ComputerWeekly.comnotes today that an EU commission charged with assessing the state of EU IT research efforts has concluded that the effort is failing because of insufficient funding and heavy-handed bureaucracy.
The panel said the research was vital for competitiveness but that it more investment and less bureaucracy are required for success.
The panel was chaired by former Portuguese science minister Jose Mariano Gago, who was one of the authors of the European Commissions 10-year Lisbon Strategy, which aims to make the EU the “world’s most dynamic and competitive economy.”
Viviane Reding, European Commission information society and media commissioner, said, “Fast-changing IST research is, and must remain, a key driver for the rapid economy-wide technological innovation on which Europes skilled jobs ultimately depend.”
As we’ve noted before (Are we taking NSF for granted?), the Europeans are increasingly aware how important US investment in IT R&D has been to US competitiveness and are moving to mirror it. While it appears US industry leaders and academics recognize the value of that investment, unfortunately, it appears the Administration and Congress may not be quitesosure.
Thanks to Dave Farber (via IP) for the story!
Facing heat on the right for excessive spending, President Bush has apparently indicated he will provide a “very tough” spending blueprint to Congress for FY 2006. In a commentary posted today, the Washington Timesquotes members of the Administration saying the President will exert “very, very strong discipline” on next year’s spending.
“That discipline will be there big time,” [White House Chief of Staff Andrew] Card told business leaders.”
The Times is pretty specific in predicting the cuts:
Among the budget-cutting targets: the bloated Agriculture Department, corporate welfare, scientific research, housing, state and local giveaway grants, and other low-priority and no-priority programs that will be slashed or eliminated altogether.
…
The National Science Foundation’s social research grants, long criticized as wasteful, will be cut and NSF’s overall spending is expected to be flatlined. So will the National Institutes of Health, which has seen its budget skyrocket over the past decade, especially in the past four years.
[emphasis added]
This is very disturbing news, not just because of the cuts it portends, but because the attitude on display in the article is a far cry from the very supportive language we’ve seen this Administration use in reference to the National Science Foundation and the rest of the federal basic research effort. My hope is that the article is more reflective of the Heritage Foundation position on the budget than the President’s, but we’ll know for sure on February 7th.
In the meantime, let’s reflect on the President’s feelings about the federal role in R&D as they were expressed in last year’s budget request. Surely the situation hasn’t changed so much in the intervening 12 months that he no longer believes this, has it?
The eminent 19th Century American scientist Joseph Henry once asserted, “Modern civilization depends on science.” This still holds true. Indeed, investments in science and technology have resulted in much of the unparalleled economic growth in the United States over the last 50 years, as well as the standard of living and quality of life we now enjoy. Advances have been possible only with the support of both public and private investment in research and development (R&D).
And we continue to invest. The R&D investments of the United States are unmatched. However, unlike 40 years ago, when Federal R&D expenditures doubled those of the private sector, industry R&D spending now exceeds that of the Federal Government. Still, by a wide margin, the U.S. Government continues to lead the world in R&D spending.
Investments in technological advancement are vital to strengthening our capabilities to combat terrorism and defend our country. The Presidents 2005 Budget continues to focus R&D on winning the war against terrorism, while moderating the growth in overall spending. But the benefits of innovation and discovery are not limited to national security. They are just as critical to economic security. The Administration, recognizing that fundamental research is the fuel for future innovation and technology development, has maintained the highest levels of support for priority R&D areas such as nanotechnology, information technology, hydrogen energy, and space exploration. The non-defense R&D share of the discretionary budget is at a near record high over the last 30 years.
–Analytical Perspectives, Budget of the United States of America, FY 2005 (p. 47) – (pdf)
The Coalition for National Security Research has begun a blog to note and comment on the latest news in Defense R&D.
CNSR is “a broadly-based coalition united by a commitment to a stronger defense science and technology base. Participants include scientific, engineering, mathematical and behavioral societies, academic institutions, and industrial associations.” And CRA.
Anyway, it’s definitely worth taking a look. Tom Jones, CNSR’s co-chair, has been blogging up a storm already.
Full Disclosure: Any ugly HTML/PHP coding on the CNSR blog is my fault.
