As I was updating the IT R&D policy resources page here in anticipation of it appearing as a link in a soon-to-be published Science magazine OpEd on the state of federal support for computing research (titled “An Endless Frontier Postponed” — watch this space for details), I realized that I hadn’t yet posted a link to this recently released report (pdf) from the Defense Science Board. The report includes an excellent appendix that notes the impact policy changes at DARPA will have on the Defense Department’s long-term mission. Here’s what I wrote on the IT R&D page:
In February 2005, the Defense Department’s Defense Science Board — an independent advisory committee comprised of researchers from academia, government, and industry — released an examination of the microelectronics industry, which provides hardware capability that “underlies much of America’s modern military leadership technology.” Part of that examination involved a review of DOD’s research efforts in the space to determine if the Department is doing what it can to “secure continued ‘Moore’s Law’ improvements in processing capacity that will enable it to maximize the advantages inherent in its superior sources of information and the superiority of the algortihms and networks that are used to process and benefit from them.” What they found is that changes in emphasis at DARPA have impacted DOD-related research long-term:
Historically, the rapid rate of growth in U.S. microchip capability resulted from a robust national portfolio of long-term research that incorporated both incremental and revolutionary components. Industry excelled in evolutionary technology developments that resulted in reduced costs, higher quality and reliability and vastly improved performance. DOD now is no longer perceived as being seriously involved in — or even taking steps to ensure that others are conducting — research to enable the embedded processing proficiency on which its strategic advantage depends. This withdrawal has created a vacuum where no part of the U.S. government is able to exert leadership, especially with respect to the revolutionary component of the research portfolio.
[footnote]
This development is partly explained by historic circumstances. Since World War II, the DOD has been the primary supporter of research in university Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) departments, with NSF contributing some funds towards basic research. From the early 1960’s through the 1980’s, one tremendously successful aspect of the DOD’s funding in the information technology space came from DARPA’s unique approach to the funding of Applied Research (6.2 funding), which hybridized university and industry research through a process that envisioned revolutionary new capabilities, identified barriers to their realization, focused the best minds in the field on new approaches to overcome those barriers and fostered rapid commercialization and DOD adoption. The hybridization of university and industry researchers was a crucial element; it kept the best and the brightest in the university sector well informed of defense issues and the university researchers acted as useful “prods” to the defense contractors, making it impossible for them to dismiss revolutionary concepts whose feasibility was demonstrated by university-based 6.2 efforts that produced convincing “proof of concept” prototypes. As EECS grew in scale and its scope extended beyond DOD applications, a “success disaster” ensued in that EECS essentially “outgrew” the ability of the DOD to be its primary source of directional influence, let alone funding. Furthermore, DOD never developed a strategy to deal with this transition. With pressures to fund developments are unique to the Defense (e.g., military aircraft, tanks, artillery, etc.), the DOD withdrew its EECS research leadership. Recently, DARPA has further limited university participation, especially as prime contractors, in its Computer Science 6.2 programs, which were by far its most significant investments in university research (vastly outstripping 6.1 funding). These limitations have come in a number of ways, including non-fiscal limitations, such as the classification of work in areas that were previously unclassified, precluding university submission as prime contractors on certain solicitations, and reducing the periods of performance to 18-24 months.
–High Performance Microchip Supply, Defense Science Board, February 2005, Appendix D, p. 87-88
The entire report is available here (pdf).
So add the DSB to the growing list of organizations, advisory committees, congressional committees, and the press that have noted their concern for the impact of DARPA’s policy shift.
A reminder: the House Science Committee will hold a hearing on “The Future of Computer Science Research in the U.S.” on May 12, 2005. Appearing as witnesses before the committee will be Jack Marburger, Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy; Anthony Tether, Director of DARPA; Bill Wulf, President of the National Academies of Engineering; and Tom Leighton, Co-Founder and Chief Scientist of Akamai Industries, and also the Chair of the PITAC Subcommittee on Cyber Security. All Science Committee hearings are webcast live (and then archived for later viewing as well). And, of course, we’ll have all the details here.
