The President’s Council of Advisors for Science and Technology (PCAST) met Wednesday in Washington to hear about the state of U.S. and global science and technology, to get updates on the research initiatives under its jurisdiction, and to begin work on the committee’s new responsibility as overseers of the Networking and Information Technology R&D program.
This was the first meeting attended by some of the new members of PCAST — including CRA’s Chair, Dan Reed — who were named last month by the President to augment the committee’s expertise in information technology issues. Reed, the only member of PCAST who served on the now-extinctPresident’s Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC), gave a presentation on the work of that former committee as a way of helping the PCAST get a handle on its new responsibilities.
From the discussion that followed, it appears that the committee’s two co-Chairs — John Marburger, Director of OSTP and Floyd Kvamme — hope PCAST’s examination of NITRD includes a good look at the current structure of the initiative’s Program Component Areas to see whether it’s still logical, and perhaps determine some appropriate metrics for gauging the quality and effectiveness of the research investment. The review will be undertaken by PCAST’s Subcommittee on Information Technology Manufacturing and Competitiveness Networking and Information Technology, chaired by George Scalise, president of the Semiconductor Industry Association.
Marburger pointed out that metrics are very important to the President, who wants to measure not only the inputs (how much we spend) for these programs but the outputs (what we get). He thought that folks in the software industry, who had been “so influential” in making the case for basic research to the White House during the run-up to the introduction of the President’s American Competitiveness Initiative, might be very useful in developing some metrics. PCAST ought to reach out to the industry folks who felt so strongly about the need to support basic research, Marburger said, and find out how they measure success.
There was also a lot of discussion of whether workforce considerations — specifically the issue of “outsourcing” — ought to be part of the PCAST review. I think the consensus was that workforce is a competitiveness issue and “competitiveness issues are very relevant.” In part, the workforce issue determines whether the U.S. will continue to be a “center of innovation,” the panelists said, so it’s very important. They also noted the national security component of the workforce debate (how the use of offshore labor impacts applications we depend upon for national security purposes).
Scalise, who will be heading the review effort, said the two questions he wants to keep in mind during the review are: Where is the raw innovation in the field coming from? And to what degree is the ecosystem critical to what happens? All members of the panel seemed to agree that IT research community is central to everything — the economy, health care, national security, the conduct of the sciences — and the federal government ought then to “keep it innovating.”
It’s not clear how this study will move forward yet. The subcommittee met yesterday for the first time to hear from various agency representatives about the PCAs. There was much talk and encouragement from the PCAST co-chairs about adopting the “Technical Advisory Group” model for the IT study, just as PCAST used it for its look at the National Nanotechnology Initiative. The TAG would be a “virtual” advisory committee composed of 30-50 prominent members of the field who could be queried by e-mail or phone about issues before the subcommittee. Kvamme claimed this model worked especially well for the NNI study, though the PCAST executive director wasn’t quite as enthusiastic about it in her update to the committee in January (response rates were less than hoped). Perhaps members of the computing community will be more willing to serve in that role….
The other highlight from Wednesday’s meeting was a presentation from Rolf Lehming, curator of NSF’s incredibly useful 2006 Science and Engineering Indicators. The S&E website has the full overview, which is worth a read, but here are some of the points that jumped out at me during the presentation:
Increasingly, science and technology is seen worldwide as at the core of economic development. Consequently, there has been a broad expansion of S&T activities worldwide.
Growth in S&T activities is ubiquitous, especially in Asia outside Japan.
Europe and Japan are losing world share.
The U.S. is holding its own.
China’s R&D growth is “unprecedented” for any country in recent memory, in part reflecting an large increase in R&D performed by foreign-owned, China-based firms, but also, increasingly, government investment.
Student visas may have turned a corner — though the number of student visas issued is still 25 percent below the pre-9/11 level, the number has risen significantly over the last two years or so.
It’s still somewhat shocking to me to see that the White House is now open to discussing these indicators so prominently, given where they’ve been on the issue for the last five years. Now, if they could only get through to the House leadership….
We’ll obviously have more on the efforts of PCAST as they move forward.
I’m still on vacation, but CRA blogging continues over at the CRA Bulletin, where Jay Vegso has a piece on some new analysis on the “stay rates” of foreign US-degree recipients. One of the concerns surrounding the computing research community’s contribution to U.S. competitiveness is the potential that an increasing percentage of the half of CS doctoral students who are not U.S. citizens will choose to leave the U.S. after earning their degree.
Jay points to a recent study by Michael Finn of the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education (done for NSF) that shows that while the stay rates for those students have been surprisingly high (74 percent of temporary visa holders who received doctorates in CS in 2001 were still in the US in 2003), that data seem to suggest a decline in the rate in the years to come:
As Finn points out, though, there are signs that these stay rates have plateaued and may begin to fall. The two-year stay rate for temporary visa holders, while at an all-time high, was the same for the 2001 class as it was for those who graduated in 1999. The one-year stay rate, on the other hand, declined slightly. This followed several years of steady increases. In addition, Finn points out that according to a separate NSF survey, the percentage of foreign doctorate recipients with plans to stay in the US declined each year between 2001 and 2003.
