, Research, Security /by Peter Harsha…on Jim Horning’s Nothing is as simple as we hope it will be blog. The first, on a recent cyber security hearing on the Hill has a nice extended quote from the Chairman of the Subcommittee on Emerging Threats, Cybersecurity, and S&T of the House Committee on Homeland Security, complaining about the gutting of the cyber security R&D budget at DHS.
The second is a summary of a paper by Robert Meyer and Michel Cukier on the impact of (perceived) user gender on the cyber attack threat (quick summary: “females” are much more likely to get attacked), which concludes with this great quote from Jim:
Frances Allen Honored by House of Representatives
/In: Diversity in Computing, People /by MelissaNorrA resolution to honor Frances E. Allen, the 2006 recipient of ACM’s A.M. Turing Award, passed the House today. House Concurrent Resolution 95 was introduced by Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-CA) and reported out of the House Science and Technology Committee last week.
We wrote about Dr. Allen here when the Turning Award was announced in February. She was the first woman to receive the award since it was first given forty years ago. Dr. Allen was an IBM Fellow at the TJ Watson Research Center.
A press release from the House Science and Technology Committee stated:
Another Article on the Innovation Agenda
/In: American Competitiveness Initiative, Policy, R&D in the Press /by MelissaNorrInteresting article (requires free registration) on the innovation agenda in the San Jose Mercury News. While it does focus mostly on the energy and environmental areas that could be helped, it also touches on almost all aspects of the overall innovation agenda such as funding basic research and increasing STEM K-12 teachers. There is also a good quote from Sen. John Ensign (R-NV) who said, “I’m a fiscal conservative, but the dollars we invest in basic research will come back to us in spades in terms of stimulating economic activity and helping the United States remain at the forefront of global innovation.”
Graduate Education and Innovation
/In: American Competitiveness Initiative, Events /by MelissaNorrThe Council of Graduate Schools yesterday released a report regarding the role of graduate education in Americas competitiveness. The report makes five key findings:
The report makes a series of recommendations for policymakers, calling for:
While the findings and recommendations echo a lot of recent reports — the National Academies Rising Above the Gathering Storm, the Council on Competitiveness’ Innovate America, the Task Force on the Future of American Innovation’s Measuring the Moment — it’s very useful to have another perspective on innovation policy from another “sector” of the U.S. innovation ecosystem. And as innovation policy continues to swirl around the Hill, these reports provide the sort of buttressing policymakers need to continue to champion pro-innovation ideas.
House Innovation Agenda
/In: American Competitiveness Initiative, Policy /by MelissaNorrSpeaker Pelosi has re-released the House Democrats Innovation Agenda, which we have talked about before in this space. The Agenda was first announced in November 2005 and includes many of the provisions called for in the National Academies Rising Above the Gathering Storm report and that subsequently ended up in the American Competitiveness Initiative. With this re-release of the Agenda, Speaker Pelosi also released a statement saying:
The re-release is in support of three bills that are going to the House floor this weekHR 362 the 10,000 Teachers, 10 Million Minds Science and Math Scholarship Act, HR 1332 the Small Business Lending Improvements Act of 2007, and HR 363 the Sowing the Seeds Through Science and Engineering Research Act. Rep. George Miller (D-CA), chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, and Rep. Bart Gordon (D-TN), chairman of the House Science and Technology Committee, each released a statement supporting the Innovation Agenda and the three bills.
This happens at the same time that the Senate is voting on S. 761, the America COMPETES Act, and could mean that a conference between the two chambers innovation bills might not be as problematic as it initially appeared…. We’ll keep you posted.
PCAST Approves Draft IT R&D Recommendations
/In: Policy /by Peter HarshaThe President’s Council of Advisors for Science and Technology met today to approve a draft set of recommendations concerning the federal Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) program. In reviewing the program and the overall IT “ecosystem” in the U.S. and abroad for the first time since the PITAC review in 1999, the committee came to the conclusion that while the U.S. continues to hold a dominant leadership position in the IT sector, that leadership is at risk unless steps are taken now to shore up our innovation footing long-term.
The committee, composed of 35 leaders of industry and academia appointed by the President, approved recommendations in four general areas:
PCAST members Dan Reed (Director of the Renaissance Computing Institute at UNC, and Chair of CRA) and George Scalise (President, Semiconductor Industry Association) both co-chair the subcommittee charged with producing the report and led the other members of PCAST through the draft recommendations during PCAST’s meeting today at the National Academies.
Reed began by noting that America’s current global success relies in large part on our lead in IT, but that our favorable position in developing and adopting new networking and IT technologies is not assured. Other nations have recognized the value of leadership in IT and are mounting challenges. Our current success rests on our leadership throughout the IT ecosystem — in the market positions of US IT firms, in our IT commercialization systems, and in the position of U.S. higher education and research systems. The enabling foundation for that ecosystem is clear — early and continuing federal investments.
Three independent areas must be strengthened to ensure continued leadership, Reed said: education and training; the structure of the federal NITRD portfolio; and prioritization among research areas.
