House Committee Hears Cyber Security Testimony

Representatives from academia, industry and the U.S. Secret Service told a House committee that the threat to the U.S. from "cyber attack" is real and potentially destructive, and that current levels of research are not sufficient to meet the threat. The panel, testifying last week before the House Committee on Science, warned that a cyber attack against the nation's physical infrastructure, including water and power supplies, was conceivable and yet, "no federal funding agency has assumed responsibility for supporting basic research in this area -- not DARPA, not the NSF, not the Department of Energy, not the NSA," said panel member William Wulf, President of the National Academy of Engineering. Wulf, and the other members of the panel -- including Eugene Spafford, CRA and ACM Board member and Professor of Computer Sciences at Purdue -- agreed that the current coordination of computer security research was lacking. However, the solutions offered were varied: from entrusting coordination to the new Homeland Security Office to creating a brand new computer security research agency. The Committee will hold another hearing on the issue on Wednesday, October 17th, and will likely develop legislation as a result.

Copies of the hearing charter, the written testimony of the witnesses, and Committee Chairman Sherwood Boehlert's opening remarks can be found at the Committee's website at www.house.gov/science/full/fchearings.htm. A news story on the hearing can be found at www.wired.com/news/conflict/0,2100,47479,00.html.

Senate Committee Recommends Marburger Confirmation

The Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Science, Technology and Space on October 9th voted to recommend confirmation of Dr. John H. Marburger, III, the President's nominee for the position of Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). Testifying on Marburger's behalf were House Science Committee Chairman Sherwood Boehlert (R-NY) and Rep. Felix Grucci (R-NY). Marburger, who will also serve as President Bush's Science Advisor, is currently the Director of Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York. Also receiving committee's endorsement was Phillip J. Bond, nominee for the post of Under Secretary of Commerce for Technology. Both confirmations will go before the full Senate.

Marburger's written statement from the confirmation hearing can be found at: www.ostp.gov/html/01_1012.html.

Many Colleges Reduced the Percentage of Full-time Employees on Their Faculties in the 1990s

The National Center for Education Statistics has released a study based upon their survey of college faculty policies and practices as of fall 1998.

Some highlights from the study:

• Between 1993 and 1998, 40% of all institutions took at least one action to reduce the size of the full-time faculty. Some institutions (22%) accomplished this by replacing full-time faculty with part-time faculty. Among public research institutions, 38% took at least one action to reduce their full-time faculty, and in 23% of cases this was done by replacing them with part-time faculty. Among not-for-profit research institutions, 13% reduced their full-time faculty, replacing them with part-time faculty in 6% of the cases.
  
  
• 57% of the faculty of all institutions were full-time employees. Among public research institutions, 79% of the faculty were full-time employees. Among not-for-profit private research institutions, 69% of the faculty were full-time employees.
  
  
• As of fall 1998, 48% of all full-time faculty had tenure. Of the remaining faculty, 19% were on tenure track, 20% were not on tenure track, and 12% were at institutions that did not have a tenure system. 
  
  
• Of the newly hired faculty, 39% were hired into tenure-track positions and 45% were hired into nontenure-track positions.
  
  
• During the 1997-98 academic year, 16% of the nation's nontenured, tenure-track faculty came up for tenure review. Overall, 81% of those reviewed received tenure. Public research institutions granted tenure to 90% of those reviewed, while private, not-for-profit research institutions granted tenure to 77% of those eligible.
  

The report, Institutional Policies and Practices: Results From the 1999 National Study of Postsecondary Faculty, Institution Survey, is available at nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2001201 

Mass Resignation Among Editorial Board of Journal of Machine Learning

Forty computer scientists have resigned from the Editorial Board of the Machine Learning Journal (MLJ) in order to support an online journal, the Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR). In their resignation letter, the members of the Board cite their frustration with MLJ's limitations on access, high subscription rates, and copyright policy. They argue that as a result of these problems, MLJ does not distribute research results widely enough. They sum up their views by stating that, 

journals should principally serve the needs of the intellectual community, in particular by providing the immediate and universal access to journal articles that modern technology supports, and doing so at a cost that excludes no one. We are excited about JMLR, which provides this access and does so unconditionally. We feel that JMLR provides an ideal vehicle to support the near-term and long-term evolution of the field of machine learning and to serve as the flagship journal for the field. We invite all of the members of the community to submit their articles to the journal and to contribute actively to its growth.