The President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC) achieved consensus yesterday on the final draft of its report on the status of the federal cyber security R&D effort, finding that support for civilian-oriented, fundamental cyber security research is seriously inadequate, the pool of researchers is insufficient, and that coordination between funding agencies is lacking.
Judging by yesterday’s presentation (delivered by Tom Leighton, the Chair of PITAC’s Subcommittee on Cyber Security), the report will lay out in stark terms the magnitude of the threat posed by vulnerabilities in the information infrastructure. It will also spell out in some detail the difficulties faced by researchers, especially in academic institutions, in finding federal support for the fundamental cyber security research that will address the vulnerabilities long-term. The report will note problems in all three agencies one would expect to be funding critical long-term cyber security R&D: NSF, DARPA and the Department of Homeland Security. I’ve covered these issues before inthisspace, but here are the key points:
DHS sees itself as a supporter of short-term research, funding very near-term technologies in an effort to address the current threat. Of a more than $1 billion science and technology budget for FY05, it will spend less than $18 million on cyber security research, of which only $1.5 million might be called “basic.” DHS says it’s dependent upon DARPA and NSF to provide the long-term research it will need in the future.
Two policies at DARPA have made it very difficult for academic researchers to participate in DARPA-supported research: a short-term focus with an emphasis on weeding out projects that can’t demonstrate measurable results in 12- to 18-month timeframes; and, a move towards classification of a larger percentage of the DARPA research budget, especially in cyber security. As a result, university participation in DARPA-led IT research appears to have dropped significantly.
NSF’s CyberTrust program (its research in cyber security) is heavily over-subscribed as a result. Proposal success rates are 8 percent, vs. a Foundation-wide average of about 25 percent. Proposal success rates that low are damaging to the discipline and to the nation that depends on that research. The Foundation believes about 40 percent of those proposals as good enough to warrant funding, were funding available.
As a quick fix, the committee will recommend an immediate $90 million infusion of funding into NSF’s cyber security research efforts to alleviate some of these funding pressures, while leaving the door open to future funding increases should the situation warrant it.
Rather than summarize Leighton’s whole presentation, I’ll just link to the slides...once they’ve been posted (should be soon). When they appear, they’ll be here. They’re here (pdf).
I’ll recommend again CRA’s own contribution to the report: our testimony (pdf) submitted to PITAC back in July, which mirrors much of what will be in the final report. In fact, it appears that the only major concern we raised which doesn’t get some mention in the report is the chilling effect of various copyright legislation efforts on research in information security and assurance.
CRA’s testimony is here (pdf).
The committee is putting its final touches on the report, which should be ready for final approval at the next meeting of PITAC, which I believe will be in March. We’ll have all the details here.
For the current fiscal year, Congress cut the budget of the National Science Foundation by about 2 percent, to $5.47 billion, and the White House Office of Management and Budget initially proposed a further cut of about 5 percent for 2006. But the agency appealed, with support from allies like Senator Christopher S. Bond, Republican of Missouri, and the White House decided to propose a flat budget, instead of cuts.
The White House budget office initially sought a small cut at the National Institutes of Health, which received an appropriation of $28.4 billion for the current fiscal year. But after an appeal by Tommy G. Thompson, the secretary of health and human services, the White House agreed to propose a small increase, less than 2 percent, which would not be enough to keep pace with the rising costs of biomedical research.
…
Mr. Bush will try again to end the Advanced Technology Program in the Commerce Department, which is spending $142 million this year to speed development of high-risk technologies in medicine, manufacturing, engineering, computer science and other fields. President Bill Clinton liked the program, but the conservative Heritage Foundation calls it “corporate welfare at its worst.”
The President will start the annual budget cycle on February 7, 2005, with the release of his budget request. It will then be up to Congress to come up with it’s own version in March or April, then begin the process of passing appropriations bills, ideally before the start of the 2006 fiscal year on October 1, 2005 (an ideal it rarely achieves). Appropriations staffers have already made it clear that they don’t expect to be able to provide much help in getting increases for agencies beyond the President’s request, so the FY 06 cycle looks to be another tough one for the science agencies.