Education and Training: The U.S. demand for IT professionals in the coming decade is likely to grow more rapidly than most other employment categories. The current IT curricula do not adequately meet employer and student needs. In addition, women and other underrepresented groups constitute a declining proportion of new IT graduates. The committee recommends assessing the current state of and future requirements for IT graduate and undergraduate education, revising IT curricula, increasing fellowship opportunities, and ease visa processes for students and R&D visitors and green card processes for IT professionals.
Evolving Nature of IT R&D: The committee finds (as the PITAC did in 1999) that the NITRD program is currently imbalanced in favor of projects that are low risk, small-scale and short term. In addition, universities continue to miss research opportunities because of organizational structures and incentives that emphasize disciplinary studies rather than inter-disciplinary research. The committee will call on NITRD and federal agencies to identify important IT problems and put in place appropriately balanced programs that stress innovation and longer term, multidisciplinary projects. The committee also concluded that universities must rethink their structures — their organizations as well as their merit and tenure systems — to become more open to and rewarding of multidisciplinary work.
Technology R&D Priorities for NITRD: The committee identified eight general research areas it deemed worthy of priority in the NITRD portfolio:
The Federal NITRD Program: The committee found that, in general, NITRD has been very effective. However, the NITRD program’s current coordination process are inadequate to meet anticipated national needs and to maintain U.S. leadership in a globally competitive world. The NITRD program must evolve to support the challenges of developing and applying advanced networking and IT capabilities that require larger scale, longer term and multidisciplinary R&D. PCAST will call upon the NSTC NITRD Subcommittee to develop a strategic plan — a vision — and the roadmap to get it done. To help this process along, the PCAST is calling on the NITRD subcommittee to meet annually with broad agency participation to discuss the plan and roadmap.
Technology Transfer: Scalise delivered this portion of the presentation and noted that the ability to transition ideas from the nation’s R&D institutions to the marketplace has been a key strength of America’s science and technology base. However, it wasn’t clear to PCAST that there was adequate structure within the NITRD program to maximize transfer possibilities. Scalise said the program needs a technology strategy committee, with representatives from industry and academia, to manage the process of technology transfer, not just oversee it. He sees the FOCUS Center Research Program — a research partnership between the federal government, the semiconductor industry, and academia — as a good model. With such a management structure in place, he argued, “the technology transfer problem becomes moot, because it becomes imbedded in the process.”
Scalise also noted that there’s one key issue that is missing from the draft report and that’s whether the current federal investment of $3.1 billion per year in IT R&D is adequate. It’s missing, he said, because the committee didn’t feel like it had enough information available to it to assess whether that level of spending is appropriate. The report also doesn’t appear to contain any proposals for new agency or federal government-wide initiatives in information technology. Both were key aspects of the 1999 PITAC report — recommendations that helped propel the growth of the NITRD program and led to the creation the National Science Foundation’s Information Technology Research program, a program that ultimately helped more than double the budget of the NSF Computer and Information Science and Engineering directorate over 5 years.
But otherwise, the report appears to be pretty solid. The committee discussion after the presentation was very positive, with much of the conversation focused on strengthening the recommendations with the addition of some sort of metrics. Identifying exactly what those metrics might be will likely prove challenging, though. One example given by Scalise was again in the area of semiconductors — the metric for the FOCUS Center program is essentially “are we keeping pace with Moore’s law?” PCAST Co-chair Floyd Kvamme asked if it was conceivable that one could envision a “moore’s law” type of metric for each component area, or each strategic area — something that might force the agencies to agree that the key to area “A” is challenge “X.” Scalise responded that he thought that methodology could address “90 percent of the problem.”
One other interesting area of discussion centered around the workforce issue. PCAST member Norm Augustine (former Lockheed Martin CEO and Chair of the National Academies Rising Above the Gathering Storm report) asked the committee to “suppose we produce more high-quality IT professionals — and so do other countries. Why then, under the pressures of the marketplace, won’t industry continue to shift work abroad?” Scalise answered that he thought the rate of change of salaries worldwide meant that salaries and costs are going to equalize. So he thought it was a problem, but not an overwhelming one. He said he was convinced that if we decided to compete with China in the semiconductor world — and we could equalize the one area where there’s a substantial imbalance…namely tax policy — then you could build a fab plant in China and one here in the U.S. and the one in the U.S. would compete favorably. Stratton Sclavos, CEO of Verisign, added another data point in support of the “salaries will equalize” argument by noting that his company’s “R&D salaries” in the U.S. are rising at 6 – 8 percent per year; but in India, the rate is closer to 30 to 40 percent a year. Verisign expects the offshore salaries to equalize within 10 years.
In the end, the committee reached consensus on all the recommendations as presented. The report now goes back to the PCAST IT subcommittee for “final” drafting in preparation for its release this summer.
Update: (4/26/07) — Dan Reed has posted his take on the meeting over at his blog.
Update 2:: (5/2/2007) — Dan’s slides are now up on the OSTP website.