CRA commends the House for its swift passage today of the High Performance Computing Revitalization Act (H.R. 28). The bill, which would provide sustained access by the research community to federal HPC assets, assure a balanced portfolio in HPC research pursuits and beef up interagency planning, passed by voice vote. The measure now moves on to the Senate, where previous efforts to reauthorize portions of the Networking and Information Technology R&D program have failed to receive timely consideration.
Here’s our previous coverage of the bill, which has a bit more detail.
CRA and USACM joined in issuing a press release applauding the bill’s authors and the members of the House for moving the legislation. A copy of that release can be found after the jump.
The House Science Committee’s press release has further (positive) reaction from Chair Sherwood Boehlert.
“This is very important legislation that deals with the competitiveness of the United States of America in the global marketplace. We are not going to be preeminent in the competitive world if we don’t invest wisely and direct our resources in the proper way, because the competition is all over the place. It isn’t one state against another. It’s the United States against the world. Right now, we’re ahead. That’s the position I like. But when we look back, we see a lot of people following closely behind. That’s why it’s critically important that we do things like invest in high-performance computing so that we maintain our competitive edge.”
Roll Call’s Morton Kondracke writes in an OpEd (sub. req’d) that Congress must act to increase federal support for fundamental research or risk future competitiveness. The good news is, he notes, is that Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA), Chair of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Science, State, Justice, Commerce committee, appears to be up to the challenge.
Wolf, who has led Congressional campaigns against gambling and has focused national attention on religious persecution and other human rights violations around the world, is now putting together an agenda to reverse America’s decline in science.
On April 12, he and two House colleagues – accompanied by former Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) – announced the introduction of legislation to have the U.S. government pay the interest on undergraduate loans for students who agree to work in science, math or engineering for a five-year period.
Wolf also favors holding a blue-ribbon national conference on technology, trade and manufacturing where leaders of industry would highlight the danger to U.S. leadership. He wants to triple funding for federal basic-science programs over a period of years.
…
Wolf told me in an interview, rather diplomatically, that “I personally believe that [the Bush administration is] underfunding science. Not purposefully. I think we have a deficit problem, and previous administrations have underfunded it also.”
Gingrich is less diplomatic. “I am totally puzzled by what they’ve done with the basic-research budget,” he told me. “As a national security conservative and as a world trade-economic competition conservative, I cannot imagine how they could have come up with this budget.”
He continued: “There’s no point in arguing with them internally. They’re going to do what they are going to do. But I think if this Congress does not substantially raise the research budget, we are unilaterally disarming from the standpoint of international competition.”
Much of the credit for influencing Wolf’s position has to go to the Task Force on the Future of American Innovation (of which CRA is a member). Their Benchmarks of Our Innovation Future (pdf) report seems to be resonating well with congressional offices, and special efforts to reach out to Wolf (who has been very receptive) seem to be paying off.
Now the trick is to turn that enthusiasm into real appropriations — something that remains a real challenge in current budget environment. We’ll keep you posted.
The National Science Foundation has included a new, special section on computing research at NSF on the Foundation’s homepage. It’s a nice overview of the types of innovation that have resulted from their decades of support for fundamental research in computing, as well as some of the challenges ahead (pulled from CRA’s Grand Challenges in Computer Science and Engineering conference).
There’s even a snazzy screensaver.
Since there’s been so much recent coverage of computing R&D issues in the popular press, and since we’ve been trying to cite so much of it here, I figured I’d make life easy on myself and anyone else looking for a collection of recent articles by creating a new “R&D in the Press” category over there on the left. Clicking the link gets you to an archive of all the posts we’ve made citing news reports — though at the moment it only goes back a couple of weeks. When I get some time, I’ll go deeper into the archive and tag more relevant posts with the new category.
Enjoy!
This OpEd (free link) by Norman Ornstein, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (a reasonably influential conservative think tank — Newt Gingrich is also a fellow), ran today in Roll Call (sub req’d), “the Newspaper of Capitol Hill.” It’s a strong defense of federal support of basic research that cites DARPA’s declining support for university computer science research as one of the flawed policy decisions that need correcting to preserve our future competitiveness. Here’s a snippet:
But I am growing increasingly alarmed, less because of the dynamism in Asia and more because of our blindness and obtuseness when it comes to our crown jewel: our overwhelming lead in basic research and our position as home to the best scientists in the world.