Finns study suggests that stay rates among foreign students have leveled off and may begin to decline. On the one hand, this is not surprising: the rates have been very high and could be expected to reach a limit at some point. However, the next bulletin entry will discuss recent CRA and NSF data that show that the percentage of foreign doctorate students that have found employment outside the US has jumped in the past few years.
Jay’s post has more analysis and a nifty chart, too.
is a comprehensive piece of legislation to get Congress engaged in the business of promoting innovation in America by creating additional incentives for private individuals and businesses to create and rollout new products and services so that America will remain the world leader in innovation,” said Goodlatte. “This legislation also recognizes that government sometimes is the problem – not the answer to the problem – so it also addresses government-imposed hurdles to innovation.”
Here’s what’s included:
Business activity tax simplification;
Attorney accountability changes;
An Innovation Scholarship Program;
“Promotion of R&D” by making permanent the research credit; increase in rates of alternative incremental credit; alternative simplified credit for qualified research expenses’
Health care choice provisions;
and, Health IT promotion.
Sigh.
The bill was actually previewed yesterday at a press conference of the High Tech Working Group attended by a whole slew of Republican House members and the entire Republican House leadership, including Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL) and new majority leader John Boehner (R-OH). Among the attendees, the only one who mentioned anything about the need to increase research funding in the physical sciences was Science Committee Chairman Sherwood Boehlert (R-NY). Boehlert emphasized that this innovation package wouldn’t be the only one moving through the House this summer and that he would make sure research funding was addressed in the innovation/competitiveness bills before his committee and in the deliberations of the appropriators this year.
Still, this has very bad “optics,” as they say. The House leadership is clearly behind an innovation plan that bears little resemblance to the one introduced by the President and endorsed by Republicans in the Senate. The House Republican leadership has now had two opportunities to be supportive of bipartisan innovation efforts molded on the recommendations of the NAS and others, and has chosen not to be supportive both times. The first was Majority Leader Boehner’s biting response to a Democratic innovation event held last month, which we covered here.
It will be interesting to see how members of the high-tech industry associations, for whom this Goodlatte plan is ostensibly for, react to this approach. They were, after all, very much supportive of the President’s ACI, the Senate bills, and the Democratic Innovation Agenda (which are all very similar). They’ve gone above and beyond the call of duty in making increased support for research a priority in their own advocacy efforts. But they’re needed again. It’s time for those companies who believe in this cause to pick up the phone and tell the Republican leadership what’s missing from their plan.
The Association for Computing Machinery, the professional organization that issued the report, says that there are more information technology jobs today than at the height of the dot-com boom. While 2 to 3 percent of American jobs in the field migrate to other nations each year, new jobs have thus far more than made up for the loss.
…
That picture, of course, stands in contrast with the more familiar gloomy depiction of runaway outsourcing. Perhaps that explains what the report says is declining interest in computer science among American college students. Students may think, Why bother if all the jobs are in India? But the computer sector is booming, while the number of students interested in going into the field is falling.
The industry isn’t gone, but it will be if we don’t start generating the necessary dynamic work force. The association says that higher-end technology jobs like those in research are beginning to go overseas and that policies to “attract, educate and retain the best I.T. talent are critical” to future success. Given the post 9/11 approach to immigration and the state of math and science education in America, that is hardly encouraging.
Information technology jobs won’t go away unless we let them. Computing in the past five years has become, according to the report, “a truly global industry.” In the next few years, jobs won’t just land in our laps. We have nothing to fear but the fear of competing itself.
We covered the report from ACM’s Job Migration Task Force recently in this space. Given the amount of work I know went into it, I’m pleased that the report appears to be having such significant impact. Update: (9:40 am, 3/1) – The Wall Street Journal has a related piece today titled Market is Hot for High-Skilled in Silicon Valley. I assume it’s publicly available. If not, I’ll excerpt it a bit. But the lead tells the story:
Five years after the dot-com bubble burst, job growth has returned to Silicon Valley. But it’s a different kind of growth than in past recoveries, favoring higher-skilled workers.
Today President Bush announced he is planning to appoint CRA Board Chair Dan Reed, to the newly-expanded membership of the President’s Council of Advisors for Science and Technology. Reed, who is Vice-Chancellor of IT and CIO for the University of North Carolina, and Director of the Renaissance Computing Institute, joins 13 other members named as the committee prepares to take on the former functions of the President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee, which was rolled into PCAST by presidential order on September 30, 2005.