Along with the rest of the scientific community, CRA has already been active in the FY 06 budget process, making a direct appeal to White House Office of Management and Budget Director Joshua Bolten for sufficient funding for computing research in the President’s budget request. In that appeal, we noted the particular pressure faced by NSF’s Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) directorate as a result of the latest funding cuts and the changing funding landscape for university-led computing research — particularly changes at DARPA* that have discouraged university researcher participation in DOD programs.
In part because of that change in support at DARPA, NSF now bears a disproportionate share of the load for funding fundamental IT R&D in universities (about 85%), a fact which has helped contribute to discouragingly low success rates in CISE. In fact, since 1994, while the CISE budget has doubled, the number of proposals submitted to CISE has tripled, and the funding rate has fallen from 36 percent to 16 percent — the lowest of any directorate in the Foundation. In some critical programs like CyberTrust, the award rate is even lower: 8.2 percent. Award rates this low are not only harmful to the vitality of computing community, they are harmful to the nation. As we noted in our appeal, “NSF research funding not only leads to multi-billion dollar industry segments, it also produces the PhDs that industry needs and wants more of for advanced product development and research. This is vital to continuing economic recovery and growth.”
If you haven’t yet joined CRA’s Computing Research Advocacy Network, now would be a good time. As we move through the budget process, we’ll have a number of opportunities to make the case for computing research and could use your help. In the meantime, keep an eye on this space for further developments.
* CRA has been concerned for some time over what we see is a shift at DARPA from a focus on long-term research to shorter-term research. Tony Tether, since taking over as head of the agency in 2001, has been plain in his desire to reshape DARPA in the model of a high-tech venture capital firm – identifying promising technologies early and providing them with the capital needed to turn them into demonstrable technologies on short-timelines. Key to this identification process is DARPA’s implementation of a formal “go/no-go” decision matrix for all DARPA funded research projects. In addition to facing a traditional annual review, in which DARPA managers verify that contract work is proceeding according to plan and on-budget, DARPA contract recipients now face multiple review milestones at relatively short 12 to 18 month intervals, by which their projects must deliver some demonstrable result in order to receive continued funding.
To some, DARPA’s approach appears to represent a reasonably business-like approach to providing good stewardship over taxpayer dollars in the course of developing the technologies necessary for national security in the post-September 11th world. However, for university researchers accustomed to working on basic research problems, the idea of “scheduling” breakthroughs or demonstrable results on 12 month timelines is anathema to the basic research enterprise and nearly impossible to do in an academic environment. CRA believes that DARPA’s new funding regime has constrained university researchers from pursuing DARPA contracts, effectively preventing some of the best minds in the country from working on national security problems. The “go/no-go” decisions result in research that is evolutionary, not revolutionary, with potential grantees only proposing ideas they can be sure to deliver significant progress on in 12 months. Failing to consider long-term research could leave the nation once-again “flat-footed” to the new threats of the 21st Century.
The other policy concern surrounding DARPA is the increased use of classification to limit the dissemination of its research, particularly its cyber security research underway. Tether has stated in a number of public forums – including at CRA’s Computing Leadership Summit in February 2004 and the April 2004 meeting of PITAC – that the move towards increasing the amount of research under classification is justified given the Department of Defense’s increasing reliance on “network-centric” operations for its warfighting capability. There are, of course, important reasons for classifying federal research, especially when it is clear that the research might reveal our capabilities or vulnerabilities. However, it should also be understood that there are real costs – including that the research is unavailable for public dissemination and scrutiny, and that many university researchers, arguably some of the best minds in the country, are no longer able to contribute to the work. In the case of DARPA’s cyber security research, there is another significant cost to bear as well. The military (and the government overall) has a huge dependence on our nation’s commercial infrastructure, but classifying the research in information security means that it is largely unavailable for use in protecting this commercial infrastructure.
Jim Horning uses the frustration he and I faced yesterday trying to figure out why he was having trouble with a link in Wednesday’s post on R&D funding to make some observations about the risks of lenient parsing. He’s got the whole story there.
His interesting blog is Nothing is as simple as we hope it will be.