Basic research is the real building block of economic growth, and here we have had the franchise; just look at the number of Nobel Prize winners from the United States compared to the rest of the world combined. Our academic institutions and research labs have been magnets attracting, and often keeping, the best and the brightest. Our academic openness and our culture of freedom have encouraged good research and challenges to orthodoxy. Our politicians have recognized that most basic research has to be funded by the government because there is scant short-term economic benefit for most businesses to do it themselves.
But now, in a variety of ways, we are frittering away this asset, and for no good reason. Start with the federal budget. Basic research has been concentrated in a few key institutions: the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency at the Pentagon. After a series of pledges to double the NIH budget and then keep it on a growth path, NIH has stagnated. Budget growth for next year is one-half of 1 percent, which will be below inflation for the first time since the 1980s, at a time when the need for more biomedical research is obvious.
The NSF budget is slated to grow by 2 percent, leaving it $3 billion below the funding level Congress promised in 2002. At NIST, the Bush administration is trying to eliminate the Advanced Technology Program and to slash the Manufacturing Extension Partnership by 57 percent. At DARPA, which originated the Internet but where computer science research has been flat for several years, the money going to university researchers has fallen precipitously, along with a larger focus on applied research for the here and now.
…
It is gut check time. The foolish fiscal policies that keep big entitlements off the table, wont consider revenues along with spending, and have turned the one-sixth of the budget that is discretionary into a vicious, zero-sum game, are truly eating our seed corn in this critical area. Somebody needs to get the White House to wake up, and Congress to understand what it is mindlessly doing.
But what happens if the United States not only gives up every trade protection benefit, continues to suffer a loss of manufacturing and fritters away its research leadership in science, medicine and technology?
That’s a lose-lose proposition. And it ought to worry U.S. leaders a lot more than it has so far.
Of all the government sources of funding for basic technology research, few have delivered more breakthroughs for Silicon Valley and the U.S. economy than the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA.
That’s why a shift away from basic and university research in DARPA funding is alarming for the valley and for the future of innovation in the United States. Long-term casualties could eventually include America’s competitiveness and military readiness.
…
The shift at DARPA is all the more troubling as it goes hand in hand with decreases in funding for basic research across the Pentagon and at the National Science Foundation. What’s more, these subtle yet significant changes have occurred without a national debate.
The time to have that debate is now. If these trends continue, America will pay dearly for them.
Fortunately, it appears that Congress is getting interested in having that debate. In early May the House Science Committee will hold a hearing on the issue. Testifying before the committee will be John Marburger, Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy; Tony Tether, Director of DARPA; Bill Wulf, President of the National Academy of Engineering; and Tom Leighton, Co-Founder and Chief Scientist at Akamai Industries, and Chair of the PITAC Subcommittee on Cyber Security, which just released it’s review of the federal government’s cyber security R&D programs. We, of course, will bring you all the details.
In the meantime, read the full editorial.
Since Sue, Ed, Andy, and a whole host of my relatives have all sent me a pointer to this OpEd by Thomas Friedman in the NY Times, you may have already seen it. But that doesn’t make it any less worth noting.
Friedman picks up where former Clinton defense officials Perry and Deutch left off earlier in the week (which we covered here), who picked up where NY Times reporter John Markoff left off a couple weeks earlier (which we covered here), arguing that the Bush Administration, by cutting the U.S. investment in fundamental research, has put not only our national security at risk (as noted by Perry and Deutch), but our economic security at risk as well.
The Bush team is proposing cutting the Pentagon’s budget for basic science and technology research by 20 percent next year – after President Bush and the Republican Congress already slashed the 2005 budget of the National Science Foundation by $100 million.
When the National Innovation Initiative, a bipartisan study by the country’s leading technologists and industrialists about how to re-energize U.S. competitiveness, was unveiled last December, it was virtually ignored by the White House. Did you hear about it? Probably not, because the president preferred to focus all attention on privatizing Social Security.