Here’s the list of those named by the President today [and affiliation, if known]:
F. Duane Ackerman, of Georgia [CEO, Bell South]
Paul M. Anderson, of Washington [CEO, Duke Energy]
Robert A. Brown, of Massachusetts [Dean of Engineering at MIT]
Nance K. Dicciani, of Pennsylvania [Pres and CEO, Specialty Materials Honeywell]
Richard H. Herman, of Illinois
Martin C. Jischke, of Illinois [President, Purdue University]
Fred Kavli, of California [Physicist, philanthropist]
Daniel A. Reed, of Illinois
Hector de Jesus Ruiz, of Texas [Chairman, AMD]
Stratton D. Sclavos, of California [Chairman, Verisign]
John Brooks Slaughter, of Connecticut [President and CEO, NACME]
Joseph M. Tucci, of New Hampshire [CEO, EMC]
Robert E. Witt, of Alabama [President, Univ of Alabama]
Tadataka Yamada, of Pennsylvania [Chair of R&D at GlaxoSmithKline]
Quite an august group. Hopefully this will give the PCAST sufficient depth in IT to make good progress on the broad review of the NITRD program they seemed to be headed towards at the last meeting.
CRA affiliate organization, the Association for Computing Machinery, today released the results of its year-long, comprehensive study on the globalization and offshoring of software. The study contains six key findings:
Globalization of, and offshoring within, the software industry are deeply connected and both will continue to grow. Key enablers of this growth are information technology itself, the evolution of work and business processes, education, and national policies.
Both anecdotal evidence and economic theory indicate that offshoring between developed and developing countries can, as a whole, benefit both, but competition is intensifying.
While offshoring will increase, determining the specifics of this incrase are difficult given the current quantity, quality, and objectivity of data available. Skepticism is warranted regarding claims about the number of jobs to be offshored and the projected growth of software industries in developing nations.
Standardized jobs are more easily moved from developed to developing countries than are higher-skill jobs. These standardized jobs were the initial focus of offshoring. Today, global competition in higher-end skills, such as research is increasing. These trends have implications for individuals, companies, and countries.
Offshoring magnifies existing risks and creates new and often poorly understood or addressed threats to national security, business property and processes, and individuals’ privacy. While it is unlikely these risks will deter the growth of offshoring, businesses and nations should employ strategies to mitigate them.
To stay competitive in a global IT environment and industry, countries must adopt policies that foster innovation. To this end, policies that improve a country’s ability to attract, educate, and retain the best IT talent are critical. Educational policy and investment is at the core.
The report is pretty weighty, but the executive summary (pdf) does a good job of laying out the central findings in more detail. This issue of job migration is a huge concern within the discipline and there’s lots of FUD spread around on both sides of the debate, so having a report from a respected professional organization like ACM, generated by a Task Force with representatives from academia, industry, government, economics and labor should go a long way towards putting both sides on some firmer ground.
There’s been pretty good coverage of the report already. First, ACM’s U.S. Public Policy Committee has its press release and blog post. The New York Times’ Steve Lohr had the first coverage of the report this morning. Lohr’s piece highlights one of the key messages to come out of the study:
The study concluded that dire predictions of job losses from shifting high-technology work to low-wage nations with strong education systems, like India and China, were greatly exaggerated.
Though international in perspective, the study group found that the most likely prognosis for the United States would be that 2 percent to 3 percent of the jobs in information technology would go offshore annually over the next decade or so.
But more jobs will be created than are lost in the future, they said, as long as the industry in America moves up the economic ladder to do higher-value work typically, applying information technology to other fields, like biology and business. They noted that employment in the information technology industry was higher today than it was at the peak of the dot-com bubble, despite the growth of offshore outsourcing in the last few years.
“The global competition has gotten tougher and we have to run faster,” said Moshe Y. Vardi, co-chair of the study group and a computer scientist at Rice University. “But the notion that information technology jobs are disappearing is just nonsense. The data don’t bear that out.”
Yet the view that job opportunities in computing are dwindling fast is both common and potentially damaging to America’s competitive prowess, according to David A. Patterson, president of the Association for Computing Machinery.
He pointed to the declining interest in computer science as a major among American college students, based on a survey last year of the intentions of students entering college. The results suggested that only 1 in 75 students would major in computer science, compared with 1 in 30 in 2000.
“The perception among high school students and their parents is that the game is over that all computing jobs are going overseas,” observed Mr. Patterson, who is a computer science professor at the University of California, Berkeley. “It’s an extraordinarily widely held misperception.”
The concern, he said, is that misplaced pessimism will deter bright young people from pursuing careers in computing. That, in turn, would erode the skills in a field that is crucial to the nation’s economic competitiveness.
The report also saw coverage in CNN’s Money which was subsequently Slashdotted. I’m sure there will be additional coverage of the report in the coming days.