Thanks to Spaf and Dave Farber’s Interesting-People list for the pointer to this column by The New Republic’s Jonathan Chait taking Congress to task for approving a cut to the National Science Foundation while at the same time allowing more dubious pork-barrel spending to flourish. It’s more than a little partisan, but still interesting. Here’s a bit:
The new evidence is that Congress voted last month to cut the budget for the National Science Foundation, or NSF, which supports basic scientific research. This means that next year the NSF will have about 1,000 fewer research grants. This comes at a time when scientific experts worry that the United States is losing its worldwide primacy in science and technology.
Now, some of you righties may be saying to yourselves, “Great! We scaled back another big government program.” But, remember, Republicans over at least the last decade have flaunted their support of science and technology. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich used to go on about dinosaur research and giving poor people laptop computers. Bush grandly promised a new mission to land humans on Mars in his last State of the Union address.
And the GOP commitment to science, at least until recently, very much included the NSF. Two years ago, the Republican Congress voted to double the foundation’s budget by 2007. At the time, Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard wrote that the White House considered the NSF to be one of the few “programs that work.” Its grants go out on a competitive basis.
Mitch Daniels, then Bush’s budget director, told Barnes that the NSF “has supported eight of the 12 most recent Nobel Prize awards earned by Americans at some point in their careers.”
Still, you say, don’t we face a huge deficit now? Indeed we do, but cutting support for scientific research is an incredibly mindless way to solve that problem. Deficits are bad because they represent a form of borrowing against the future. Every dollar we spend beyond our means today is one less dollar that we’ll have to spend someday down the road. But scientific research is an investment in future prosperity. Cutting the NSF budget is like a family in debt pulling its children out of college but keeping its country club membership.
CRA’s CRA-Bulletin is a free electronic bulletin that aims to inform about timely events we think will be of interest to computing researchers. This edition’s topics (frequent blog readers will have seen some of these before…):
In a story yesterday, Information Week reports that the Bush Administration will look in FY 06 to focus on R&D funding and IT policy in response to challenges that the US technological leadership is slipping globally. Here’s a snip:
While many agree that emerging economies such as China, India, and South Korea are mounting a serious challenge to the United States’ long-held role as the leading technology innovator, some question the administration’s focus on the task at hand and its ability to deliver adequate funding given the burgeoning federal deficit.
“The Bush administration’s philosophy is to create an environment for innovation and an environment for participation,” says Phillip Bond, the Commerce Department’s undersecretary for technology.
Federal research and development funding, crucial to the administration’s ability to create innovative technologies, has increased 44% since 2001, Bond says. The administration contributes $2 billion annually to networking and IT R&D alone at agencies such as the Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology, the National Science Foundation, and areas within the Defense Department. The Bush administration has also allocated $1 billion for the development of nanotechnology and taken an interest in quantum communication, an emerging encryption system.
The article doesn’t note whether any of the Administration’s focus will result in increased funding for IT R&D — and I don’t have any information on that either — but it’s worth pointing out that the 44% figure quoted by Bond above isn’t reflected in the actual amounts spent (and requested) for federal IT R&D spending from FY 01 – FY 05 (as can be seen on the bottom half of this chart). As others have noted, the bulk of that 44% increase has gone to the Defense Department, which is increasing its support for more short-term, development-oriented research and de-emphasizing long-term, fundamental research. Here’s more on CRA’s concerns about DOD research.
But keep it tuned here for all the details of the President’s FY 06 budget request, due February 7th…. Update: Also forgot that I’d whipped up this little chart that showed how Federal IT R&D funding had fared in the various Administrations. Here’s the post in which it originally appeared, which contains detail on how the chart was assembled.
[I may be on vacation in soggy LA, but computing research policy waits for no one! So here’s an update from the road…]
The National Academies have released their long-awaited report, Assessment of Department of Defense Basic Research. This is the study that was requested by the Senate Armed Services Committee in the FY 2004 Defense Authorization Act after they raised questions about the state of DOD basic research (“6.1” research in defense parlance) as part of the hearings leading up to the bill.