It’s as if we have an industrial-age presidency, catering to a pre-industrial ideological base, in a post-industrial era.
Of course, when Friedman writes regarding the National Innovation Initiative
Did you hear about it? Probably not…
he’s obviously not referring to readers of this blog, who read all about the Council on Competitiveness report back on December 15th. 🙂
Friedman has hit the Administration and Congress hard (and repeatedly) for allowing NSF to be cut in the FY 2005 appropriations, so I’m glad to see him continue to bang the drum for federal support for fundamental research.
So, read the whole thing, and thanks to Sue, Ed, Andy and my relations for pointing it out.
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Defense Science Board on the Impact of Changes to DARPA IT R&D
/In: Policy /by Peter HarshaAs I was updating the IT R&D policy resources page here in anticipation of it appearing as a link in a soon-to-be published Science magazine OpEd on the state of federal support for computing research (titled “An Endless Frontier Postponed” — watch this space for details), I realized that I hadn’t yet posted a link to this recently released report (pdf) from the Defense Science Board. The report includes an excellent appendix that notes the impact policy changes at DARPA will have on the Defense Department’s long-term mission. Here’s what I wrote on the IT R&D page:
In February 2005, the Defense Department’s Defense Science Board — an independent advisory committee comprised of researchers from academia, government, and industry — released an examination of the microelectronics industry, which provides hardware capability that “underlies much of America’s modern military leadership technology.” Part of that examination involved a review of DOD’s research efforts in the space to determine if the Department is doing what it can to “secure continued ‘Moore’s Law’ improvements in processing capacity that will enable it to maximize the advantages inherent in its superior sources of information and the superiority of the algortihms and networks that are used to process and benefit from them.” What they found is that changes in emphasis at DARPA have impacted DOD-related research long-term:
The entire report is available here (pdf).
So add the DSB to the growing list of organizations, advisory committees, congressional committees, and the press that have noted their concern for the impact of DARPA’s policy shift.
A reminder: the House Science Committee will hold a hearing on “The Future of Computer Science Research in the U.S.” on May 12, 2005. Appearing as witnesses before the committee will be Jack Marburger, Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy; Anthony Tether, Director of DARPA; Bill Wulf, President of the National Academies of Engineering; and Tom Leighton, Co-Founder and Chief Scientist of Akamai Industries, and also the Chair of the PITAC Subcommittee on Cyber Security. All Science Committee hearings are webcast live (and then archived for later viewing as well). And, of course, we’ll have all the details here.
High Performance Computing Act Passes House
/In: Funding, Policy /by Peter HarshaCRA commends the House for its swift passage today of the High Performance Computing Revitalization Act (H.R. 28). The bill, which would provide sustained access by the research community to federal HPC assets, assure a balanced portfolio in HPC research pursuits and beef up interagency planning, passed by voice vote. The measure now moves on to the Senate, where previous efforts to reauthorize portions of the Networking and Information Technology R&D program have failed to receive timely consideration.
Here’s our previous coverage of the bill, which has a bit more detail.
CRA and USACM joined in issuing a press release applauding the bill’s authors and the members of the House for moving the legislation. A copy of that release can be found after the jump.
The House Science Committee’s press release has further (positive) reaction from Chair Sherwood Boehlert.
Read more →
Roll Call OpEd Calls on Congress to Support Science
/In: Funding, Policy, R&D in the Press /by Peter HarshaRoll Call’s Morton Kondracke writes in an OpEd (sub. req’d) that Congress must act to increase federal support for fundamental research or risk future competitiveness. The good news is, he notes, is that Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA), Chair of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Science, State, Justice, Commerce committee, appears to be up to the challenge.
Much of the credit for influencing Wolf’s position has to go to the Task Force on the Future of American Innovation (of which CRA is a member). Their Benchmarks of Our Innovation Future (pdf) report seems to be resonating well with congressional offices, and special efforts to reach out to Wolf (who has been very receptive) seem to be paying off.
Now the trick is to turn that enthusiasm into real appropriations — something that remains a real challenge in current budget environment. We’ll keep you posted.