I’m pleased that a number of CRA volunteers were able to serve on the Task Force, including CRA board members Bill Aspray (who served as the Task Force’s Executive Consultant), Moshe Vardi (the TF Co-Chair), Bobby Schnabel, and Dick Waters, as well as Vijay Gurbaxani, who serves on my Government Affairs Committee, and Stu Zweben, who is instrumental in putting together CRA’s Taulbee Survey. The study was an enormous undertaking, so kudos to ACM for making the effort to advance the debate. The study deserves to be read.
While there has been some progress in straightening out the mess that is the visa process post-9/11, as this Washington Poststory indicates, the situation is still pretty bad for those who have research interests in high-tech areas.
A decision two weeks ago by a U.S. consulate in India to refuse a visa to a prominent Indian scientist has triggered heated protests in that country and set off a major diplomatic flap on the eve of President Bush’s first visit to India.
The incident has also caused embarrassment at the highest reaches of the American scientific establishment, which has worked to get the State Department to issue a visa to Goverdhan Mehta, who said the U.S. consulate in the south Indian city of Chennai told him that his expertise in chemistry was deemed a threat.
…
The consulate told Mehta “you have been denied a visa” and invited him to submit additional information, according to an official at the National Academy of Sciences who saw a copy of the document. Mehta said in a written account obtained by The Washington Post that he was humiliated, accused of “hiding things” and being dishonest, and told that his work is dangerous because of its potential applications in chemical warfare.
Mehta denied that his work has anything to do with weapons. He said that he would provide his passport if a visa were issued, but that he would do nothing further to obtain the document: “If they don’t want to give me a visa, so be it.”
The scientist told Indian newspapers that his dealing with the U.S. consulate was “the most degrading experience of my life.” Mehta is president of the International Council for Science, a Paris-based organization comprising the national scientific academies of a number of countries. The council advocates that scientists should have free access to one another.
As Bill Wulf of the National Academy of Engineering points out later in the article, these consular officials overseas are under tremendous pressure to not make mistakes in deciding who to allow in the country. Still, if the process leads to the summary denial of entry for someone like Mehta, the process clearly needs some work.
“Making the wrong decision would be career-ending, so they play it safe, not really understanding the macroscopic implications of their decision,” Wulf said. “Denying a visa to the president of ICSU is probably as dumb as you can get. This is not the way we can make friends.”
As promised, we’ve got some further detail on the individual agency budget requests for FY 2007 and what those requests might mean for computing research.
But before diving into that, I thought I’d point out that the FY 2007 NITRD Budget Supplement produced by the NITRD National Coordinating Office is now available in a pre-print version (pdf). We’ll have more details on that when we get a chance to tear through it a bit. I’ll just note for now that it indicates NITRD will increase 7.7 percent in FY 07 (versus the 2.0 percent indicated in the President’s budget and the 9.4 percent indicated in the OSTP documentation…see the whole sordid story here). But, the supplement is the most comprehensive look at the actual contributions of the participating agencies, so we’ll consider that the “number of record.”
Anyway, the descriptions below come from my forthcoming Computing Research News article on the budget submission. Previous issues are available online. National Science Foundation
NSF would continue to be the lead agency in the NITRD program in the President’s plan, making the largest contribution at $904 million in FY 2007. NSF’s Computer and Information Science and Engineering directorate (CISE) would continue to be home of the largest share of that investment with a budget of request of $527 million, an increase of 6.1 percent over CISE’s FY 2006 current plan. The CISE investment is spread relatively equally between its Computing and Communication Foundations activity ($123 million in the request, an increase of 16.5 percent over FY 2006), Computer and Network Systems ($163 million, an increase of 15.2 percent), and Information and Intelligent Systems ($119 million, an increase of 15.1 percent). The double-digit increases to these programs are made possible by both the 6.1 percent overall increase for the directorate and funding freed up as grants under the old Information Technology Research (ITR) program – which officially ended in FY 2004 – continue to expire. ITR expenditures in FY 2007 would decline by 17 percent to $122 million under the current plan.
Also included in the CISE budget request in FY 2007 is $10 million for the agency’s new Global Environment for Networking Innovations program (detailed by Peter Freeman, NSF Assistant Director for CISE, elsewhere in this issue). The GENI proposal – a plan for a $300 million computer science facility and $40 million research program — faces an internal NSF design review on February 22, 2006. The results of that review will determine whether the project stays on track for presentation to the National Science Board in the coming year, with the aim of securing approval for consideration for inclusion in FY 2009 budget request.
The overall NSF contribution to Cybersecurity and Information Assurance would also grow significantly under the President plan. The budget request boost NSF’s Cyber Trust program $10 million to $35 million in FY 2007, bringing NSF’s total contribution to information assurance research to $97 million (an increase of 26 percent).
Proposed investments in NSF’s Office of Cyber Infrastructure (to be headed by University of Michigan professor and computer scientist Daniel Atkins) account for $182 million of NSF’s NITRD share in FY 2007, an increase of $55 million, or 44 percent, over FY 2006. The great bulk of that increase — $50 million – would begin the acquisition of a new petascale computing system.
The remainder of NSF’s investments in NITRD programs would come from the other research directorates, which on average received about the same level of overall increase as did CISE (about 6 percent vs. FY 2006). One notable exception is the Engineering directorate, which would grow 8.0 percent in the President’s request, largely due to the establishment of a new $20 million Improvised Explosive Device Detection research program. Freeman said that program should provide opportunities for computer science researchers, especially those in artificial intelligence and sensors, to compete for funding. Department of Energy, Office of Science
The Department of Energy’s contribution to the NITRD effort would grow to $387 million in FY 2007 in the President’s plan, an increase of nearly 33 percent over FY 2006. The focus of much of the DOE SC investment will be on leadership-class computing efforts. The President’s budget calls for $103 million in DOE SC towards the goal of deploying petascale computing systems by the year 2010. The Advanced Scientific Computing Research Program would be funded at $319 million in FY 2007, an increase of $84 million, or 36 percent, over FY 2006. DARPA
Computing research at DARPA would grow significantly under the President’s plan, gaining back ground lost in the FY 2006 Defense Appropriations process when $55 million was cut from the agency’s Cognitive Computing program. DARPA’s two main computing research efforts, the Information and Communications Technology account and the Cognitive Computing Systems account are both slated for substantial gains in the President’s budget. ICT would grow $47 million to $243 million in FY 2007, an increase of 24 percent. Cognitive Computing Systems would grow $57 million to $220 million in FY 2007, an increase of 35 percent.
Overall, DARPA would see its budget increase by $400 million to $3.3 billion in FY 2007, a 14 percent increase. Basic research would grow to $151 million, which is more than the FY 2006 level of $133 million, but still under the $165 million spent in FY 2005. DARPA applied research would increase to $1.5 billion (vs. $1.4 billion in FY 2006), and advanced technology development would grow to $1.6 billion (vs. $1.4 billion in FY 2006).
ACM’s Cameron Wilson has the scoop on the USACMTechnology Policy Blog about some potentially troubling signs ahead for the President’s new American Competitiveness Initiative. Cameron focuses on the reaction of newly-elected House Majority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) to a Democratic “innovation” event on the Hill today. Boehner disparaged the event and, more importantly, the Democratic innovation agenda — a fact that’s troubling because, well, it’s really quite similar to the President’s proposal. Cameron’s got all the details.
There are, of course, other hurdles/speedbumps/large potholes in the ACI’s road to enactment. There’s the fact that the life sciences community is upset that NIH’s budget would be held flat under the President’s plan. There’s also some tension with the NASA folks, which could prove tricky in the Senate as the Chair of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee for Commerce, Science and Justice, Richard Shelby (R-AL), is an avowed NASA supporter. Then there’s the congressional earmarking process, the annual fight about NIST’s ATP and MEP programs, and other fights over the rise in discretionary spending generally. In short, it’s still quite the battle ahead. We’ll try to keep you informed….
On the CRA Bulletin blog, Jay Vegso has the latest data from the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA on the continuing decline in interest in computer science and computer engineering among freshman. He’s even got a (not-so) pretty chart.
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PCAST Starts its PITAC Work
/In: Policy /by Peter HarshaThe President’s Council of Advisors for Science and Technology (PCAST) met Wednesday in Washington to hear about the state of U.S. and global science and technology, to get updates on the research initiatives under its jurisdiction, and to begin work on the committee’s new responsibility as overseers of the Networking and Information Technology R&D program.
This was the first meeting attended by some of the new members of PCAST — including CRA’s Chair, Dan Reed — who were named last month by the President to augment the committee’s expertise in information technology issues. Reed, the only member of PCAST who served on the now-extinct President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC), gave a presentation on the work of that former committee as a way of helping the PCAST get a handle on its new responsibilities.
From the discussion that followed, it appears that the committee’s two co-Chairs — John Marburger, Director of OSTP and Floyd Kvamme — hope PCAST’s examination of NITRD includes a good look at the current structure of the initiative’s Program Component Areas to see whether it’s still logical, and perhaps determine some appropriate metrics for gauging the quality and effectiveness of the research investment. The review will be undertaken by PCAST’s Subcommittee on
Information Technology Manufacturing and CompetitivenessNetworking and Information Technology, chaired by George Scalise, president of the Semiconductor Industry Association.Marburger pointed out that metrics are very important to the President, who wants to measure not only the inputs (how much we spend) for these programs but the outputs (what we get). He thought that folks in the software industry, who had been “so influential” in making the case for basic research to the White House during the run-up to the introduction of the President’s American Competitiveness Initiative, might be very useful in developing some metrics. PCAST ought to reach out to the industry folks who felt so strongly about the need to support basic research, Marburger said, and find out how they measure success.
There was also a lot of discussion of whether workforce considerations — specifically the issue of “outsourcing” — ought to be part of the PCAST review. I think the consensus was that workforce is a competitiveness issue and “competitiveness issues are very relevant.” In part, the workforce issue determines whether the U.S. will continue to be a “center of innovation,” the panelists said, so it’s very important. They also noted the national security component of the workforce debate (how the use of offshore labor impacts applications we depend upon for national security purposes).
Scalise, who will be heading the review effort, said the two questions he wants to keep in mind during the review are: Where is the raw innovation in the field coming from? And to what degree is the ecosystem critical to what happens? All members of the panel seemed to agree that IT research community is central to everything — the economy, health care, national security, the conduct of the sciences — and the federal government ought then to “keep it innovating.”
It’s not clear how this study will move forward yet. The subcommittee met yesterday for the first time to hear from various agency representatives about the PCAs. There was much talk and encouragement from the PCAST co-chairs about adopting the “Technical Advisory Group” model for the IT study, just as PCAST used it for its look at the National Nanotechnology Initiative. The TAG would be a “virtual” advisory committee composed of 30-50 prominent members of the field who could be queried by e-mail or phone about issues before the subcommittee. Kvamme claimed this model worked especially well for the NNI study, though the PCAST executive director wasn’t quite as enthusiastic about it in her update to the committee in January (response rates were less than hoped). Perhaps members of the computing community will be more willing to serve in that role….
The other highlight from Wednesday’s meeting was a presentation from Rolf Lehming, curator of NSF’s incredibly useful 2006 Science and Engineering Indicators. The S&E website has the full overview, which is worth a read, but here are some of the points that jumped out at me during the presentation:
It’s still somewhat shocking to me to see that the White House is now open to discussing these indicators so prominently, given where they’ve been on the issue for the last five years. Now, if they could only get through to the House leadership….
We’ll obviously have more on the efforts of PCAST as they move forward.
Stay Rates for S&E Doctorates Level Off
/In: People /by Peter HarshaI’m still on vacation, but CRA blogging continues over at the CRA Bulletin, where Jay Vegso has a piece on some new analysis on the “stay rates” of foreign US-degree recipients. One of the concerns surrounding the computing research community’s contribution to U.S. competitiveness is the potential that an increasing percentage of the half of CS doctoral students who are not U.S. citizens will choose to leave the U.S. after earning their degree.
Jay points to a recent study by Michael Finn of the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education (done for NSF) that shows that while the stay rates for those students have been surprisingly high (74 percent of temporary visa holders who received doctorates in CS in 2001 were still in the US in 2003), that data seem to suggest a decline in the rate in the years to come:
Jay’s post has more analysis and a nifty chart, too.
House Republicans Ignore R&D in Innovation and Competitiveness Bill
/In: American Competitiveness Initiative, Funding, FY07 Appropriations, Policy /by Peter HarshaDemonstrating how much work remains to be done with the House Republican leadership, the House Republican “High-tech Task Force” led by Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) today introduced its “Innovation and Competitiveness Act,” which wholly ignores the central recommendation of the President’s American Competitiveness Initiative, two bi-partisan bills in the Senate, the National Academies “Gathering Storm” report, and just about every high-tech industry association (pdf), by not including any commitment to increase funding for fundamental research in the physical sciences.
Instead, Goodlatte’s bill
Here’s what’s included:
Sigh.
The bill was actually previewed yesterday at a press conference of the High Tech Working Group attended by a whole slew of Republican House members and the entire Republican House leadership, including Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL) and new majority leader John Boehner (R-OH). Among the attendees, the only one who mentioned anything about the need to increase research funding in the physical sciences was Science Committee Chairman Sherwood Boehlert (R-NY). Boehlert emphasized that this innovation package wouldn’t be the only one moving through the House this summer and that he would make sure research funding was addressed in the innovation/competitiveness bills before his committee and in the deliberations of the appropriators this year.
Still, this has very bad “optics,” as they say. The House leadership is clearly behind an innovation plan that bears little resemblance to the one introduced by the President and endorsed by Republicans in the Senate. The House Republican leadership has now had two opportunities to be supportive of bipartisan innovation efforts molded on the recommendations of the NAS and others, and has chosen not to be supportive both times. The first was Majority Leader Boehner’s biting response to a Democratic innovation event held last month, which we covered here.
It will be interesting to see how members of the high-tech industry associations, for whom this Goodlatte plan is ostensibly for, react to this approach. They were, after all, very much supportive of the President’s ACI, the Senate bills, and the Democratic Innovation Agenda (which are all very similar). They’ve gone above and beyond the call of duty in making increased support for research a priority in their own advocacy efforts. But they’re needed again. It’s time for those companies who believe in this cause to pick up the phone and tell the Republican leadership what’s missing from their plan.
NY Times Editorial: Outsourcing Isn’t as Bad as You Think
/In: R&D in the Press /by Peter HarshaCiting ACM’s report on globalization the New York Times today editorializes on the mismatch between the perception of the high-tech industry job market and the reality.
We covered the report from ACM’s Job Migration Task Force recently in this space. Given the amount of work I know went into it, I’m pleased that the report appears to be having such significant impact.
Update: (9:40 am, 3/1) – The Wall Street Journal has a related piece today titled Market is Hot for High-Skilled in Silicon Valley. I assume it’s publicly available. If not, I’ll excerpt it a bit. But the lead tells the story:
CRA Chair Named to PCAST
/In: CRA, Policy /by Peter HarshaToday President Bush announced he is planning to appoint CRA Board Chair Dan Reed, to the newly-expanded membership of the President’s Council of Advisors for Science and Technology. Reed, who is Vice-Chancellor of IT and CIO for the University of North Carolina, and Director of the Renaissance Computing Institute, joins 13 other members named as the committee prepares to take on the former functions of the President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee, which was rolled into PCAST by presidential order on September 30, 2005.
Here’s the list of those named by the President today [and affiliation, if known]:
Quite an august group. Hopefully this will give the PCAST sufficient depth in IT to make good progress on the broad review of the NITRD program they seemed to be headed towards at the last meeting.
ACM Job Study: Despite Offshoring, IT Job Growth Should be Strong
/In: Policy /by Peter HarshaCRA affiliate organization, the Association for Computing Machinery, today released the results of its year-long, comprehensive study on the globalization and offshoring of software. The study contains six key findings:
The report is pretty weighty, but the executive summary (pdf) does a good job of laying out the central findings in more detail. This issue of job migration is a huge concern within the discipline and there’s lots of FUD spread around on both sides of the debate, so having a report from a respected professional organization like ACM, generated by a Task Force with representatives from academia, industry, government, economics and labor should go a long way towards putting both sides on some firmer ground.
There’s been pretty good coverage of the report already. First, ACM’s U.S. Public Policy Committee has its press release and blog post. The New York Times’ Steve Lohr had the first coverage of the report this morning. Lohr’s piece highlights one of the key messages to come out of the study:
The report also saw coverage in CNN’s Money which was subsequently Slashdotted. I’m sure there will be additional coverage of the report in the coming days.
I’m pleased that a number of CRA volunteers were able to serve on the Task Force, including CRA board members Bill Aspray (who served as the Task Force’s Executive Consultant), Moshe Vardi (the TF Co-Chair), Bobby Schnabel, and Dick Waters, as well as Vijay Gurbaxani, who serves on my Government Affairs Committee, and Stu Zweben, who is instrumental in putting together CRA’s Taulbee Survey. The study was an enormous undertaking, so kudos to ACM for making the effort to advance the debate. The study deserves to be read.
Visa Issues: Still a long way to go
/In: People, Policy, R&D in the Press /by Peter HarshaWhile there has been some progress in straightening out the mess that is the visa process post-9/11, as this Washington Post story indicates, the situation is still pretty bad for those who have research interests in high-tech areas.
As Bill Wulf of the National Academy of Engineering points out later in the article, these consular officials overseas are under tremendous pressure to not make mistakes in deciding who to allow in the country. Still, if the process leads to the summary denial of entry for someone like Mehta, the process clearly needs some work.
You can read the whole thing here.
ACI: Details of the NSF, DARPA and DOE Office of Science FY07 Requests
/In: American Competitiveness Initiative, Funding, FY07 Appropriations /by Peter HarshaAs promised, we’ve got some further detail on the individual agency budget requests for FY 2007 and what those requests might mean for computing research.
But before diving into that, I thought I’d point out that the FY 2007 NITRD Budget Supplement produced by the NITRD National Coordinating Office is now available in a pre-print version (pdf). We’ll have more details on that when we get a chance to tear through it a bit. I’ll just note for now that it indicates NITRD will increase 7.7 percent in FY 07 (versus the 2.0 percent indicated in the President’s budget and the 9.4 percent indicated in the OSTP documentation…see the whole sordid story here). But, the supplement is the most comprehensive look at the actual contributions of the participating agencies, so we’ll consider that the “number of record.”
Anyway, the descriptions below come from my forthcoming Computing Research News article on the budget submission. Previous issues are available online.
National Science Foundation
NSF would continue to be the lead agency in the NITRD program in the President’s plan, making the largest contribution at $904 million in FY 2007. NSF’s Computer and Information Science and Engineering directorate (CISE) would continue to be home of the largest share of that investment with a budget of request of $527 million, an increase of 6.1 percent over CISE’s FY 2006 current plan. The CISE investment is spread relatively equally between its Computing and Communication Foundations activity ($123 million in the request, an increase of 16.5 percent over FY 2006), Computer and Network Systems ($163 million, an increase of 15.2 percent), and Information and Intelligent Systems ($119 million, an increase of 15.1 percent). The double-digit increases to these programs are made possible by both the 6.1 percent overall increase for the directorate and funding freed up as grants under the old Information Technology Research (ITR) program – which officially ended in FY 2004 – continue to expire. ITR expenditures in FY 2007 would decline by 17 percent to $122 million under the current plan.
Also included in the CISE budget request in FY 2007 is $10 million for the agency’s new Global Environment for Networking Innovations program (detailed by Peter Freeman, NSF Assistant Director for CISE, elsewhere in this issue). The GENI proposal – a plan for a $300 million computer science facility and $40 million research program — faces an internal NSF design review on February 22, 2006. The results of that review will determine whether the project stays on track for presentation to the National Science Board in the coming year, with the aim of securing approval for consideration for inclusion in FY 2009 budget request.
The overall NSF contribution to Cybersecurity and Information Assurance would also grow significantly under the President plan. The budget request boost NSF’s Cyber Trust program $10 million to $35 million in FY 2007, bringing NSF’s total contribution to information assurance research to $97 million (an increase of 26 percent).
Proposed investments in NSF’s Office of Cyber Infrastructure (to be headed by University of Michigan professor and computer scientist Daniel Atkins) account for $182 million of NSF’s NITRD share in FY 2007, an increase of $55 million, or 44 percent, over FY 2006. The great bulk of that increase — $50 million – would begin the acquisition of a new petascale computing system.
The remainder of NSF’s investments in NITRD programs would come from the other research directorates, which on average received about the same level of overall increase as did CISE (about 6 percent vs. FY 2006). One notable exception is the Engineering directorate, which would grow 8.0 percent in the President’s request, largely due to the establishment of a new $20 million Improvised Explosive Device Detection research program. Freeman said that program should provide opportunities for computer science researchers, especially those in artificial intelligence and sensors, to compete for funding.
Department of Energy, Office of Science
The Department of Energy’s contribution to the NITRD effort would grow to $387 million in FY 2007 in the President’s plan, an increase of nearly 33 percent over FY 2006. The focus of much of the DOE SC investment will be on leadership-class computing efforts. The President’s budget calls for $103 million in DOE SC towards the goal of deploying petascale computing systems by the year 2010. The Advanced Scientific Computing Research Program would be funded at $319 million in FY 2007, an increase of $84 million, or 36 percent, over FY 2006.
DARPA
Computing research at DARPA would grow significantly under the President’s plan, gaining back ground lost in the FY 2006 Defense Appropriations process when $55 million was cut from the agency’s Cognitive Computing program. DARPA’s two main computing research efforts, the Information and Communications Technology account and the Cognitive Computing Systems account are both slated for substantial gains in the President’s budget. ICT would grow $47 million to $243 million in FY 2007, an increase of 24 percent. Cognitive Computing Systems would grow $57 million to $220 million in FY 2007, an increase of 35 percent.
Overall, DARPA would see its budget increase by $400 million to $3.3 billion in FY 2007, a 14 percent increase. Basic research would grow to $151 million, which is more than the FY 2006 level of $133 million, but still under the $165 million spent in FY 2005. DARPA applied research would increase to $1.5 billion (vs. $1.4 billion in FY 2006), and advanced technology development would grow to $1.6 billion (vs. $1.4 billion in FY 2006).
First Speedbumps for President’s Competitiveness Initiative?
/In: American Competitiveness Initiative /by Peter HarshaACM’s Cameron Wilson has the scoop on the USACM Technology Policy Blog about some potentially troubling signs ahead for the President’s new American Competitiveness Initiative. Cameron focuses on the reaction of newly-elected House Majority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) to a Democratic “innovation” event on the Hill today. Boehner disparaged the event and, more importantly, the Democratic innovation agenda — a fact that’s troubling because, well, it’s really quite similar to the President’s proposal. Cameron’s got all the details.
There are, of course, other hurdles/speedbumps/large potholes in the ACI’s road to enactment. There’s the fact that the life sciences community is upset that NIH’s budget would be held flat under the President’s plan. There’s also some tension with the NASA folks, which could prove tricky in the Senate as the Chair of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee for Commerce, Science and Justice, Richard Shelby (R-AL), is an avowed NASA supporter. Then there’s the congressional earmarking process, the annual fight about NIST’s ATP and MEP programs, and other fights over the rise in discretionary spending generally. In short, it’s still quite the battle ahead. We’ll try to keep you informed….
Interest in CS/CE Continues to Drop
/In: People /by Peter HarshaOn the CRA Bulletin blog, Jay Vegso has the latest data from the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA on the continuing decline in interest in computer science and computer engineering among freshman. He’s even got a (not-so) pretty chart.