The NAS panel’s recommendations mirror a lot of things we’ve been saying about the DOD research — mainly that it’s become less basic and it’s declining in both absolute dollars and as a percentage of the overall DOD science and technology budget. The full report doesn’t seem to be online (I get an error at the NAS link above), but here’s a copy of the summary (pdf, ~740k). I haven’t read the full report so far, but from the executive summary the recommendations are worth reading:
Recommendations Recommendation 1. The Department of Defense should change its definition of basic research to the following:
Basic research is systematic study directed toward greater knowledge or understanding of the fundamental aspects of phenomena and has the potential for broad, rather than specific, application. It includes all scientific study and experimentation directed toward increasing fundamental knowledge and understanding in those fields of the physical, engineering, environmental, social, and life sciences related to longterm national security needs. It is farsighted high-payoff research that provides the bases for technological progress. Basic research may lead to (a) subsequent applied research and advance technology developments in Defense-related technologies, (b) new and improved military functional capabilities, or (c) the discovery of new knowledge that may later lead to more focused advances in areas relevant to the Department of Defense.
Recommendation 2. The Department of Defense should include the following attributes in its guidance to basic research managers and direct that these attributes be used to characterize 6.1-funded research: a spirit that seeks first and foremost to discover new fundamental understanding, flexibility to modify goals or approaches in the near term based on discovery, freedom to pursue unexpected paths opened by new insights, high-risk research questions with the potential for high payoff in future developments, minimum requirements for detailed reporting, open communications with other researchers and external peers, freedom to publish in journals and present at meetings without restriction and permission, unrestricted involvement of students and postdoctoral candidates, no restrictions on the nationality of researchers, and stable funding for an agreed timetable to carry out the research. Recommendation 3. The Department of Defense should abandon its view of basic research as being part of a sequential or linear process of research and development (in this view, the results of basic research are handed off to applied research, the results of applied research are handed off to advanced technology development, and so forth). Instead, the DOD should view basic research, applied research, and the other phases of research and development as continuing activities that occur in parallel, with numerous supporting connections among them. Recommendation 4. The Department of Defense should set the balance of support within 6.1 basic research more in favor of unfettered exploration than of research related to short-term needs. Recommendation 5. Senior Department of Defense leadership should clearly communicate to research managers its understanding of the need for long-term exploration and discovery. Recommendation 6. Personnel policies should provide for the needed continuity of research management in order to ensure a cadre of experienced managers capable of exercising the level of authority needed to effectively direct research resources. Further, in light of the reductions in positions reported to the Committee on Department of Defense Basic Research, the Department of Defense should carefully examine the adequacy of the number of basic research management positions. Recommendation 7. The Department of Defense should redress the imbalance between its current basic research allocation, which has declined critically over the past decade, and its need to better support the expanded areas of technology, the need for increased unfettered basic research, and the support of new researchers. Recommendation 8. The Department of Defense should, through its funding and policies for university research, encourage increased participation by younger researchers as principal investigators. Recommendation 9. To avoid weakening the long and fruitful partnership between universities and Department of Defense agencies, DOD agreements and subagreements with universities for basic research should recognize National Security Decision Directive 189, the fundamental research exclusion providing for the open and unrestricted character of basic research. DOD program managers should also explicitly retain the authority to negotiate export compliance clauses out of basic research grants to universities, on the basis of both the programs specific technologies and its objectives.
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EU Says Bureaucracy Hurting IT Research Efforts, Competitiveness
/In: Policy /by Peter HarshaComputerWeekly.com notes today that an EU commission charged with assessing the state of EU IT research efforts has concluded that the effort is failing because of insufficient funding and heavy-handed bureaucracy.
As we’ve noted before (Are we taking NSF for granted?), the Europeans are increasingly aware how important US investment in IT R&D has been to US competitiveness and are moving to mirror it. While it appears US industry leaders and academics recognize the value of that investment, unfortunately, it appears the Administration and Congress may not be quite so sure.
Thanks to Dave Farber (via IP) for the story!
President Will Target “Scientific Research” in New Budget, Wash Times Says
/In: Funding /by Peter HarshaFacing heat on the right for excessive spending, President Bush has apparently indicated he will provide a “very tough” spending blueprint to Congress for FY 2006. In a commentary posted today, the Washington Times quotes members of the Administration saying the President will exert “very, very strong discipline” on next year’s spending.