According to the Chronicle, the publisher of MLJ, Kluwer Academic Publishers, has responded to the resignations by making a variety of changes to their subscription and distribution policies.

A Chronicle of Higher Education article about the resignation and its context can be found at chronicle.com/free/2001/10/2001101801t.htm

A copy of the resignation letter is available at www.arl.org/sparc/core/index.asp?page=f47 

R&D Funding Increases Requested in FY 2002 Budget Go to Defense and Health Only

Revised figures indicate that President Bush's budget request proposed a FY 2002 budget authority of $99.1 billion for research and development (R&D), according to a recently-released NSF Data Brief. After adjusting for expected inflation, the FY 2002 R&D and R&D plant budget authority represents an increase of 6.3% over the FY 2001 figure. R&D increases, however, are slated for defense and health activities only.

• The Bush Administration has proposed a 12.6% increase in national defense R&D budget authority (in current dollars) for FY 2002. With this gain, defense would account for 54.6% ($51.4 billion) of the Federal R&D total.
  
  
• Among individual nondefense budget functions, health-- the bulk of which goes to the National Institutes of Health-- accounts for the largest FY 2002 R&D budget increase, and would constitute 24.5% ($23 billion) of the total Federal R&D budget authority. 
  
  
• The Administration has proposed that R&D funding for general science be decreased by 1% in FY 2002, to a total of $5.3 billion. NSF accounts for 56.5% of these dollars; DOE provides the rest of these general science funds.

The NSF Data Brief can be found at www.nsf.gov/sbe/srs/databrf/nsf02300/db02300.htm  

Hewlett-Packard/Compaq and Lucent Announce New Leaders for Research

Both Hewlett-Packard (HP) and Lucent Technologies have announced changes in the leadership of their research work. At Hewlett-Packard, Shane Robinson, currently Compaq's chief technology officer, will replace HP's current CTO, Richard DeMillo. Compaq's current chief information officer, Bob Napier, will replace HP's Maureen Conway. Dick Lampman will continue to serve as director of HP Labs, and will also become a senior vice president. No further changes in leadership are expected until after the merger of HP and Compaq has been finalized.

Lucent Technologies has appointed Bill O'Shea as president of Bell Labs and as the company's chief technology officer. O'Shea was serving as Lucent's head of strategy and marketing. O'Shea will replace Arun Netravali, who will pursue research interests outside of Lucent. In addition, Netravali will become Lucent's chief scientist, working with academic and investment communities to identify new technologies relevant to Lucent's mission. Lucent has also created a new position, president of Bell Labs Research and Advanced Technologies, which will be filled by Jeff Jaffe. Jaffe, a recently named vice president of Bell Labs, will report to O'Shea. According to Lucent's chairman and CEO, Henry Schacht, "the partnership between our product and market units and our R&D labs has never been more critical. With these new responsibilities, Bill [O'Shea] will be able to couple our marketing and sales efforts with our innovation engine — the largest R&D investment in our industry — to drive our strategic agenda."

Information on the HP/Compaq appointments can be found in a recent article from the San Francisco Chronicle.

Lucent's press release on the appointments is available at www.lucent.com/press/1001/011015.bla.html

Growth Rate of U.S. Corporate R&D Investment Doubles from 1999 to 2000

Public corporations headquartered in the United States almost doubled the growth rate of their investment in R&D in 2000, according to a new report released by the Commerce Department’s Office of Technology Policy (OTP). According to OTP, R&D investment in 2000 rose by 9.3% in inflation-adjusted terms, increasing from $145.6 billion in 1999 to an estimated $162.7 billion in 2000. The increase reverses a five-year trend of slowing annual percentage increases in corporate R&D investment, and approaches the high of a 10.2% annual increase set in 1995.

