CRA Bulletin
May 22, 2001
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"Bush Actions, and
Inaction, Set Scientists Grumbling"
New York Times (5/15/01) William J. Broad
The New York Times reported that unease among scientists continues to grow with the Bush administration's handling of science and research issues. Key leadership positions remain unfilled, including that of presidential science advisor, commissioner of the FDA, head of the NIH, and science heads at the EPA and the Departments of Energy and Agriculture. At the same time, Bush's proposed budget for FY2002 essentially cuts support for research outside of health and defense.
The article cites the concerns of a number of sources, including the president of M.I.T., the chairman of the House Science Committee, and even Bush's own science advisor while he was governor of Texas. Defenders of the administration argue that the vacancies are unexceptional at this point in a new president's term and that, overall, research funding will increase. They also point to the large amount of money that the private sector spends on R&D.
The New York Times article can be found here (free registration required).
CRA's assessment of R&D in the President's budget for FY2002 is available at http://www.cra.org/govaffairs/budget/analysis02.html
"Innovaton: End of Era?"
Technology Review (6/01); Erika Jonietz
President Bush's budget will suspend funding for the National Institute of
Standards and Technology's Advanced
Technology Program, a program that Technology Review calls "arguably,
one of the most successful technology collaborations of its time between
government and industry."
The $200-million-per-year program funds high-risk, high payoff R&D in four broad categories: IT and applications; electronics and photonics technology; chemistry and life sciences; and economic assessments. Universities and non-profit independent research organizations play a significant role as participants in ATP projects. Out of the more than 460 projects selected by the ATP since its inception, well over half of the projects include one or more universities as either subcontractors or joint-venture members. All told, there are more than 140 individual universities participating in ATP projects.
The President's summary of the FY2002 budget, Blueprint for New Beginnings, labels the ATP program a corporate subsidy and calls for its re-evaluation. New ATP awards would not be made in 2001 or 2002, though support for ongoing projects would be continued using reprogrammed ATP funds from 2001. (www.whitehouse.gov/news/usbudget/blueprint/budtoc.html)
Technology Review cites Arden Bement, chair of the program's advisory committee, as arguing that the 're-evaluation' process could effectively end the program due to the consequent loss of staff and momentum.
The article can be found at www.techreview.com/magazine/jun01/innovation3.asp
Inadequacies of Research and Education Pose a National Security Threat, Commission Finds
The U.S. Commission on National Security/21st Century's report, Road Map for National Security: Imperative for Change, argues that "the inadequacies of our systems of research and education pose a greater threat to U.S. national security over the next quarter century than any potential conventional war that we might imagine." The bipartisan Commission was established in 1998 by the Secretary of Defense in order to reassess challenges to national security and how the government should handle them.
The report asserts that the U.S. has underfunded basic scientific research and education. To address this, it makes three recommendations:
The report is available in PDF format at www.nssg.gov/PhaseIIIFR.pdf
"Bush Tech Advisor Says
Focus on the Big Picture"
SiliconValley.com (5/19/01)
Floyd Kvamme, the Bush administration's co-chair of the White House science and technology council, has given some hint of the President's priorities regarding technology policy. According to Reuters' interview with Kvamme, "the new administration was focused mostly on reforms that would keep tech-driven productivity gains rolling along: lower taxes, credits for research, and limited regulation." Bush is also interested in technology's ability to improve energy efficiency and in broadband technology.
Kvamme believes that the technology industry would benefit most from limited regulation, arguing that "we didn't see a lot of government involvement when the personal computer industry started. We didn't see a lot of government involvement when the software industry started."
Kvamme lives in Silicon Valley and will travel monthly to brief the White House on technology issues.
The SiliconValley.com article can be found at www.siliconvalley.com/docs/news/svfront/011537.htm
"Collapse of Dot-Coms Stifles Tech
Innovators"
Washington Post (4/30/01) Ariana Eunjung Cha
The tech firms that developed the innovations that drove the dot-com boom now find themselves curtailing their grandiose projects for humbler, more practical applications of their research. However, some experts fear that as more and more tech firms fold due to lack of funding, important breakthroughs may be delayed. Yale science historian Daniel Kevles contends that the pace of innovation is closely linked with the availability of capital, making the year's Nasdaq woes and choppy venture capital waters a dangerous period for many promising ideas. E.piphany CEO Roger Siboni argues that the shakeout will be good in the long run because it will separate the best from the good and eventually will make the strongest innovations even surer. Large tech firms such as AOL and Microsoft have shown that the most promising new technologies will attract capital. In recent years, for example, AOL has acquired many firms--Netscape, Tegic Communications, Nullsoft, and others--that have added to its tech repertoire. Microsoft senior vice president Craig Mundie says the firms' research spending will increase to $4 billion this year, with some of that amount earmarked for the purchase of struggling firms with good ideas. As many groundbreaking technologies fade into the corporate background, innovative companies are left solving the more mundane solutions of making networks work and building commercial Web sites.
The Washington Post article can be found at www.washtech.com/news/software/9388-1.html
Chinese S&E Doctoral Students in the U.S.
NSF has released a brief on doctoral students studying science and engineering disciplines in the United States who are from China. The number of Chinese students earning these doctorates in all S&E disciplines increased from 200 in 1986 to almost 3,000 in 1996. Chinese students earned 7.5% of all US S&E doctorates in the period 1988-1996. In the computer disciplines the percentage was only 5.8%, compared to 13% in the physical sciences and 15% in mathematics. Between 1988 and 1996, 30% of the Chinese S&E doctorates had plans to remain in the United States after graduation as postdocs and 17% in other types of employment--mainly R&D positions in industry. This meant that there were more S&E postdocs from China than from any other country during this period.
The report by Jean M. Johnson, Human Resources Contributions to U.S. Science and Engineering from China (NSF 01-311) is available online at www.nsf.gov/sbe/srs/issuebrf/nsf01311/start.htm
Academic Intellectual Property and Research Workshop
Slides and a transcript of the April 17 "Workshop on Academic IP: The Effects of University Patenting and Licensing on Commercialization and Research" are now available. The workshop is part of the Board on Science, Technology and Economic Policy's assessment of the effects of changes in intellectual property rights policies (i.e. patents, copyrights, and trade secret protection) over the past 25 years.
Sessions include:
The Workshop materials can be found at nationalacademies.org/ipr
Lewis Branscomb Wins Vannevar Bush Award
The National Science Board (NSB) has named two renowned scientists to receive the Vannevar Bush Award for lifetime achievement in science and public service. Lewis M. Branscomb, a physicist, former NSB chair and one of the most compelling voices in science and technology policy, and Harold E. Varmus, former director of the National Institutes of Health and a Nobel-prize holder for contributions to understanding the mechanisms of cancer, will receive the award May 23 at a Department of State-hosted awards dinner.
Lewis Branscomb, professor emeritus in public policy and corporate management at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, is a physicist and former chairman of the National Science Board who pioneered the study of atomic and molecular negative ions and their role in the atmospheres of the earth and stars. He served four Presidents and has written many books and articles as a respected expert in science and technology policy and management of innovation and technology.
Branscomb joined the National Bureau of Standards (NBS - now the National Institute of Standards and Technology) in 1951 and made the first vacuum measurements of the photodetachment spectrum of a free negative ion, verifying the theory that the absorption of light by the negative hydrogen ion determines the surface temperature of the sun. He returned to NBS in 1969, appointed by President Nixon to head the agency.
Branscomb served three other presidents. President Johnson appointed him to the Science Advisory Committee and also to chair the Panel on Space Science and Technology during the Apollo mission to the moon. Branscomb was appointed to the National Science Board in 1979 by President Carter, and chaired the NSB from 1980-84. Under President Reagan, he was appointed a member of the National Productivity Advisory Committee and also chairman of the Subcommittee on Research, Development and Technological Innovation.
In the private sector, Branscomb served as Vice President and Chief Scientist at IBM, where he worked for 15 years from 1972 to 1986.
The NSF press release is available at www.nsf.gov/od/lpa/news/press/01/pr0140.htm
CRA Digital Government Fellow to Speak at FCC on June 11
[Please note that the date of the talk has changed to June 11]
Jeff Bilmes, an assistant professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Washington, Seattle, has been named a CRA Digital Government Fellow and will give a lecture on graphical models for speech recognition as part of the Federal Communications Commission's Engineering education initiative on June 11th in Washington D.C.
A signal processing technique, graphical models (GMs) are flexible statistical abstractions that offer a promising path on which to find new approaches to automatic speech recognition (ASR). This talk will provide a brief overview of GMs, covering the four main components (semantics, structure, implementation, and parameters) needed to associate a given GM with a probabilistic model. Three types of graphical models will be discussed.
Professor Bilmes is also an adjunct assistant professor in linguistics. He co-founded the Signal, Speech, and Language Interpretation Laboratory at the university. He received a Masters degree from MIT, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of California in Berkeley in 1999. His primary research interests lie in statistical modeling (particularly graphical model approaches) and signal processing for speech and pattern recognition, and language and audio processing. He is an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, and is a 2001 recipient of the NSF CAREER award.
CRA was invited by the FCC's Office of Engineering and Technology (OET) to present a research talk. OET is the FCC's technical adviser on engineering and scientific matters. OET makes recommendations on how the radio spectrum should be allocated and establishes the technical standards to be followed by users. OET also provides technical leadership to create new opportunities for competitive technologies and services for the American public. (www.fcc.gov/oet/)
The talk announcement should be posted soon among the headlines of the FCC website: www.fcc.gov
The Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing Symposium 2001 is designed to highlight the technical contributions and career interests of people of color in computing fields. The symposium, sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery and IEEE-Computer Society, will take place October 18-20, 2001 at the Sofitel Hotel in Houston, Texas. This year's theme, "Expanding Horizons," reflects a focus on access to powerful knowledge from diverse researchers in computing, community expansion in the field of computing, and knowledge sharing among computing disciplines.
The symposium honors the significant contributions of Dr. Richard A. Tapia, a mathematician and professor in computational and applied mathematics at Rice University in Houston, Texas. Dr. Tapia, an internationally acclaimed scientist, is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the first recipient of the A. Nico Habermann Award from the Computing Research Association for outstanding contributions to aiding members of underrepresented groups within the computing community, a member of the National Science Board, and recipient of the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Mentoring from President Clinton.
In addition to Richard Tapia's keynote address, current research on leading-edge topics will be presented by invited speakers and during poster sessions. Tailored panels will focus on the roles of people of color in today's technology fields. Special events will provide networking opportunities. Students and their advisors are strongly encouraged to attend.
The Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing is being planned by the Coalition to Diversify Computing (CDC - www.npaci.edu/Outreach/CDC), CDC is a joint committee of the Computing Research Association (CRA), the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM), and the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineering (IEEE) Computer Society.
The deadlines for applications for scholarships to attend is June 15, Poster submissions will be accepted through July 15, 2001, and the registration deadline is August 30, 2001. For more information and on-line registration, go to www.sdsc.edu/Tapia2001