The Times is pretty specific in predicting the cuts:
This is very disturbing news, not just because of the cuts it portends, but because the attitude on display in the article is a far cry from the very supportive language we’ve seen this Administration use in reference to the National Science Foundation and the rest of the federal basic research effort. My hope is that the article is more reflective of the Heritage Foundation position on the budget than the President’s, but we’ll know for sure on February 7th.
In the meantime, let’s reflect on the President’s feelings about the federal role in R&D as they were expressed in last year’s budget request. Surely the situation hasn’t changed so much in the intervening 12 months that he no longer believes this, has it?
Sigh.
New Defense R&D Blog Worth Checking Out
/In: Misc. /by Peter HarshaThe Coalition for National Security Research has begun a blog to note and comment on the latest news in Defense R&D.
CNSR is “a broadly-based coalition united by a commitment to a stronger defense science and technology base. Participants include scientific, engineering, mathematical and behavioral societies, academic institutions, and industrial associations.” And CRA.
Anyway, it’s definitely worth taking a look. Tom Jones, CNSR’s co-chair, has been blogging up a storm already.
Full Disclosure: Any ugly HTML/PHP coding on the CNSR blog is my fault.
PITAC Approves Cyber Security Report Calling For Significant Increases in Basic Cyber R&D
/In: Policy /by Peter HarshaThe President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC) achieved consensus yesterday on the final draft of its report on the status of the federal cyber security R&D effort, finding that support for civilian-oriented, fundamental cyber security research is seriously inadequate, the pool of researchers is insufficient, and that coordination between funding agencies is lacking.
Judging by yesterday’s presentation (delivered by Tom Leighton, the Chair of PITAC’s Subcommittee on Cyber Security), the report will lay out in stark terms the magnitude of the threat posed by vulnerabilities in the information infrastructure. It will also spell out in some detail the difficulties faced by researchers, especially in academic institutions, in finding federal support for the fundamental cyber security research that will address the vulnerabilities long-term. The report will note problems in all three agencies one would expect to be funding critical long-term cyber security R&D: NSF, DARPA and the Department of Homeland Security. I’ve covered these issues before in this space, but here are the key points:
As a quick fix, the committee will recommend an immediate $90 million infusion of funding into NSF’s cyber security research efforts to alleviate some of these funding pressures, while leaving the door open to future funding increases should the situation warrant it.
Rather than summarize Leighton’s whole presentation, I’ll just link to the slides..
.once they’ve been posted (should be soon). When they appear, they’ll be here.They’re here (pdf).I’ll recommend again CRA’s own contribution to the report: our testimony (pdf) submitted to PITAC back in July, which mirrors much of what will be in the final report. In fact, it appears that the only major concern we raised which doesn’t get some mention in the report is the chilling effect of various copyright legislation efforts on research in information security and assurance.
CRA’s testimony is here (pdf).
The committee is putting its final touches on the report, which should be ready for final approval at the next meeting of PITAC, which I believe will be in March. We’ll have all the details here.
President to Propose Flat-funding for NSF, Increase for NIH, NY Times Reports
/In: Funding /by Peter HarshaThe New York Times appears to have some detail about what the President will propose as part of his FY 2006 Budget Request for the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. It doesn’t look good.
The President will start the annual budget cycle on February 7, 2005, with the release of his budget request. It will then be up to Congress to come up with it’s own version in March or April, then begin the process of passing appropriations bills, ideally before the start of the 2006 fiscal year on October 1, 2005 (an ideal it rarely achieves). Appropriations staffers have already made it clear that they don’t expect to be able to provide much help in getting increases for agencies beyond the President’s request, so the FY 06 cycle looks to be another tough one for the science agencies.
Along with the rest of the scientific community, CRA has already been active in the FY 06 budget process, making a direct appeal to White House Office of Management and Budget Director Joshua Bolten for sufficient funding for computing research in the President’s budget request. In that appeal, we noted the particular pressure faced by NSF’s Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) directorate as a result of the latest funding cuts and the changing funding landscape for university-led computing research — particularly changes at DARPA* that have discouraged university researcher participation in DOD programs.