Computing at NSF
/In: Research /by Peter HarshaThe National Science Foundation has included a new, special section on computing research at NSF on the Foundation’s homepage. It’s a nice overview of the types of innovation that have resulted from their decades of support for fundamental research in computing, as well as some of the challenges ahead (pulled from CRA’s Grand Challenges in Computer Science and Engineering conference).
There’s even a snazzy screensaver.
Reaction to Trends in CS Majors article
/In: CRA, Misc., People /by Peter HarshaFirst, there was Jay Vegso’s Computing Research News article: “Interest in CS as a Major Drops Among Incoming Freshmen”
Then his blog post.
Then C-Net picked it up.
Then Techdirt.
Now it’s hit Slashdot and the comments are pouring in.
Housekeeping Note: New Blog Category
/In: Misc. /by Peter HarshaSince there’s been so much recent coverage of computing R&D issues in the popular press, and since we’ve been trying to cite so much of it here, I figured I’d make life easy on myself and anyone else looking for a collection of recent articles by creating a new “R&D in the Press” category over there on the left. Clicking the link gets you to an archive of all the posts we’ve made citing news reports — though at the moment it only goes back a couple of weeks. When I get some time, I’ll go deeper into the archive and tag more relevant posts with the new category.
Enjoy!
Ball Keeps Rolling: Ornstein Writes in Support of Basic Research and IT R&D at DARPA
/In: Funding, R&D in the Press /by Peter HarshaThis OpEd (free link) by Norman Ornstein, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (a reasonably influential conservative think tank — Newt Gingrich is also a fellow), ran today in Roll Call (sub req’d), “the Newspaper of Capitol Hill.” It’s a strong defense of federal support of basic research that cites DARPA’s declining support for university computer science research as one of the flawed policy decisions that need correcting to preserve our future competitiveness. Here’s a snippet:
And with that, the (bipartisan) chorus of voices grows….
Seattle Post-Intelligencer Worries About Cuts to Federal R&D
/In: Funding, R&D in the Press /by Peter HarshaThe Seattle PI makes the economic case for federal support of R&D in an editorial today.
Read it all.
The Drumbeat Continues: SJ Merc News on DARPA IT R&D and Universities
/In: Funding, Policy, R&D in the Press /by Peter HarshaFollowing in the wake of news stories and OpEds in the New York Times, the San Jose Mercury News editorializes today on the negative impact of DARPA’s shift away from university researchers in computer science and engineering.
Fortunately, it appears that Congress is getting interested in having that debate. In early May the House Science Committee will hold a hearing on the issue. Testifying before the committee will be John Marburger, Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy; Tony Tether, Director of DARPA; Bill Wulf, President of the National Academy of Engineering; and Tom Leighton, Co-Founder and Chief Scientist at Akamai Industries, and Chair of the PITAC Subcommittee on Cyber Security, which just released it’s review of the federal government’s cyber security R&D programs. We, of course, will bring you all the details.
In the meantime, read the full editorial.
NY Times’ Friedman OpEd on Bush Failure to Support Innovation, U.S. Competitiveness
/In: Funding, Policy, R&D in the Press /by Peter HarshaSince Sue, Ed, Andy, and a whole host of my relatives have all sent me a pointer to this OpEd by Thomas Friedman in the NY Times, you may have already seen it. But that doesn’t make it any less worth noting.
Friedman picks up where former Clinton defense officials Perry and Deutch left off earlier in the week (which we covered here), who picked up where NY Times reporter John Markoff left off a couple weeks earlier (which we covered here), arguing that the Bush Administration, by cutting the U.S. investment in fundamental research, has put not only our national security at risk (as noted by Perry and Deutch), but our economic security at risk as well.
Of course, when Friedman writes regarding the National Innovation Initiative
he’s obviously not referring to readers of this blog, who read all about the Council on Competitiveness report back on December 15th. 🙂
Friedman has hit the Administration and Congress hard (and repeatedly) for allowing NSF to be cut in the FY 2005 appropriations, so I’m glad to see him continue to bang the drum for federal support for fundamental research.
So, read the whole thing, and thanks to Sue, Ed, Andy and my relations for pointing it out.