The Government Accountability Office has just released its report (pdf) on the state of Federal Coordination for Cyber Security R&D requested by the House Committee on Government Reform. It’s goal wasn’t to assess the state of the research portfolio, but to look at how the agencies coordinate. Here’s what they recommended:
To strengthen cyber security research and development programs, we recommend that the Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy take the following action:
Establish firm timelines for the completion of the federal cyber security R&D agenda that includes near-term, mid-term, and long-term research. Such an agenda should include the following elements:
timelines and milestones for conducting research and development activities;
goals and measures for evaluating research and development activities;
assignment of responsibility for implementation, including the accomplishment of the focus areas and suggested research priorities; and
the alignment of funding priorities with technical priorities.
We also recommend that the Director of the Office of Management and Budget implement the following action:
Issue guidance to agencies on reporting information about federally funded cyber security R&D projects to the governmentwide repositories.
The report is here (pdf). It’s a pretty quick read at only 30 pages. GCN.com have online coverage here.
OSTP apparently had no comment on the recommendations in the GAO report. The establishment of a research agenda for federal cyber security R&D was also a recommendation and focus of the PITAC report Cyber Security R&D: A Crisis of Prioritization. The committee laid out in the 2005 report ten specific research areas it felt warranted prioritization, along with recommending immediate increases to the cyber security research budgets of NSF, DARPA and DHS (but especially NSF, which they felt was really carrying the load for fundamental, long-term cyber security research). While progress on these funding recommendations has been slow, NITRD has added a Cyber Security and Information Assurance working group into its interagency planning effort….
While CRA highly encourages all computing research community members to attend the annual Congressional Visit Days held in Washington, DC throughout the year, we know it is sometimes difficult to take two or three days to come to the Capitol. Since it is important that everyone be involved in the process and meet with their Representative and Senators, we are adding a space to the CRA Government Affairs web site regarding advocacy through district visits. Visiting your members of Congress while they are in your neighborhood is an equally effective and less time consuming way to express how important federal funding for computer research is to you and your community and is usually more low-key and less chaotic than similar meetings in DC. In doing a district visit, please be sure to keep your institutions government affairs contact informed as he or she can give valuable advice and assistance. To find out who your Representative is, visit Write Your Representative.
The 2007 Congressional and Senate calendars have not been published and things are a bit up in the air regarding sessions at the end of this year. As soon as recess schedules are announced we will list them on the web site. Please visit the new District Visits portion of the web site for updates to the recess listings and as always if you have questions or need assistance with making an appointment, contact Melissa Norr in CRA’s Government Affairs office at mnorr@cra.org or 202.234.2111 ext. 111.
Steve Lohr has a great piece today in the NY Times on the state of CS, called “Computing, 2016: What Won’t be Possible?” The essay was apparently spurred by last week’s CSTB’s 20th Anniversary symposium, which I regret that I couldn’t attend. (Fortunately Cameron and David from ACM’s U.S. Public Policy Committee did and have some greatwrite-ups.)
Here’s a snippet from the NY Times piece:
Computer science is not only a comparatively young field, but also one that has had to prove it is really science. Skeptics in academia would often say that after Alan Turing described the concept of the universal machine in the late 1930s the idea that a computer in theory could be made to do the work of any kind of calculating machine, including the human brain all that remained to be done was mere engineering.
The more generous perspective today is that decades of stunningly rapid advances in processing speed, storage and networking, along with the development of increasingly clever software, have brought computing into science, business and culture in ways that were barely imagined years ago. The quantitative changes delivered through smart engineering opened the door to qualitative changes.
Computing changes what can be seen, simulated and done. So in science, computing makes it possible to simulate climate change and unravel the human genome. In business, low-cost computing, the Internet and digital communications are transforming the global economy. In culture, the artifacts of computing include the iPod, YouTube and computer-animated movies.
Whats next? That was the subject of a symposium in Washington this month held by the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, which is part of the National Academies and the nations leading advisory board on science and technology.
Glad to see that the CSTB event succeeded in getting the message across that computing is a discipline still rich with challenges and contributions to make. Let’s hope this piece gets as wide a circulation (and has as big an impact) as this previous NY Times piece….
You can read all of Lohr’s piece today here.
The Homeland Security Appropriations were passed last week before Congress went home to campaign. The news is mixed with the total appropriations for R&D coming in at $838 million more than either the House or the Senate recommended individually. The cyber security R&D program will see an increase of $3.3 million to $20 million, up from $16.7 million in FY2006. While it’s nice that there’s an increase to the cyber security account, the level is still well below “adequate,” as PITAC pointed out last year in its report on the federal cyber security research effort Cyber Security R&D: A Crisis of Prioritization. Ed Lazowska, former Chair of PITAC, put it nicely in this interview with CIO Magazine last year:
Most egregiously, the Department of Homeland Security simply doesn’t get cybersecurity. DHS has a science and technology (S&T) budget of more than a billion dollars annually. Of this, [only] $18 million is devoted to cybersecurity. For FY06, DHS’s S&T budget is slated to go up by more than $200 million, but the allocation to cybersecurity will decrease to $17 million! It’s also worth noting that across DHS’s entire S&T budget, only about 10 percent is allocated to anything that might reasonably be called “research” rather than “deployment.”