In part because of that change in support at DARPA, NSF now bears a disproportionate share of the load for funding fundamental IT R&D in universities (about 85%), a fact which has helped contribute to discouragingly low success rates in CISE. In fact, since 1994, while the CISE budget has doubled, the number of proposals submitted to CISE has tripled, and the funding rate has fallen from 36 percent to 16 percent — the lowest of any directorate in the Foundation. In some critical programs like CyberTrust, the award rate is even lower: 8.2 percent. Award rates this low are not only harmful to the vitality of computing community, they are harmful to the nation. As we noted in our appeal, “NSF research funding not only leads to multi-billion dollar industry segments, it also produces the PhDs that industry needs and wants more of for advanced product development and research. This is vital to continuing economic recovery and growth.”
If you haven’t yet joined CRA’s Computing Research Advocacy Network, now would be a good time. As we move through the budget process, we’ll have a number of opportunities to make the case for computing research and could use your help. In the meantime, keep an eye on this space for further developments.
Turning My Bad HTML into a Teachable Moment
/In: Misc. /by Peter HarshaJim Horning uses the frustration he and I faced yesterday trying to figure out why he was having trouble with a link in Wednesday’s post on R&D funding to make some observations about the risks of lenient parsing. He’s got the whole story there.
His interesting blog is Nothing is as simple as we hope it will be.
Catching Up: Chait Dings Congress for Slashing NSF While Boosting Pork
/In: Funding /by Peter HarshaThanks to Spaf and Dave Farber’s Interesting-People list for the pointer to this column by The New Republic’s Jonathan Chait taking Congress to task for approving a cut to the National Science Foundation while at the same time allowing more dubious pork-barrel spending to flourish. It’s more than a little partisan, but still interesting. Here’s a bit:
Read the whole thing here.
The New CRA-Bulletin is Out!
/In: CRA /by Peter HarshaCRA’s CRA-Bulletin is a free electronic bulletin that aims to inform about timely events we think will be of interest to computing researchers. This edition’s topics (frequent blog readers will have seen some of these before…):
If you don’t receive CRB and you want to, you can find subscription information at the bottom here.
R&D Funding And IT Policy To Play Major Role In Bush’s Second Term, Information Week reports
/In: Policy /by Peter HarshaIn a story yesterday, Information Week reports that the Bush Administration will look in FY 06 to focus on R&D funding and IT policy in response to challenges that the US technological leadership is slipping globally. Here’s a snip:
The article doesn’t note whether any of the Administration’s focus will result in increased funding for IT R&D — and I don’t have any information on that either — but it’s worth pointing out that the 44% figure quoted by Bond above isn’t reflected in the actual amounts spent (and requested) for federal IT R&D spending from FY 01 – FY 05 (as can be seen on the bottom half of this chart). As others have noted, the bulk of that 44% increase has gone to the Defense Department, which is increasing its support for more short-term, development-oriented research and de-emphasizing long-term, fundamental research. Here’s more on CRA’s concerns about DOD research.
But keep it tuned here for all the details of the President’s FY 06 budget request, due February 7th….
Update: Also forgot that I’d whipped up this little chart that showed how Federal IT R&D funding had fared in the various Administrations. Here’s the post in which it originally appeared, which contains detail on how the chart was assembled.
New NAS Report on 6.1 Research at DOD
/In: Policy /by Peter Harsha[I may be on vacation in soggy LA, but computing research policy waits for no one! So here’s an update from the road…]
The National Academies have released their long-awaited report, Assessment of Department of Defense Basic Research. This is the study that was requested by the Senate Armed Services Committee in the FY 2004 Defense Authorization Act after they raised questions about the state of DOD basic research (“6.1” research in defense parlance) as part of the hearings leading up to the bill.
The NAS panel’s recommendations mirror a lot of things we’ve been saying about the DOD research — mainly that it’s become less basic and it’s declining in both absolute dollars and as a percentage of the overall DOD science and technology budget. The full report doesn’t seem to be online (I get an error at the NAS link above), but here’s a copy of the summary (pdf, ~740k). I haven’t read the full report so far, but from the executive summary the recommendations are worth reading: