Update: (9/29/06) — The CCC Planning Group has released a white paper 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
Finally, we’ve set up a page for all CCC related information: https://cra.org/ccc.
For Immediate Release
Contact: Peter Harsha, CRA
202-234-2111 x 106
NSF TAPS CRA TO CREATE COMPUTING COMMUNITY CONSORTIUM
WASHINGTON, DC, September 18, 2006 – The National Science Foundation today announced an agreement with the Computing Research Association (CRA) to establish a consortium of computing experts that will provide scientific leadership and vision on issues related to computing research and future large-scale computing research projects.
Under the three-year, $6 million agreement, CRA will create the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) to identify major research opportunities and establish grand challenges for the field. The CCC will create venues for community participation for developing visions and creating new research activities.
One of the first tasks of the CCC will be to assume the role of community proxy organization for the NSF’s Global Environment for Networking Innovations (GENI) Project, providing broad scientific oversight to its potential construction and operation. In addition, the CCC will provide scientific oversight for future NSF large-scale computing research initiatives.
A council of 9 to 15 members and a council chair will lead the CCC. All council members will be leaders of the computing research community and will represent the diversity of that community.
“We’re pleased that NSF has charged our organization with establishing the CCC,” said Dan Reed, chair of the Computing Research Association and director of the Renaissance Computing Institute in North Carolina. “Computing research continues to fuel the innovations that drive economic productivity. We see the CCC as a mechanism that will enable continued innovation by enhancing our community’s ability to envision and pursue long-term, audacious computing research goals.”
Reed said the main challenges for the CCC will be to catalyze the computing research community to debate long-range research challenges, to build consensus around research visions, to articulate those visions, and to develop the most promising visions into clearly defined initiatives. About CRA. The CRA was established 30 years ago and has members at more than 250 research entities in academia, industry and government. Its mission is to strengthen research and advance education in the computing fields, expand opportunities for women and minorities, and improve public and policymaker understanding of the importance of computing and computing research in society.
We’ll have more on this announcement shortly, including a white paper that will help provide a little more detail. But in the interim, you can get some additional context by looking at NSF’s original solicitation for the CCC, “Defining the Large-Scale Infrastructure Needs of the Computing Research Community.”
As part of the Coalition for National Science Funding (CNSF), CRA brought participants to the 2nd annual CNSF Fall Hill Visits Day this week. The overall visits brought over 80 people from many scientific disciplines to Capitol Hill to meet with lawmakers and staff regarding NSF funding. Robert Constable from Cornell University, Mary Jane Irwin from Penn State University, Joe Kearney from the University of Iowa, Charles Nicholas from the University of Maryland Baltimore County, and Michael Oudshoorn from Montana State University, below with Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT), ably represented CRA and met with 30 Congressional offices to emphasize the importance of NSF funding to computer research and innovation. The participants shared their personal research and funding stories and many others from their universities. The message was well received on the Hill with many offices encouraging participants to follow up in the future with stories or problems involving research and funding. As weve noted before, meetings between scientists and members of Congress and their staff are an incredibly effective tool in keeping Congress interested and engaged in the needs of scientists. The examples of research done in a particular district are invaluable to a member of Congress and can be a real boon for science when it comes time for appropriations votes. Its also important to point out that Congressional offices will not turn away constituents who ask for a meeting although it often means you will meet with a staff member instead of your Senator or Representative. Dont discount those meetingsCongressional staffers are the eyes and ears of their bosses!
We highly encourage all members of the CRA community to get in touch with their Congressional delegation, either by visiting Washington, DC or going to their local offices. If you have any questions or concerns about setting up appointments or meeting with Congressional staff, please let us know. Were happy to help any way that we can.
The Department of Energy announced new funding for computational science projects over the next three to five years. The press release describes the projects as “aimed at accelerating research in designing new materials, developing future energy sources, studying global climate change, improving environmental cleanup methods and understanding physics from the tiniest particles to the massive explosions of supernovae.” The new projects will be sponsored by the DoE’s Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing (SciDAC) program and will be called SciDAC-2. These projects will rely heavily on high performance computing.
The announcement states:
In support of these scientific applications, approximately $24.3 million in annual awards will allow SciDAC-2 to establish nine Centers for Enabling Technologies. Multidisciplinary teams will be led by national laboratories and universities and will focus on meeting the specific needs of SciDAC science applications researchers as they move toward petascale computing. The centers will specialize in applied mathematics, computer science, distributed computing or visualization and will be closely tied to specific science applications.
SciDAC-2 will also increase the presence of the program in the academic community by creating four university-led SciDAC institutes with thirteen participating universities. The institutes will receive approximately $8.2 million in awards annually. Through hands-on workshops and tutorials, the SciDAC institutes will help a broad range of researchers prepare their applications to take advantage of the increasing capabilities of supercomputing centers around the country as well as help foster the next generation of computational scientists.
Information on all of the programs and Centers can be found at SciDAC.
NIST has released recommendations for automated Web services security. The announcement was published in GCN last week and the recommendations are open to comments. Information for sending comments is at the end of the GCN article. Comments need to be sent by October 30.
The Council on Competitiveness will unveil a “new study regarding public-private partnerships that leverage supercomputing resources funded by the federal government for greater industry strength” on September 7 during the Third High Performance Computing Users Conference. The announcement can be found on HPC Wire and we’ll post more details once the study is released.
The computing community has an image problem. This is not news to long-time readers of this blog — or indeed, anyone who has followed coverage of IT-related stories in the popular press. Dropping enrollment rates and dropping interest in computing are pretty good signs that that there is a perception among an increasing number of undergraduate (and probably younger) students that a career in computing isn’t as rewarding as a career in some other discipline. The reasons for this perception could be many — belief that a career in computing means long, lonely hours staring at an LCD screen; that the field is “mature,” and computing a “solved” problem; that the problems aren’t intellectually stimulating enough; or that the best IT jobs will get outsourced overseas. In previousposts, we’ve described some of the evidence out there that debunks these perceptions, yet they persist.
Fortunately, the computing community isn’t standing still. As we wrote last August:
At the Computing Leadership Summit convened by CRA last February, a large and diverse group of stakeholders — including all the major computing societies, representatives from PITAC, NSF and the National Academies, and industry reps from Google, HP, IBM, Lucent, Microsoft, Sun, TechNet and others (complete list and summary here (pdf)) — committed to addressing two key issues facing computing: the current concerns of research funding support and computing’s “image” problem. Task forces have been formed, chairmen named (Edward Lazowska of U of Washington heads the research funding task force; Rick Rashid of Microsoft heads the “image” task force), and the work is underway. As the summary of the summit demonstrates, no ideas or possible avenues are off the table…. We’ll report more on the effort as it moves forward.
Rashid and the Image Task force have been pretty busy. Rick detailed some of the Task Force’s conclusions at CRA’s Snowbird conference back in June (which Cameron Wilson of ACM has done a good job summarizing). One of the key conclusions, though, was that addressing this problem in a coordinated way is going to be a full-time job. And the Task Force members felt committed enough addressing the problem that they agreed to contribute their own resources to fund the position and get to work.
That position is now ready to be filled. From the job description:
The person in this position will become a national spokesperson for the computing discipline, working with executive level leaders from across the nation in industry, academia, government and not-for-profit organizations. Work will include forming strategic relationships with corporations, negotiating with academic institutions to shepherd computer science curricular reform, talking to the press, and promoting information technologies to the public. The position will plan and lead a national research and information gathering effort and use the results to define a strategy to encourage more young people to enter information technology, as well as create a greater public understanding of IT. The position will create and lead the roll out of a national awareness campaign and will be personally involved with changing the image of IT, through numerous speaking engagements, conference panels, outreach activities and written articles. This position is accountable for progress to the Task Force on the Image of IT (whose members represent such distinguished institutions as AAAI, ACM, CRA, Hewlett Packard, IEEE-CS, Intel, Microsoft, SIAM, and USENIX) and is housed in the National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT) and ATLAS Institute.
For complete details, see the full posting. Please forward the link to anyone you think may qualify….
Interesting article on Enterprise Systems IT salary survey in Monday’s InfoWorld. The survey “found that although application programmers scored the largest pay increases, at almost 9 percent, all IT staff positions with applications and system responsibilities had year-to-year jumps in base salary.”
Other interesting stats from the survey include:
Application programmers received the biggest salary increases, 8.7 percent over last year
Systems administrators received the smallest increase, 2 percent over last year but their annual bonuses jumped 15 percent
The survey results are being released over the next four weeks at Enterprise Systems web site. The first round of data can be found here.
New legislation has been introduced in the Senate to expand the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program. While this is not in and of itself a bad thing, the correlating increase in the budget could actually hit the research agencies hard. The SBIR program is funded by a tax on federal research agencies (those doing more than $100,000,000 in R&D). Currently the agencies are required to contribute a minimum 2.5 percent of their total budget to the SBIR program. The new legislation, S. 3778 – the Small Business Reauthorization and Improvements Act of 2006, would increase the percentage to a minimum of 3 percent in FY 2007 and increase it by 0.5 percent each fiscal year until it reaches 5 percent in 2011 where it would remain until legislation is passed to increase it again.
The irony in this proposal is that it will actually decrease the amount of money the agencies can spend on their core research missions, which may have impacts on the nation’s innovative capacity beyond any expansion of the SBIR program. At a time when Congress and the Administration seem to have agreed on the importance of increasing support for fundamental research as a way to improve the environment for innovation and help ensure the nation’s continued competitiveness, this proposal actually represents a step backwards.
The science advocacy community is beginning to organize to respond to this new legislation. We will keep you posted here when more details on the effort become available.
Last week the Senate Appropriations Committee (SAC) approved its version of the FY 2007 Defense Appropriations bill and once again, as they did last year, included a significant cut to DARPA’s “Cognitive Computing” program. In addition, the SAC approved cuts to both the “Information and Communications Technology” account and even the “Computer Science Study Group” activity at DARPA.
Here are the details: Information and Communications Technology: President requested $243 million in his budget for ICT in FY 07, an increase of $47 million (or 24 percent) over FY 06.
The House included $243 million in their version of the FY 07 Defense Approps.
The SAC approved $229 million, a cut of $13.4 million, or 5 percent, vs. the request — an increase of $34 million over FY 06 (17 percent).
Programs that would suffer cuts are “Responsive Computing Architectures” (-$3.9 million), “Security-Aware Systems” (-$3 million) and “Automated Speech and Text Exploitation in Multiple Languages” (-$6.5 million). Cognitive Computing Systems: The President requested $220 million for FY 07, an increase of $57 million (35 percent) over FY 06.
The House included the full $220 million in their bill.
The SAC approved $149 million, a cut of $70.8 million (32 percent) vs. the request, and a cut of $14 million over FY 06 (9 percent).
Programs targeted are “Integrated Cognitive Systems” (-$60 million), “Learning Locomotion and Navigation,” (-$3.8 million) and “Improved Warfighter Information Processing” (-$7 million).
In addition, SAC cut the Computer Science Study Group at DARPA — established this year to help expose young faculty to DOD-oriented problems in computer science — from the requested level of $6.6 million in FY 07 to $3 million.
This is obviously bad news. While the ICT cut is really just the slowing of the rate of growth of ICT programs, the cuts to Cognitive Computing represent a real scaling back of the program — back to FY 05 budget levels.
CRA will be working to oppose the cuts along with representatives from a number of the institutions affected. (The cut to the Integrated Cognitive Systems account alone would impact more than 20 universities and research institutions.)
The SAC bill may come before the Senate as early as Tuesday, August 1st. Senate leadership hopes to have debate on the bill wrapped up by the end of the week, before Congress sets off on its annual August recess. The next chance to contest the cut would then be during the conference for the bill, which could happen in September.
Keep a watch here for the latest details in the effort to oppose the cuts. The case we laid out last year remains true today:
Research in learning, reasoning, and cognitive systems is focused on intelligent intrepretations of signals and data, on controlling unmanned vehicles, and on amplifying human effectiveness. Its aim is to reduce U.S. casualties by providing improved command and control and tactical planning against adversaries, as well as improved training systems. Work in this area includes research responsible for the Command Post of the Future (CPOF) — a software system currently deployed and very widely-used in Iraq to coordinate battle plans and integrate multiple intelligence reports, providing U.S. forces the capability to plan, execute and replan much faster than the enemy’s decision cycle and cited by Secretary Rumsfeld as the major contributor to victory in the first phase of Operation Iraqi Freedom. It’s also cricital to the research and development of autonomous, unmanned vehicles that amplify our warfighting capability while reducing the number of U.S. forces in harm’s way. Cutting support so significantly for this research will hamper advancements in defense-related IT in the short- and long-term and will slow technological advancements essential to current and future military operations in Iraq and around the globe.
It also runs completely counter to recent concerns of Congress, PITAC and the DOD’s Defense Science Board. All three bodies 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 these concerns.
Anyway, this is a bit of a dark cloud over the otherwise very positive news we’ve received all year long (topped by the House and Senate both approving full funding for the ACI in their approps bills), but we’ve got a reasonable chance of mitigating this somewhat, provided we start moving now. Update: (Aug 1, 2006) — It appears now that the Senate won’t be able to begin consideration of its version of the FY 2007 Defense Appropriations bill until after the August recess — which is good news because it gives us a bit more time. However, it also means we’re a bit more likely to see another omnibus appropriations bill at the end of the session, which poses its own set of challenges…. Update 2: (Aug 1, 2006, 9:30 pm) — So, I should have known that as soon as I posted the update above, the situation would change. The Defense Appropriations bill came to the floor this afternoon and debate will continue for the remainder of the week. The plan is to finish it before the August recess begins — which means the Senate leadership would like to have it done by Friday or the weekend. One positive is an amendment planned by Sens. Ted Kennedy (D-MA) and Susan Collins (R-ME) that would appropriate an additional $45 million for basic research accounts at DOD. Here are the details:
$12 million in additional funds for Army University Research Initiatives (PE 0601103A)
$13 million in additional funds for Navy URI (PE 0601103N)
$5 million in additional funds for Air Force URI (PE 0601103F)
$6 million in additional funds for the DARPA (PE 0601101E) for its University Research Program in Computer Science and Cybersecurity
$9 million in additional funds for the SMART National Defense Education Program (PE 0601120D8Z)
This amendment is very similar to an amendment Kennedy and Collins introduced to the Defense Authorization early this summer, which passed unanimously after gaining the co-sponsorship of 21 other senators. We’ll pass along further details as we get them. Update 3: (August 7th) — The Senate didn’t manage to finish up debate on the Defense Approps bill before the recess, so they’ll take the bill up again when they return in September. No word on the fate of the Kennedy-Collins amendment, but it appears we’ve got some time to buttress support for it and for heading off the cuts to Cognitive Computing and ICT….
Information Week spent a great deal of its July 17 issue discussing the IT workforce shortage and a variety of issues surrounding it. One of the articles, Computer Classes Seen as Shop Class” at Many Schools, discusses an area of the talent pipeline that is contributing to the image problem of IT. The article starts:
If a kid takes a computer networking class as an elective, will college admissions departments look at it in the same spirit as an advanced physics class–or more akin to wood shop?
It goes on to discuss the different types of computer related courses that can be offered and the constraints that high schools are under as well as an example of a company program that works with schools on computer curriculum. However, it then states the disparity that while some computer classes are in the advanced placement or honors curriculum, others are often in the technical/vocational curriculum which makes parents steer their college-bound children away.
The question is, of course, a much more complicated one than just whether or not computer courses should be considered honors or vocational in high school. But it does raise the issue of how invasive the image problem that computer science suffers can be and the depth of the problem that needs to be addressed.
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NSF Taps CRA to Form Computing Community Consortium
/In: Computing Community Consortium (CCC), CRA /by Peter HarshaUpdate: (9/29/06) — The CCC Planning Group has released a white paper 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: https://cra.org/ccc.
We’ll have more on this announcement shortly, including a white paper that will help provide a little more detail. But in the interim, you can get some additional context by looking at NSF’s original solicitation for the CCC, “Defining the Large-Scale Infrastructure Needs of the Computing Research Community.”
CRA Members Visit Capitol Hill
/In: CRA, Funding, FY07 Appropriations, People, Policy, Research /by MelissaNorrAs part of the Coalition for National Science Funding (CNSF), CRA brought participants to the 2nd annual CNSF Fall Hill Visits Day this week. The overall visits brought over 80 people from many scientific disciplines to Capitol Hill to meet with lawmakers and staff regarding NSF funding. Robert Constable from Cornell University, Mary Jane Irwin from Penn State University, Joe Kearney from the University of Iowa, Charles Nicholas from the University of Maryland Baltimore County, and Michael Oudshoorn from Montana State University, below with Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT), ably represented CRA and met with 30 Congressional offices to emphasize the importance of NSF funding to computer research and innovation. The participants shared their personal research and funding stories and many others from their universities. The message was well received on the Hill with many offices encouraging participants to follow up in the future with stories or problems involving research and funding.
As weve noted before, meetings between scientists and members of Congress and their staff are an incredibly effective tool in keeping Congress interested and engaged in the needs of scientists. The examples of research done in a particular district are invaluable to a member of Congress and can be a real boon for science when it comes time for appropriations votes. Its also important to point out that Congressional offices will not turn away constituents who ask for a meeting although it often means you will meet with a staff member instead of your Senator or Representative. Dont discount those meetingsCongressional staffers are the eyes and ears of their bosses!
We highly encourage all members of the CRA community to get in touch with their Congressional delegation, either by visiting Washington, DC or going to their local offices. If you have any questions or concerns about setting up appointments or meeting with Congressional staff, please let us know. Were happy to help any way that we can.
DoE Announces New Funding for Computational Science Projects
/In: Funding, Research /by MelissaNorrThe Department of Energy announced new funding for computational science projects over the next three to five years. The press release describes the projects as “aimed at accelerating research in designing new materials, developing future energy sources, studying global climate change, improving environmental cleanup methods and understanding physics from the tiniest particles to the massive explosions of supernovae.” The new projects will be sponsored by the DoE’s Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing (SciDAC) program and will be called SciDAC-2. These projects will rely heavily on high performance computing.
The announcement states:
Information on all of the programs and Centers can be found at SciDAC.
NIST Security Recommendations for Automated Web Services
/In: Research, Security /by MelissaNorrNIST has released recommendations for automated Web services security. The announcement was published in GCN last week and the recommendations are open to comments. Information for sending comments is at the end of the GCN article. Comments need to be sent by October 30.
New Supercomputing Study to be Released Sept. 7
/In: Misc., R&D in the Press, Research /by MelissaNorrThe Council on Competitiveness will unveil a “new study regarding public-private partnerships that leverage supercomputing resources funded by the federal government for greater industry strength” on September 7 during the Third High Performance Computing Users Conference. The announcement can be found on HPC Wire and we’ll post more details once the study is released.
Position Opening: IT “Image” Strategist
/In: People /by Peter HarshaThe computing community has an image problem. This is not news to long-time readers of this blog — or indeed, anyone who has followed coverage of IT-related stories in the popular press. Dropping enrollment rates and dropping interest in computing are pretty good signs that that there is a perception among an increasing number of undergraduate (and probably younger) students that a career in computing isn’t as rewarding as a career in some other discipline. The reasons for this perception could be many — belief that a career in computing means long, lonely hours staring at an LCD screen; that the field is “mature,” and computing a “solved” problem; that the problems aren’t intellectually stimulating enough; or that the best IT jobs will get outsourced overseas. In previous posts, we’ve described some of the evidence out there that debunks these perceptions, yet they persist.
Fortunately, the computing community isn’t standing still. As we wrote last August:
Rashid and the Image Task force have been pretty busy. Rick detailed some of the Task Force’s conclusions at CRA’s Snowbird conference back in June (which Cameron Wilson of ACM has done a good job summarizing). One of the key conclusions, though, was that addressing this problem in a coordinated way is going to be a full-time job. And the Task Force members felt committed enough addressing the problem that they agreed to contribute their own resources to fund the position and get to work.
That position is now ready to be filled. From the job description:
For complete details, see the full posting. Please forward the link to anyone you think may qualify….
IT Salary Survey
/In: Misc. /by MelissaNorrInteresting article on Enterprise Systems IT salary survey in Monday’s InfoWorld. The survey “found that although application programmers scored the largest pay increases, at almost 9 percent, all IT staff positions with applications and system responsibilities had year-to-year jumps in base salary.”
Other interesting stats from the survey include:
The survey results are being released over the next four weeks at Enterprise Systems web site. The first round of data can be found here.
SBIR Increase from Research Agencies Budgets
/In: American Competitiveness Initiative, Funding, FY07 Appropriations, Research /by MelissaNorrNew legislation has been introduced in the Senate to expand the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program. While this is not in and of itself a bad thing, the correlating increase in the budget could actually hit the research agencies hard. The SBIR program is funded by a tax on federal research agencies (those doing more than $100,000,000 in R&D). Currently the agencies are required to contribute a minimum 2.5 percent of their total budget to the SBIR program. The new legislation, S. 3778 – the Small Business Reauthorization and Improvements Act of 2006, would increase the percentage to a minimum of 3 percent in FY 2007 and increase it by 0.5 percent each fiscal year until it reaches 5 percent in 2011 where it would remain until legislation is passed to increase it again.
The irony in this proposal is that it will actually decrease the amount of money the agencies can spend on their core research missions, which may have impacts on the nation’s innovative capacity beyond any expansion of the SBIR program. At a time when Congress and the Administration seem to have agreed on the importance of increasing support for fundamental research as a way to improve the environment for innovation and help ensure the nation’s continued competitiveness, this proposal actually represents a step backwards.
The science advocacy community is beginning to organize to respond to this new legislation. We will keep you posted here when more details on the effort become available.
Senate Appropriators Target Cognitive Computing, IT Research Again
/In: Funding, FY07 Appropriations, Policy /by Peter HarshaLast week the Senate Appropriations Committee (SAC) approved its version of the FY 2007 Defense Appropriations bill and once again, as they did last year, included a significant cut to DARPA’s “Cognitive Computing” program. In addition, the SAC approved cuts to both the “Information and Communications Technology” account and even the “Computer Science Study Group” activity at DARPA.
Here are the details:
Information and Communications Technology: President requested $243 million in his budget for ICT in FY 07, an increase of $47 million (or 24 percent) over FY 06.
The House included $243 million in their version of the FY 07 Defense Approps.
The SAC approved $229 million, a cut of $13.4 million, or 5 percent, vs. the request — an increase of $34 million over FY 06 (17 percent).
Programs that would suffer cuts are “Responsive Computing Architectures” (-$3.9 million), “Security-Aware Systems” (-$3 million) and “Automated Speech and Text Exploitation in Multiple Languages” (-$6.5 million).
Cognitive Computing Systems: The President requested $220 million for FY 07, an increase of $57 million (35 percent) over FY 06.
The House included the full $220 million in their bill.
The SAC approved $149 million, a cut of $70.8 million (32 percent) vs. the request, and a cut of $14 million over FY 06 (9 percent).
Programs targeted are “Integrated Cognitive Systems” (-$60 million), “Learning Locomotion and Navigation,” (-$3.8 million) and “Improved Warfighter Information Processing” (-$7 million).
In addition, SAC cut the Computer Science Study Group at DARPA — established this year to help expose young faculty to DOD-oriented problems in computer science — from the requested level of $6.6 million in FY 07 to $3 million.
This is obviously bad news. While the ICT cut is really just the slowing of the rate of growth of ICT programs, the cuts to Cognitive Computing represent a real scaling back of the program — back to FY 05 budget levels.
CRA will be working to oppose the cuts along with representatives from a number of the institutions affected. (The cut to the Integrated Cognitive Systems account alone would impact more than 20 universities and research institutions.)
The SAC bill may come before the Senate as early as Tuesday, August 1st. Senate leadership hopes to have debate on the bill wrapped up by the end of the week, before Congress sets off on its annual August recess. The next chance to contest the cut would then be during the conference for the bill, which could happen in September.
Keep a watch here for the latest details in the effort to oppose the cuts. The case we laid out last year remains true today:
Anyway, this is a bit of a dark cloud over the otherwise very positive news we’ve received all year long (topped by the House and Senate both approving full funding for the ACI in their approps bills), but we’ve got a reasonable chance of mitigating this somewhat, provided we start moving now.
Update: (Aug 1, 2006) — It appears now that the Senate won’t be able to begin consideration of its version of the FY 2007 Defense Appropriations bill until after the August recess — which is good news because it gives us a bit more time. However, it also means we’re a bit more likely to see another omnibus appropriations bill at the end of the session, which poses its own set of challenges….
Update 2: (Aug 1, 2006, 9:30 pm) — So, I should have known that as soon as I posted the update above, the situation would change. The Defense Appropriations bill came to the floor this afternoon and debate will continue for the remainder of the week. The plan is to finish it before the August recess begins — which means the Senate leadership would like to have it done by Friday or the weekend. One positive is an amendment planned by Sens. Ted Kennedy (D-MA) and Susan Collins (R-ME) that would appropriate an additional $45 million for basic research accounts at DOD. Here are the details:
This amendment is very similar to an amendment Kennedy and Collins introduced to the Defense Authorization early this summer, which passed unanimously after gaining the co-sponsorship of 21 other senators. We’ll pass along further details as we get them.
Update 3: (August 7th) — The Senate didn’t manage to finish up debate on the Defense Approps bill before the recess, so they’ll take the bill up again when they return in September. No word on the fate of the Kennedy-Collins amendment, but it appears we’ve got some time to buttress support for it and for heading off the cuts to Cognitive Computing and ICT….
Another Piece of the Image Problem
/In: Diversity in Computing, Misc., People /by MelissaNorrInformation Week spent a great deal of its July 17 issue discussing the IT workforce shortage and a variety of issues surrounding it. One of the articles, Computer Classes Seen as Shop Class” at Many Schools, discusses an area of the talent pipeline that is contributing to the image problem of IT. The article starts:
It goes on to discuss the different types of computer related courses that can be offered and the constraints that high schools are under as well as an example of a company program that works with schools on computer curriculum. However, it then states the disparity that while some computer classes are in the advanced placement or honors curriculum, others are often in the technical/vocational curriculum which makes parents steer their college-bound children away.
The question is, of course, a much more complicated one than just whether or not computer courses should be considered honors or vocational in high school. But it does raise the issue of how invasive the image problem that computer science suffers can be and the depth of the problem that needs to be addressed.