Hopefully, this is high on the agenda of the Department’s new Assistant Secretary for Cyber Security and Telecommunications, Greg Garcia, who was appointed to the post on September 18th.
Further bad news in the R&D section is that University Programs received $50 million, which is less than the $62 million appropriated last year and below the Presidents request of $51.9 million.
Congress used the appropriations bill to express its displeasure with the way Homeland Security S&T has been managed and its expectation that things must improve if S&T is to get any increased appropriations in the future. In fact, Congress expressly withheld $50 million from the R&D budget until the office presents, and Congress approves, a report prepared by the Under Secretary of Science and Technology that describes the progress to address financial management deficiencies, improve its management controls, and implement performance measures and evaluations. They also included language requiring a hearing within 60 days of enactment on the University-Based Centers of Excellence Program goals for fiscal year 2007 and outcomes projected for each center for the next three years.
As the bill has not yet been signed by the President (although it is expected to be), the Department is operating under a continuing resolution extending the FY2006 budget numbers.
As we noted last week, the National Science Foundation has tasked CRA with establishing a Computing Community Consortium that can provide scientific leadership and vision on issues related to computing research and future large-scale computing research projects. Today, the CCC Planning Group released a white paper (pdf, 210kb) with much more detail on the structure and purpose of the CCC. They’ve also released a timeline of future activities.
The first step in “Bootstrapping Phase 1” has been completed with the naming of an interim CRA GENI Community Advisory Board. Its members are:
Charlie Catlett, Argonne National Lab
Vint Cerf, Google
Susan Graham, University of California, Berkeley
Ron Johnson, University of Washington
Anita Jones, University of Virginia
Ed Lazowska, University of Washington (Chair)
Peter Lee, Carnegie Mellon University
Ellen Zegura, Georgia Tech
With the members of the 109th Congress getting ready to leave town this week and not come back until mid-November (giving them plenty of time for last-minute campaigning in their home districts), it seems appropriate to take a look at what they’ve accomplished in addressing some of the innovation and competitiveness issues that have been so well-covered here this year.
Though there was movement on competitiveness issues in Congress at the end of last year, the inclusion by President Bush of an “American Competitiveness Initiative” in his State of the Union speech at the end of January clearly catalyzed the action on innovation and competitiveness issues this year. The President’s plan included a number of different provisions addressing different portions of the innovation/competitiveness chain:
First, double, over 10 years, the Federal support for fundamental research in the physical sciences and engineering at the National Science Foundation, National Institute of Standards and Technology, and the Department of Energy’s Office of Science;
Second, make permanent the R&D Tax Credit;
Third, encourage more children to take more math and science, and encourage more math and science professionals to teach;
Fourth, provide more worker training options;
and, Fifth, increase our ability to compete for and retain the best and the brightest talent in the world.
Congress, too, had it’s own ideas — many gleaned from influential reports like the National Academies’ Rising Above the Gathering Storm and the Council on Competitiveness’ Innovate America reports — and reflected them in a number of pieces of legislation introduced throughout the year. It was enough to make the science advocacy community somewhat giddy. After all, we’d been fighting for several years to convince the Administration and Congress that the federal investment in fundamental research, despite being an absolutely crucial part of the the chain of innovation that keeps America dominant in an increasingly competitive world, was inadequately supported within the Federal budget — a fact that put our future competitiveness at risk. But until this year, beyond a few sympathetic ears in Congress, that argument had gained no traction. Then, a change in attitude in the White House and some real leadership on both sides of the aisle in Congress (folks like Reps. Frank Wolf (R-VA), Sherry Boehlert (R-NY), the House Democratic Leadership, Sens. Lamar Alexander (R-TN), Joe Lieberman (D-CT), Jeff Bingaman (D-NM), Pete Domenici (R-NM), John Ensign (R-NV), and Barbara Mikulski (D-MD)) and the tide turned dramatically. Soon the President was on the road making the case for increased funding for science and members were scrambling to claim some legislative ground by introducing a plethora of competitiveness bills.
So as we approach the end of this legislative session, where did all of this activity get us? How will the science community fare as a result of “competitiveness” and “innovation” becoming hot topics?
The short answer seems to be: we’ll probably do pretty well.
For those of us who have a great interest in seeing university research in the physical sciences (which, in DC parlance, includes mathematics, computer science, physics, chemistry, etc) receive more support, the clear number one priority was seeing the President’s number one priority — starting NSF, NIST and DOE Office of Science, on the path to doubling their budgets in 10 years — enacted in the FY 2007 appropriations bills. And despite some early mixed-signals from the House Republican leadership, both the full House and the Senate Appropriations Committee have approved appropriations bills that would provide those agencies with the full funding they requested under ACI.
[There is one potential hurdle ahead in the form of the appropriations “end-game.” It’s clear that Congress will not conclude work on the appropriations bills before the November election, which means they’ll need to pass a “continuing resolution” that would provide funding for the federal government past the Oct 1, 2006 beginning of the 2007 fiscal year. What is unclear is whether Congress will elect to return after the election in “lame duck” session and pass the appropriations bills as freestanding pieces of legislation (unlikely), as part of a giant omnibus appropriation with all bills rolled into one (pretty likely), or simply “punt” on the whole issue and extend the “continuing resolution” (CR) through Sept. 30, 2007.
That last option is the most problematic for the science community. A CR typically directs federal agencies to continue to spend in the new fiscal year, but only at the same rate as the previous fiscal year — with no new starts or programs. A similar CR this year would wipe out all the gains we’ve worked to achieve through the President’s ACI and the House and Senate appropriations committees and send us back to square one next year. While it’s unlikely Congress would take the CR option this year — a CR would wipe out any earmarks won by lawmakers as well, unless they were explicitly included — it’s not completely out of the question, and the uncertainty about which party will lead each chamber doesn’t make the prognosticating any easier. So CRA, along with the rest of the science community, will continue to take the message “omnibus, not CR!” to the congressional leadership throughout the end of this legislative session.]
Beyond funding increases for the agencies, however, things aren’t quite as clear. Several bills were introduced in Congress this year that attempt to “authorize” specific provisions of ACI, or the various recommendations of the Gathering Storm or Innovate America reports. The table below shows what some of those bills contain and what their current and likely future status is. In every case, it appears the bills will fall short of the actions required to enact them. The biggest hurdle, it appears, is the White House’s continuing insistence that the programs contained in the ACI don’t require additional authorizations (and so they’re reluctant to allow Congress to put its stamp on programs in authorizations), and the House Leadership’s continuing reluctance to pass “high-dollar” authorizations at a time when it’s trying to demonstrate fiscal restraint. (This despte the fact that the authorizations don’t actually obligate any funding — it’s just “bad optics.”)
With only a short time remaining in the 109th Congress’ legislative calendar — really, only the days the Members are willing to sit in “lame duck” session after the election — it becomes increasingly unlikely (though not impossible) that any of the congressional competitiveness bills will make it to the President’s desk. So, despite yesterday’s introduction by the Senate Majority and Minority Leaders of the National Competitiveness Investment Act (not yet online) — an omnibus-like complilation of a number of different Senate approaches into one 209-page bill — it’s not clear that any of the bill will get the necessary consideration in the House to move it towards passage.
It would be nice symbolism to see these Congressional authorizations passed overwhelmingly, but it’s not a particularly big loss that they likely won’t be. In fact, from our perspective, there’s a benefit in not having these particular bills get enacted. One key element of increasing the Nation’s innovative capacity is insuring that we have a diverse, well-educated workforce. And a key part of that is by increasing the participation of underrepresented groups in math and science — particularly in computer science. Though the various authorization bills listed below have a number of good things in them, none is particularly strong in promoting the participation of women or minorities in math and science. Having to begin the process of working through these bills with the next Congress beginning in January actually presents an opportunity for us to continue to make the case for increasing support for programs that aim to create a more diverse workforce, with the hope of seeing that reflected in whatever bill finally moves towards passage.
But, for now, the real key for those of us who represent those who do fundamental research in the physical sciences is to see the appropriations requested by the President enacted in full. And on that score, we should do quite well this session.
Authorizes a scholarship program for teachers in K-12 math and science;
Encourages school and university partnerships in math and science education through a specialized master’s degree program as well as a mentor program for AP teachers and their students;
Allows NSF to fund centers to improve undergraduate education.
Last night, the House overwhelming approved a compromise version (pdf) of the FY 2007 Defense Appropriations bill after House and Senate negotiators agreed last Friday to mitigate some of the significant cuts in the Senate version. As we’ve noted previously, a key area of concern for the computing research community was the large cut by the Senate to DARPA’s Cognitive Computing program, particularly their $60 million cut to “Integrated Cognitive Systems” account. As we pointed out then, the cuts to the ICS account run counter to the recent concerns of Congress, PITAC, and DOD Defense Science Board, who all have raised strong concerns about the shift of DARPA resources away from fundamental research at universities, especially in information technology. The Cognitive Computing program is one area where DARPA has responded positively to those concerns.
While the community attempted to resist the cuts, the compromise version of the bill still contains a $30 million reduction from the President’s requested level for Integrated Cognitive Systems for FY 2007 — part of a $159 million reduction to DARPA’s overall requested budget. While these cuts to the requested budget are not good, they are a marked improvement from the Senate numbers, which included a $433 million cut to DARPA’s requested budget. Fortunately, even with the cut to its requested budget, Cognitive Computing will still see an increase over its FY 06 estimated level (about 10.6 percent).
The Senate had also approved a $14 million cut to the requested budget for the Information and Communications Technology line. That cut was mitigated to $8 million in the conference report ($3.9 million from the Responsive Computing Architectures account, $1 million from Security-Aware Systems, and $3 million from the Automated Speech and Text Exploitation in Multiple Languages account).
Overall, 6.1 (Basic) research at DOD fared pretty well (5.6 percent increase over FY 06) and 6.2 (Applied) overall did OK, too (2.2 percent increase). 6.1 “Defense-wide” (DARPA and OSD, basically) went up 14.8 percent, and 6.2 “Defense-wide” went up about 3.5 percent.
The folks at the Coalition for National Security Research have put together a handy little chart of the various DOD R&D accounts in the bill (thanks to Jason Van Wey of MIT). You can get it here (pdf).
Senate approval of the conference bill is expected today and the President is expected to sign the bill. When signed, the bill will represent the only one of the 13 annual appropriations bills necessary to fund the operations of government that Congress will have completed before the start of the new fiscal year October 1st. Congress also hopes to complete work on the FY 07 Homeland Security Appropriations bill before it recesses at the end of the week (so that members can return to their states/districts in time for last-minute campaigning before the November elections), but it’s not clear whether that will happen. We’ll have further details on the Homeland Security bill conference as soon as they become available….
Computer scientists testifying before the Committee on House Administration on the security (or lack thereof) and verification of e-voting machines.
Cameron Wilson of ACM’s U.S. Public Policy Committee has all the details. USACM has been heavily involved in the issues surrounding electronic voting machines and so its appropriate that USACM members Ed Felten and Barbara Simons have been invited to testify. You may have seen Felten recently on Fox News or CNN talking about his research on the security and vulnerabilities of a particular e-voting machine and demoing the relative ease with which an election can be compromised.
Kudos to USACM (and Ed) for helping bring this attention some much needed focus and for providing Congress with the technical expertise it needs to really assess this situation.
A few interesting pieces/tidbits to juxtapose this morning. Sam Liles helpfully forwarded this piece from The Tennessean on the declining interest in computer science as a major, which is apparently getting a fair bit of play on digg.com. The article asks the now familiar question:
Computer science majors make some of the highest starting salaries for college graduates in the country, at about $50,000 a year. Computer science and computer engineering jobs are some of the fastest-growing occupations in the nation, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.
So why are university computer science departments watching their enrollments slide?
The article puts the finger on student’s perceptions about the state of the job market — that potential majors shy away from CS because of fears about offshore outsourcing. But it also does an “ok” job of showing how that might be a mistaken impression:
The East South Central region, which includes Tennessee, Kentucky, Alabama and Mississippi, is the fastest growing in the country in terms of information technology jobs, in part because of economic growth here, according to her agency’s latest survey.
Some 23 percent of chief information officers in that region plan to hire more workers this year and only 1 percent plan cutbacks.
Movva said she hasn’t been able to find experienced consultants in Nashville, and has had to hire outside the region, including signing visas for foreign nationals, to fill job openings.
“There are lots of jobs but not enough people are entering this field,” said Sandeep Walia, who is opening an e-commerce software office called Ignify on West End Avenue.
With Oracle database experts making as much as $150,000 a year, “you wonder why more people aren’t getting into this,” Walia said.
Vanderbilt professors are worried about the perception that jobs aren’t out there.
The department’s Web site includes a plea from the chairman to prospective students that says: “Contrary to what you may be reading in some publications, there are jobs.
“The jobs are out there, but the perception is that they’re not,” said Richard Detmer, the chairman of the computer science department at Middle Tennessee State University.
Jonathan Waite graduated with a bachelor’s degree from Vanderbilt in May. But he says the job market is saturated with computer scientists. He feels that way even though he got three job offers in three months of looking for a job.
But students’ perceptions of the job market aren’t the only aspects of the problem worth addressing. Increasingly, CS departments are realizing that the way they teach computer science might have something to do with declining interest in their major, too. And that’s the focus of this piece in today’s Inside Higher Ed, “New ‘Threads’ for Computer Science.” The piece (which must be good because it quotes my boss, Andy Bernat, and CRA Board Member Rich DeMillo) focuses on the announcement of planned curriculum changes in the College of Computing at Georgia Tech, where DeMillo is Dean.
The Georgia Institute of Technology is today unveiling what some experts believe is a much broader approach to the problem. The institute has abolished the core curriculum for computer science undergraduates a series of courses in hardware and software design, electrical engineering and mathematics. These courses, in various forms, have been the backbone of the computer science curriculum not just at Georgia Tech but at most institutions.
In their place, Georgia Tech is introducing a curriculum called Threads.
…
Underlying this approach is the view that “the one size fits all approach to computer science just isnt working anymore,” said Richard A. DeMillo, dean of the College of Computing at Georgia Tech. The plans were developed by professors, who prepared a white paper outlying how this approach would create “symphonic thinking” graduates another way of saying graduates whose jobs wouldnt be outsourced, a fear keeping many out of the field.
“The really big change here is that we were willing to give up the idea of a core curriculum,” said DeMillo. “If you have 90 percent of your courses occupied with the core, you dont have the flexibility to do anything creative.”
The Georgia Tech approach is noteworthy, not just because it’s an interesting approach to the problem, but because — as Andy points out in the article — it’s being undertaken by one of the bigger schools in computing. There’s plenty of additional detail on Georgia Tech’s approach in the article and on the Georgia Tech website.
Additional efforts in improving the quality of CS education will likely be give a boost by NSF’s very recent solicitation for its new CISE “Pathways to Revitalized Undergraduate Computing Education” (CPATH) program. The new program will make $6 million in awards in FY 2007 to encourage “colleges and universities to work together, and with other stakeholders in undergraduate computing education including industry, professional societies and other types of organizations, to formulate and implement plans to revitalize undergraduate computing education in the United States.”
While the image of computing still requires a lot of work, it’s also becoming increasingly clear that the field needs to reexamine the way it educates its undergraduates. In the coming months, I think we’ll see further efforts by the various computing societies (including CRA) to put a focus on CS education. Hopefully the NSF solicitation will uncover some interesting ideas and approaches within the discipline as well.
A National Academies report published this week discussing the gap between women and men in science academia is getting decent press in the national media. Both Newsweek and the New York Times have pieces covering the Academies’ report “Beyond Bias and Barriers: Fulfilling the Potential of Women in Academic Science and Engineering.
Both articles make the key point from the report: while women are getting a larger percentage of the graduate degrees in science, engineering, and mathematics than in the past, academic faculties do not reflect those gains. Women of minority groups are almost non-existent on faculties. Among the reasons given in the report for low numbers of women on faculties are: rigid tenure clocks, inadequate child care, and colleague and administration bias. The report also states that in order to address this issue, there must be widespread changes to academic departmental structure in order to address the problem and that the changes must start at the top.
The New York Times article Bias is Hurting Women in Science, Panel Reports focuses on the reports findings and states:
For 30 years, the report says, women have earned at least 30 percent of the nations doctorates in social and behavioral sciences, and at least 20 percent of the doctorates in life sciences. Yet they appear among full professors in those fields at less than half those levels. Women from minority groups are virtually absent, it adds.
The report also dismisses other commonly held beliefs that women are uncompetitive or less productive, that they take too much time off for their families. Instead, it says, extensive previous research showed a pattern of unconscious but pervasive bias, arbitrary and subjective evaluation processes and a work environment in which anyone lacking the work and family support traditionally provided by a wife is at a serious disadvantage.
The Newsweek article Science and the Gender Gap, which is part of a larger section on women in leadership, points out that this is not necessarily new information. The article states:
Though individual women may have understood what they were up against, there wasn’t much of an organized effort to change things until an August day in 1994, when a group of tenured female faculty members at MIT met with physicist Robert Birgeneau, then the dean of the School of Science, to press their case that there was an institutional bias. “It was really a singular point,” says Birgeneau, now the chancellor at Berkeley. Before that day, he says, it was easy to dismiss an individual woman’s career problems as the result of a personality conflict or problems in her lab. But after investigating their complaints, he concluded that the problem was systemic.
In 1999, MIT issued a groundbreaking report which showed that tenured women professors made less money and received fewer research resources than their male colleagues. The next year MIT’s president, Charles Vest, convened a meeting of administrators and scientists from 25 of the most prestigious U.S. universities who issued a unanimous statement agreeing that institutional barriers prevented women from succeeding in science.
GAO Report on Cyber Security R&D
/In: Security /by Peter HarshaThe Government Accountability Office has just released its report (pdf) on the state of Federal Coordination for Cyber Security R&D requested by the House Committee on Government Reform. It’s goal wasn’t to assess the state of the research portfolio, but to look at how the agencies coordinate. Here’s what they recommended:
The report is here (pdf). It’s a pretty quick read at only 30 pages.
GCN.com have online coverage here.
OSTP apparently had no comment on the recommendations in the GAO report. The establishment of a research agenda for federal cyber security R&D was also a recommendation and focus of the PITAC report Cyber Security R&D: A Crisis of Prioritization. The committee laid out in the 2005 report ten specific research areas it felt warranted prioritization, along with recommending immediate increases to the cyber security research budgets of NSF, DARPA and DHS (but especially NSF, which they felt was really carrying the load for fundamental, long-term cyber security research). While progress on these funding recommendations has been slow, NITRD has added a Cyber Security and Information Assurance working group into its interagency planning effort….
Visiting Congress At Home
/In: Events, People, Policy /by MelissaNorrWhile CRA highly encourages all computing research community members to attend the annual Congressional Visit Days held in Washington, DC throughout the year, we know it is sometimes difficult to take two or three days to come to the Capitol. Since it is important that everyone be involved in the process and meet with their Representative and Senators, we are adding a space to the CRA Government Affairs web site regarding advocacy through district visits. Visiting your members of Congress while they are in your neighborhood is an equally effective and less time consuming way to express how important federal funding for computer research is to you and your community and is usually more low-key and less chaotic than similar meetings in DC. In doing a district visit, please be sure to keep your institutions government affairs contact informed as he or she can give valuable advice and assistance. To find out who your Representative is, visit Write Your Representative.
The 2007 Congressional and Senate calendars have not been published and things are a bit up in the air regarding sessions at the end of this year. As soon as recess schedules are announced we will list them on the web site. Please visit the new District Visits portion of the web site for updates to the recess listings and as always if you have questions or need assistance with making an appointment, contact Melissa Norr in CRA’s Government Affairs office at mnorr@cra.org or 202.234.2111 ext. 111.
NY Times on Computing’s Future
/In: R&D in the Press /by Peter HarshaSteve Lohr has a great piece today in the NY Times on the state of CS, called “Computing, 2016: What Won’t be Possible?” The essay was apparently spurred by last week’s CSTB’s 20th Anniversary symposium, which I regret that I couldn’t attend. (Fortunately Cameron and David from ACM’s U.S. Public Policy Committee did and have some great write-ups.)
Here’s a snippet from the NY Times piece:
Glad to see that the CSTB event succeeded in getting the message across that computing is a discipline still rich with challenges and contributions to make. Let’s hope this piece gets as wide a circulation (and has as big an impact) as this previous NY Times piece….
You can read all of Lohr’s piece today here.
Homeland Security Appropriations
/In: Funding, FY07 Appropriations, Policy, Research, Security /by MelissaNorrThe Homeland Security Appropriations were passed last week before Congress went home to campaign. The news is mixed with the total appropriations for R&D coming in at $838 million more than either the House or the Senate recommended individually. The cyber security R&D program will see an increase of $3.3 million to $20 million, up from $16.7 million in FY2006. While it’s nice that there’s an increase to the cyber security account, the level is still well below “adequate,” as PITAC pointed out last year in its report on the federal cyber security research effort Cyber Security R&D: A Crisis of Prioritization. Ed Lazowska, former Chair of PITAC, put it nicely in this interview with CIO Magazine last year:
Hopefully, this is high on the agenda of the Department’s new Assistant Secretary for Cyber Security and Telecommunications, Greg Garcia, who was appointed to the post on September 18th.
Further bad news in the R&D section is that University Programs received $50 million, which is less than the $62 million appropriated last year and below the Presidents request of $51.9 million.
Congress used the appropriations bill to express its displeasure with the way Homeland Security S&T has been managed and its expectation that things must improve if S&T is to get any increased appropriations in the future. In fact, Congress expressly withheld $50 million from the R&D budget until the office presents, and Congress approves, a report prepared by the Under Secretary of Science and Technology that describes the progress to address financial management deficiencies, improve its management controls, and implement performance measures and evaluations. They also included language requiring a hearing within 60 days of enactment on the University-Based Centers of Excellence Program goals for fiscal year 2007 and outcomes projected for each center for the next three years.
As the bill has not yet been signed by the President (although it is expected to be), the Department is operating under a continuing resolution extending the FY2006 budget numbers.
Computing Community Consortium Ramps Up
/In: Computing Community Consortium (CCC), CRA /by Peter HarshaAs we noted last week, the National Science Foundation has tasked CRA with establishing a Computing Community Consortium that can provide scientific leadership and vision on issues related to computing research and future large-scale computing research projects. Today, the CCC Planning Group released a white paper (pdf, 210kb) with much more detail on the structure and purpose of the CCC. They’ve also released a timeline of future activities.
The first step in “Bootstrapping Phase 1” has been completed with the naming of an interim CRA GENI Community Advisory Board. Its members are:
Finally, we’ve set up a page for all CCC related information: http://www.cra.org/ccc.
Innovation and Competitiveness: How’d we do?
/In: American Competitiveness Initiative /by Peter HarshaWith the members of the 109th Congress getting ready to leave town this week and not come back until mid-November (giving them plenty of time for last-minute campaigning in their home districts), it seems appropriate to take a look at what they’ve accomplished in addressing some of the innovation and competitiveness issues that have been so well-covered here this year.
Though there was movement on competitiveness issues in Congress at the end of last year, the inclusion by President Bush of an “American Competitiveness Initiative” in his State of the Union speech at the end of January clearly catalyzed the action on innovation and competitiveness issues this year. The President’s plan included a number of different provisions addressing different portions of the innovation/competitiveness chain:
Congress, too, had it’s own ideas — many gleaned from influential reports like the National Academies’ Rising Above the Gathering Storm and the Council on Competitiveness’ Innovate America reports — and reflected them in a number of pieces of legislation introduced throughout the year. It was enough to make the science advocacy community somewhat giddy. After all, we’d been fighting for several years to convince the Administration and Congress that the federal investment in fundamental research, despite being an absolutely crucial part of the the chain of innovation that keeps America dominant in an increasingly competitive world, was inadequately supported within the Federal budget — a fact that put our future competitiveness at risk. But until this year, beyond a few sympathetic ears in Congress, that argument had gained no traction. Then, a change in attitude in the White House and some real leadership on both sides of the aisle in Congress (folks like Reps. Frank Wolf (R-VA), Sherry Boehlert (R-NY), the House Democratic Leadership, Sens. Lamar Alexander (R-TN), Joe Lieberman (D-CT), Jeff Bingaman (D-NM), Pete Domenici (R-NM), John Ensign (R-NV), and Barbara Mikulski (D-MD)) and the tide turned dramatically. Soon the President was on the road making the case for increased funding for science and members were scrambling to claim some legislative ground by introducing a plethora of competitiveness bills.
So as we approach the end of this legislative session, where did all of this activity get us? How will the science community fare as a result of “competitiveness” and “innovation” becoming hot topics?
The short answer seems to be: we’ll probably do pretty well.
For those of us who have a great interest in seeing university research in the physical sciences (which, in DC parlance, includes mathematics, computer science, physics, chemistry, etc) receive more support, the clear number one priority was seeing the President’s number one priority — starting NSF, NIST and DOE Office of Science, on the path to doubling their budgets in 10 years — enacted in the FY 2007 appropriations bills. And despite some early mixed-signals from the House Republican leadership, both the full House and the Senate Appropriations Committee have approved appropriations bills that would provide those agencies with the full funding they requested under ACI.
[There is one potential hurdle ahead in the form of the appropriations “end-game.” It’s clear that Congress will not conclude work on the appropriations bills before the November election, which means they’ll need to pass a “continuing resolution” that would provide funding for the federal government past the Oct 1, 2006 beginning of the 2007 fiscal year. What is unclear is whether Congress will elect to return after the election in “lame duck” session and pass the appropriations bills as freestanding pieces of legislation (unlikely), as part of a giant omnibus appropriation with all bills rolled into one (pretty likely), or simply “punt” on the whole issue and extend the “continuing resolution” (CR) through Sept. 30, 2007.
That last option is the most problematic for the science community. A CR typically directs federal agencies to continue to spend in the new fiscal year, but only at the same rate as the previous fiscal year — with no new starts or programs. A similar CR this year would wipe out all the gains we’ve worked to achieve through the President’s ACI and the House and Senate appropriations committees and send us back to square one next year. While it’s unlikely Congress would take the CR option this year — a CR would wipe out any earmarks won by lawmakers as well, unless they were explicitly included — it’s not completely out of the question, and the uncertainty about which party will lead each chamber doesn’t make the prognosticating any easier. So CRA, along with the rest of the science community, will continue to take the message “omnibus, not CR!” to the congressional leadership throughout the end of this legislative session.]
Beyond funding increases for the agencies, however, things aren’t quite as clear. Several bills were introduced in Congress this year that attempt to “authorize” specific provisions of ACI, or the various recommendations of the Gathering Storm or Innovate America reports. The table below shows what some of those bills contain and what their current and likely future status is. In every case, it appears the bills will fall short of the actions required to enact them. The biggest hurdle, it appears, is the White House’s continuing insistence that the programs contained in the ACI don’t require additional authorizations (and so they’re reluctant to allow Congress to put its stamp on programs in authorizations), and the House Leadership’s continuing reluctance to pass “high-dollar” authorizations at a time when it’s trying to demonstrate fiscal restraint. (This despte the fact that the authorizations don’t actually obligate any funding — it’s just “bad optics.”)
With only a short time remaining in the 109th Congress’ legislative calendar — really, only the days the Members are willing to sit in “lame duck” session after the election — it becomes increasingly unlikely (though not impossible) that any of the congressional competitiveness bills will make it to the President’s desk. So, despite yesterday’s introduction by the Senate Majority and Minority Leaders of the National Competitiveness Investment Act (not yet online) — an omnibus-like complilation of a number of different Senate approaches into one 209-page bill — it’s not clear that any of the bill will get the necessary consideration in the House to move it towards passage.
It would be nice symbolism to see these Congressional authorizations passed overwhelmingly, but it’s not a particularly big loss that they likely won’t be. In fact, from our perspective, there’s a benefit in not having these particular bills get enacted. One key element of increasing the Nation’s innovative capacity is insuring that we have a diverse, well-educated workforce. And a key part of that is by increasing the participation of underrepresented groups in math and science — particularly in computer science. Though the various authorization bills listed below have a number of good things in them, none is particularly strong in promoting the participation of women or minorities in math and science. Having to begin the process of working through these bills with the next Congress beginning in January actually presents an opportunity for us to continue to make the case for increasing support for programs that aim to create a more diverse workforce, with the hope of seeing that reflected in whatever bill finally moves towards passage.
But, for now, the real key for those of us who represent those who do fundamental research in the physical sciences is to see the appropriations requested by the President enacted in full. And on that score, we should do quite well this session.
Compromise Reached on FY 07 Defense Approps; Cognitive Computing Suffers Cut
/In: FY07 Appropriations /by Peter HarshaLast night, the House overwhelming approved a compromise version (pdf) of the FY 2007 Defense Appropriations bill after House and Senate negotiators agreed last Friday to mitigate some of the significant cuts in the Senate version. As we’ve noted previously, a key area of concern for the computing research community was the large cut by the Senate to DARPA’s Cognitive Computing program, particularly their $60 million cut to “Integrated Cognitive Systems” account. As we pointed out then, the cuts to the ICS account run counter to the recent concerns of Congress, PITAC, and DOD Defense Science Board, who all have raised strong concerns about the shift of DARPA resources away from fundamental research at universities, especially in information technology. The Cognitive Computing program is one area where DARPA has responded positively to those concerns.
While the community attempted to resist the cuts, the compromise version of the bill still contains a $30 million reduction from the President’s requested level for Integrated Cognitive Systems for FY 2007 — part of a $159 million reduction to DARPA’s overall requested budget. While these cuts to the requested budget are not good, they are a marked improvement from the Senate numbers, which included a $433 million cut to DARPA’s requested budget. Fortunately, even with the cut to its requested budget, Cognitive Computing will still see an increase over its FY 06 estimated level (about 10.6 percent).
The Senate had also approved a $14 million cut to the requested budget for the Information and Communications Technology line. That cut was mitigated to $8 million in the conference report ($3.9 million from the Responsive Computing Architectures account, $1 million from Security-Aware Systems, and $3 million from the Automated Speech and Text Exploitation in Multiple Languages account).
Overall, 6.1 (Basic) research at DOD fared pretty well (5.6 percent increase over FY 06) and 6.2 (Applied) overall did OK, too (2.2 percent increase). 6.1 “Defense-wide” (DARPA and OSD, basically) went up 14.8 percent, and 6.2 “Defense-wide” went up about 3.5 percent.
The folks at the Coalition for National Security Research have put together a handy little chart of the various DOD R&D accounts in the bill (thanks to Jason Van Wey of MIT). You can get it here (pdf).
Senate approval of the conference bill is expected today and the President is expected to sign the bill. When signed, the bill will represent the only one of the 13 annual appropriations bills necessary to fund the operations of government that Congress will have completed before the start of the new fiscal year October 1st. Congress also hopes to complete work on the FY 07 Homeland Security Appropriations bill before it recesses at the end of the week (so that members can return to their states/districts in time for last-minute campaigning before the November elections), but it’s not clear whether that will happen. We’ll have further details on the Homeland Security bill conference as soon as they become available….
This is a Big Deal
/In: Policy /by Peter HarshaComputer scientists testifying before the Committee on House Administration on the security (or lack thereof) and verification of e-voting machines.
Cameron Wilson of ACM’s U.S. Public Policy Committee has all the details. USACM has been heavily involved in the issues surrounding electronic voting machines and so its appropriate that USACM members Ed Felten and Barbara Simons have been invited to testify. You may have seen Felten recently on Fox News or CNN talking about his research on the security and vulnerabilities of a particular e-voting machine and demoing the relative ease with which an election can be compromised.
Kudos to USACM (and Ed) for helping bring this attention some much needed focus and for providing Congress with the technical expertise it needs to really assess this situation.
On Declining Interest in CS and What Can Be Done…
/In: People, R&D in the Press /by Peter HarshaA few interesting pieces/tidbits to juxtapose this morning. Sam Liles helpfully forwarded this piece from The Tennessean on the declining interest in computer science as a major, which is apparently getting a fair bit of play on digg.com. The article asks the now familiar question:
The article puts the finger on student’s perceptions about the state of the job market — that potential majors shy away from CS because of fears about offshore outsourcing. But it also does an “ok” job of showing how that might be a mistaken impression:
But students’ perceptions of the job market aren’t the only aspects of the problem worth addressing. Increasingly, CS departments are realizing that the way they teach computer science might have something to do with declining interest in their major, too. And that’s the focus of this piece in today’s Inside Higher Ed, “New ‘Threads’ for Computer Science.” The piece (which must be good because it quotes my boss, Andy Bernat, and CRA Board Member Rich DeMillo) focuses on the announcement of planned curriculum changes in the College of Computing at Georgia Tech, where DeMillo is Dean.
The Georgia Tech approach is noteworthy, not just because it’s an interesting approach to the problem, but because — as Andy points out in the article — it’s being undertaken by one of the bigger schools in computing. There’s plenty of additional detail on Georgia Tech’s approach in the article and on the Georgia Tech website.
Additional efforts in improving the quality of CS education will likely be give a boost by NSF’s very recent solicitation for its new CISE “Pathways to Revitalized Undergraduate Computing Education” (CPATH) program. The new program will make $6 million in awards in FY 2007 to encourage “colleges and universities to work together, and with other stakeholders in undergraduate computing education including industry, professional societies and other types of organizations, to formulate and implement plans to revitalize undergraduate computing education in the United States.”
While the image of computing still requires a lot of work, it’s also becoming increasingly clear that the field needs to reexamine the way it educates its undergraduates. In the coming months, I think we’ll see further efforts by the various computing societies (including CRA) to put a focus on CS education. Hopefully the NSF solicitation will uncover some interesting ideas and approaches within the discipline as well.
The Tenure Gender Gap
/In: American Competitiveness Initiative, Diversity in Computing, People, Research /by MelissaNorrA National Academies report published this week discussing the gap between women and men in science academia is getting decent press in the national media. Both Newsweek and the New York Times have pieces covering the Academies’ report “Beyond Bias and Barriers: Fulfilling the Potential of Women in Academic Science and Engineering.
Both articles make the key point from the report: while women are getting a larger percentage of the graduate degrees in science, engineering, and mathematics than in the past, academic faculties do not reflect those gains. Women of minority groups are almost non-existent on faculties. Among the reasons given in the report for low numbers of women on faculties are: rigid tenure clocks, inadequate child care, and colleague and administration bias. The report also states that in order to address this issue, there must be widespread changes to academic departmental structure in order to address the problem and that the changes must start at the top.
The New York Times article Bias is Hurting Women in Science, Panel Reports focuses on the reports findings and states:
The Newsweek article Science and the Gender Gap, which is part of a larger section on women in leadership, points out that this is not necessarily new information. The article states:
Both articles are available online at Bias is Hurting Women in Science, Panel Reports and Science and the Gender Gap.