NY Times on Women’s Interest in Computing
/In: People /by Peter HarshaThe New York Times yesterday had a nice piece on the declining interest of women in computer science, the impact on the field, and some efforts to reverse the trend. Here’s a snippet:
This is perhaps the trend that’s most disturbing to those in the computing community who care about the issue:
Basically, the interest of women in computing has never been lower. In a previous posting, we’ve described some of the ways the community is trying to address the problem, including hiring an “Image Strategist” to focus on improving the image of computing. (Jill K. Ross is that new strategist and she’ll have an update on the efforts of the “Image of Computing National Task Force” in May at a meeting of the National Center for Women & Information Technology in Boulder.) Efforts like those described in the article are also crucially important. The National Science Foundation supports many such efforts in computing under its Broadening Participation in Computing program in the Computer and Information Science and Engineering directorate. (And we’ve mentioned recently that pending legislation in the House would help programs with the goals of increasing the participation of underrepresented groups in computing such as those supported by BPC (or science and engineering generally) have an easier time getting renewed funding from NSF, as long as they are deemed to be effective.)
We’ll keep you informed on the progress of these efforts — both programmatic and legislative — in the coming weeks. In the meantime, CRA’s Jay Vegso has posted links to some further discussion of the issues cited in the Times piece over at the CRA Bulletin. The Bulletin is a good one-stop shop to lots of data about the state of IT and the IT workforce and pipeline.
Finally, we’ve got a lot of additional information on the state of the IT workforce over at our IT Workforce page, including:
Time on GENI
/In: Computing Community Consortium (CCC), CRA, R&D in the Press, Research /by Peter HarshaTime Magazine has a pretty decent piece on NSF’s Global Environment for Networking Innovations program, which has the goal of “[enabling] the research community to invent and demonstrate a global communications network and related services that will be qualitatively better than today’s Internet.”
We’ve covered the progress of GENI previously in this space, including the most recent announcement by the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) of the naming of the initial members of the GENI science council. As it stands now, GENI is a “Horizon” project in NSF’s 2007 Facilities Plan — a step away from “Readiness Stage,” which would allow for extensive pre-construction planning. There are currently 10 projects listed in the plan as “Horizon” projects, and just one in the “Readiness Stage” for FY 2008 (the Advanced Technology Solar Telescope). For FY 2008, NSF has requested $20 million to ramp up GENI pre-construction planning — so the program is moving forward, but still has some distance to go before it’s ready to be included in the queue of projects being considered for the “Major Research Equipment and Facilities Construction” account in future budget years.
Innovation Briefing Event
/In: Events, Funding, Policy, Research, Security /by MelissaNorrThe Task Force on the Future of American Innovation and the House R&D Caucus are hosting a lunch briefing on Tuesday, April 17 at noon. The Role of Basic Research in Innovation, Economic Competitiveness and National Security will include speakers from industry and academia and will be based on the second Benchmarks report, Measuring the Moment: Innovation, National Security, and Economic Competitiveness that we have previously covered in this space.
Comer discussed the Measuring the Moment report issued last year by the Task Force and gave an overview of the continued importance of federal funding for basic research to the economy as a whole.
Maybe just as importantly, each attendee left with a copy of the Benchmarks report (pdf) and other Task Force material and at least one Member of Congress was seen toting the report around later that day….
Speakers will include:
Dr. Anita Jones from the University of Virginia giving a presentation called, The Role of Defense Research in the Innovation and Competitiveness Debate
Dr. C. Dan Mote, President of the University of Maryland . His presentation is Progress Since the Rising Above the Gathering Storm Report and What Still Needs Attention
Amy Burke from Texas Instruments speaking on Industry Perspective on the Importance of Federal Investment in Basic Research
Task Force Chair Doug Comer, the director of legal affairs and technology policy at Intel, will do the welcome, introductions, and speak to the Benchmarks report.
Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ) and Rep. Judy Biggert (R-IL), the co-chairs of the House R&D Caucus will also make remarks at the briefing.
Anyone with an interest in innovation and competitiveness is welcome to attend. RSVP to Jessica Delucchi at 202.646.5046 or delucchij@battelle.org by Monday, April 16. Space is limited so reservations are on a first come basis.
Update: Doug Comer, Dr. Mote, and Amy Burke spoke to a packed room at the Task Force on the Future of American Innovation and House R&D Caucus briefing ” The Role of Basic Research in Innovation, Economic Competitiveness and National Security.” Over 100 people attended from industry, academia, and the Hill, including Representatives Judy Biggert (R-IL), Rush Holt (D-NJ), and Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA).
As one of the Rising Above the Gathering Storm authors, Dr. Mote discussed the impact the report has had and what is still undone. He emphasized that the states need to be actively engaged in support of basic research at the university level and vocal about their support to their federal delegations.
Burke presented a specific picture of why federally funded basic research is important to Texas Instruments and how that translates to industry as a whole. She gave specific examples of technologies that have had major economic impact and were begun through basic research.
All in all, a good, well-attended event.