U.S. corporate R&D is increasingly concentrated in two major sectors, information and electronics manufacture and services and medical substances and devices. In only six years, these sectors together moved from claiming 55% of all U.S. corporate R&D in 1994 to 67% in 2000. Conversely, three major sectors lost significant share of total corporate R&D. Together aerospace, chemical manufacture, and basic industries and materials declined from a 21% share of R&D in 1994 to only 13% in 2000.

The OTP press release can be found at www.ta.doc.gov/PRel/pr011015.htm, and the report, Advance Estimate of Annual U.S. Corporate R&D, is available at www.ta.doc.gov/reports/TechPolicy/US_Corp_Est_011015.pdf. The final report should be published in the spring of 2002.

Ruzena Bajcsy, Former Assistant Director of CISE, to Head Research Center at Berkeley

Ruzena Bajcsy has been appointed the new director of the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) at the University of California, Berkeley, effective November 1. CITRIS is one of four California Institutes for Science and Innovation. It brings together the UC campuses at Berkeley, Davis, Merced, and Santa Cruz with private industry to develop innovative technology that tackles some of society's most pressing problems. Dr. Bajcsy, previously Professor of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania, recently completed her term as Assistant Director of CISE at the National Science Foundation.

The UC Berkeley press release is available at www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2001/10/04_Bajcsy.html

CISE Trusted Computing and Embedded and Hybrid Systems Programs: December 15, 2001 Deadlines

The deadlines for two new CISE programs, Trusted Computing (TC) and Embedded and Hybrid Systems (EHS), are approaching.

The TC program seeks to establish a sound scientific foundation and technological basis for managing privacy and security in a world linked through computing and communication technology. The program funds innovative research in all aspects of secure, reliable information systems, including methods for assessing the trustworthiness of systems. For more information, visit www.nsf.gov/cgi-bin/getpub?nsf01160

The EHS program supports research in scientific principles and technology to revolutionize the design and development of embedded systems for a broad range of applications. The goal of the EHS program is to create and unify the foundations for managing interacting physical and computational systems and to supply the technologies needed for building reliable software- and network-enabled embedded systems. The program draws on control theory, modeling, software generation, real-time software systems, and formal methods. Relevant research includes areas such as: hybrid (discrete and continuous) modeling and control of physical systems; domain-specific design, programming, and software synthesis approaches for embedded systems; verification and analysis technology for checking and certifying correct operation of embedded software and systems; real-time open systems, middleware, and virtual machine strategies for embedded systems; dynamic scheduling that accommodates both hard and soft real-time processes; and program composition approaches for synthesizing software while preserving essential properties. For more information, visit www.nsf.gov/cgi-bin/getpub?nsf01161

The Leadership Alliance's 2002 Summer Research Program for Underrepresented Minority Undergraduates

The Leadership Alliance is a consortium of 29 research and teaching institutions, including minority serving institutions, whose goal is to improve the participation of underrepresented students in graduate studies, Ph.D. programs, and ultimately, research professions. The Alliance's Summer Research-Early Identification Program for Undergraduates (SR-EIP) offers underrepresented minority college students the opportunity to work for eight to ten weeks under the guidance of a faculty or research mentor in either an academic or industry setting.

SR-EIP is designed to encourage students from groups traditionally underrepresented in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities, to consider research careers in academia, business, or the public sector. IBM's Yorktown Heights, NY research facility has signed on as a summer research sponsor for students interested in pursuing undergraduate or graduate studies in computer science, applied mathematics and engineering.

Applications can be downloaded at www.theleadershipalliance.org/html/sreip1.htm. The application deadline is February 1, 2002.