• Bush Releases IT R&D Budget Breakout
• House Science Committee Hears from NSF, NASA, NOAA and DOE
• CS Professor Backs Down to Music Industry Pressure
• IBM Nanotube Breakthrough
• NSF Reports Increases in S&E Grad Enrollment
• Computer & Data Processing Services Job Growth in the 1990s
• Freshmen Women's Confidence with Computers is Half that of Men's
• National Academy of Sciences Elects New Members
• CRA Digital Government Fellow to Speak at Government Technology Conference
• NSF CAREER Program for Faculty, July 24 Deadline

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Bush Releases IT R&D Budget Breakout

The Bush Administration has released a multiagency budget breakout for information technology R&D: aggregate spending would total $1.97 billion in the FY 2002 proposal, a mere 2 percent increase above estimated FY 2001 spending of $1.93 billion. This contrasts with the previous annual increase of about 30 percent between FY 2000 and FY 2001.

Since the passage of the High Performance Computing Act, federal budgets have been statutorily required to report aggregate agency spending in information technology R&D. This budget cross-cut had long been called the High Performance Computing and Communications (HPCC) initiative, but it has varied in recent years. In FY 2000 President Clinton introduced an add-on to HPCC called Information Technology for the 21st Century, or IT-Squared (IT²); this was the program designed to implement aspects of the 1999 PITAC report. In FY 2001, the budget cross-cuts for HPCC and IT² were merged into one, under the name of Information Technology R&D. While President Bush's first budget continues in this vein, he has chosen to call the cross-cut Networking and Information Technology R&D, a name first used by Rep. Sensenbrenner in legislation to reauthorize HPCC and authorize the newer programs that President Clinton called IT². This is no coincidence, given that Mr. Bush and Mr. Sensenbrenner belong to the same political party and Mr. Clinton belongs to the other one.

Networking and Information Technology R&D (in millions):

Visit the CRA Government Affairs website's federal budget page for links to official budget documents and other analyses: http://www.cra.org/govaffairs/budget

House Science Committee Hears from NSF, NASA, NOAA and DOE

The House Science Committee met late last month to review the proposed plans and budgets of four of the agencies under its jurisdiction. The heads of the NSF, NASA, NOAA, and DOE's Office of Science all testified at the hearing; each noted the increased importance of priority-setting in FY 2002, an obvious reference to the lack of growth in their spending prospects. In his opening remarks, Chairman Boehlert called the NSF and DOE budgets "particularly disappointing" and said he intends to work with the Appropriations Committee to increase support for research. (The science committee is an authorizing committee, charged with determining overall policy; the appropriations committee has the final word on agency budgets.)

NSF Director Rita Colwell understandably played up the agency's proposed increases for its Education and Human Resources activities, the budget for which would grow by 11 percent under the FY 2002 plan. About Information Technology Research, Colwell said the $273 million proposed investment, an increase of 5 percent, "allows us to explore ways of making large-scale networking, software, and systems more reliable, stable, and secure. This will permit diverse applications from telemedicine, to interactive education, to the remote operation of experimental apparatus... Other research will improve our understanding of human-computer interactions and investigate the impact of IT on our society, on our economy, and on our educational system. Because the information technology sector has contributed significantly to recent U.S. economic growth, these investments remain a top priority."

James Decker, Acting Director of DOE's Office of Science, which includes the Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) division, cited scientific discovery through advanced computing as one of the agency's priorities. (The FY 2002 budget request for ASCR is $165.8 million, the same as in FY 2001.) He noted the extraordinary advances in computing technology of the past decades and said that rapid advances in processor speed "must be translated into corresponding increases in the performance of the scientific codes used to model physical, chemical, and biological systems. This is a daunting problem. Current advances in computing technology are being driven by market forces in the commercial sector, not by scientific computing. Harnessing commercial computing technology for scientific research poses problems never before encountered in supercomputing, in magnitude as well as in kind. This problem will only be solved by increasing investments in computer software -- in research and development on scientific modeling codes, as well as on the mathematical and computing systems software that underlie these codes."

NASA Administrator Daniel Goldin discussed how his agency would deal with its proposed 2 percent increase by focusing on critical capabilities. Information technologies figure prominently in these plans, and the agency has reconfigured some of its programs as a result. NASA's venerable High Performance Computing and Communications program has been terminated, for instance, to be superceded by a much broader activity. Said Goldin, "We have combined existing programs with new activities to create the Computing, Information & Communications Technology (CICT) research program to concentrate our core expertise in critical technologies." CICT would be funded at $195.3 million in FY 2002.

Further information on House Science Committee hearings, including witness statements, can be found at www.house.gov/science/full/fchearings.htm

CS Professor Backs Down to Music Industry Pressure

Princeton University CS Professor Edward Felten and a team of researchers from Rice and Xerox PARC bowed to pressure from the Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI), a music industry copyright-protection group, and did not present a paper on how they were able to crack the code to four 'watermark' schemes being considered as a secure digital music standard. Felten had been threatened with legal action in an April 9 letter by the secretary of SDMI, who is also the head of the litigation department for the Recording Industry Association of American.

Watermarks attempt to prevent the unauthorized duplication of music files by inserting code that can only be interpreted by certain hardware. SDMI had sponsored a contest to see if the four watermark schemes could be cracked without harming the sound quality of the music. Felten's team pulled out early from the contest but claimed to have succeeded. They were to present their results at the Fourth International Information Hiding Workshop on April 26. SDMI claimed that if they did so, they would violate both the terms of the contest's rules and the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which made it a crime to manufacture or 'offer to the public' a way to gain unauthorized access to any copyright-protected work that has been secured by a technique like data encryption. Felten and others have argued that this is an infringement of their ability to share research with their peers.

Relevant articles can be found in The Economist, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and The New York Times (free registration required). Edward Felten's website is at www.cs.princeton.edu/~felten/

IBM Nanotube Breakthrough

IBM researchers reported in the April 27 issue of Science (paid registration required) that they have built the world's first array of transistors out of carbon nanotubes, using a process they call "constructive destruction." Nanotube wires can average about 1.4 nanometers in diameter, or the width of about 10 atoms. The same component in current transistors is about 500 nanometers in width, and even leading-edge circuits are about 130 nanometers wide. Such small components would allow manufacturers to continue to add transistors to chips beyond the limits of methods that rely on silicone alone. Nanotubes could also help solve two other problems with chip design: as more transistors are placed onto chips, the heat they generate could melt the silicon. And as the transistors shrink, the wiring connecting them becomes more likely to break. Nanotubes, however are both excellent conductors of heat and are 1,000 times stronger than steel.

The problem scientists had faced in using carbon nanotubes as transistors was that all synthetic methods of production yield a mixture of metallic and semiconducting nanotubes which “stick together” to form ropes or bundles. This compromises their usefulness because only semiconducting nanotubes can be used as transistors; and when they are stuck together, the metallic nanotubes overpower the semiconducting nanotubes. The basic premise of “constructive destruction” is that in order to construct a dense-array of semiconducting nanotubes, the metallic nanotubes must be destroyed. This is accomplished with an electric shockwave that destroys the metallic nanotubes, leaving only the semiconducting nanotubes needed to build transistors.

IBM claims that unpublished data from these studies show that if the carbon nanotubes are scaled up to the size of today’s silicon-based transistors, the performance might be the same. Although the process the researchers used is too laborious for widespread use, their discovery may help lead to hybrid devices of carbon and silicon.

For more information, see the April 27 press release at IBM Research News, as well as March 27 and April 27 articles in the New York Times (free registration required).

NSF Reports Increases in S&E Grad Enrollment

The NSF reports that graduate enrollment in science and engineering disciplines increased in 1999 after five consecutive annual decreases. Computer science had the largest annual percentage increase (12%) of any of these disciplines. By contrast, there was a 1.4% decrease in enrollment in the mathematical sciences and a 1.6% increase in electrical engineering. The bulk of the overall increase in S&E enrollments can be attributed to students with temporary visas; and enrollment of US citizens and permanent residents dropped by 0.5%. The drop was primarily in Native American and white, non-Hispanic students. There was an increase of 3% in black and Asian students and a 7% increase in Hispanic students.

Graduate Enrollment in Computer Science:

See Joan S. Burrelli, "Graduate Enrollment in Science and Engineering Increases for the First Time Since 1993, Data Brief, National Science Foundation (NSF 01-312), www.nsf.gov/sbe/srs/databrf/nsf01312/start.htm.

Computer & Data Processing Services Job Growth in the 1990s

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the computer and data processing services industry gained the fourth most jobs of any profession during the decade 1989-1999. The increase of approximately 1.1 million jobs (from 736,300 to 1,830,000 jobs) in this occupational area fell behind only the personnel supply services, eating and drinking places, and local government education in the number of jobs created in the 1990s. The percentage increase (148.6%) in computer and data processing services job over this decade was second only to home health care service jobs, which increased by 160.8%. Generally, job growth in the 1990s was in the service sectors.

Within the computer and data processing services category, the number of jobs grew primarily in information retrieval services and the software industry. Thre was also significant growth in consulting services for setting up local area networks, developing websites, and rewriting programs in anticipation of Y2K problems.

See the analysis by Julie Hatch and Angela Clinton in the December 2000 issue of Monthly Labor Review at http://stats.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2000/12/art1full.pdf

Freshmen Women's Confidence with Computers is Half that of Men's

The annual freshman survey conducted by UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute showed increasing familiarity of entering students with computers. 78.5% of freshman entering college in 2000 were regularly using computers in the year prior to college entrance, compared to 68.4% in 1999 and 27.3% in 1985. There was not much gender difference in computer use reported by those entering college in 2000: 77.8% of women and 79.5% of men. There was, however, continuing gender difference in confidence levels: 23.3% of females rated their computer skills as "above average" or "within the top 10%" whereas 46.4% of males did so. This confidence gap between men and women is the largest in the history of the survey. 1.4% of females and 6.5% of males entering college in 2000 expected to major in computer science.

The report, The American Freshman: National Norms for Fall 2000, can be ordered for $25 plus shipping costs from the Higher Education Research Institute, UCLA Graduate School of Education & Information Studies, 3005 Moore Hall, Box 951521, Los Angeles, CA 90095. A summary is available online at www.gseis.ucla.edu/heri/heri.html.

National Academy of Sciences Elects New Members

On May 1, 2001, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) announced the election of the following new members in computer science and engineering and related fields, in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research.

FREDERICK P. BROOKS, JR., Kenan Professor of Computer Science, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; ARTHUR CHARLES GOSSARD, professor of materials, electrical, and computer engineering, University of California, Santa Barbara; JAMES N. GRAY, senior researcher, Microsoft Corp., San Francisco; JAMES L. MCCLELLAND, professor of psychology and of computer science, and co-director, Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh; DAVID W. TANK, head, Biological Computation Research Laboratories, Bell Laboratories, Lucent Technologies, Murray Hill, N.J., and LESLIE G. VALIANT, Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics, Harvard University.

Complete details are at www4.nationalacademies.org/news.nsf/isbn/050101?OpenDocument

Earlier, on February 16, 2001, the National Academy of Engineering announced the election of 14 new members in in computer science and engineering and related fields. A list is available at www.nae.edu.

CRA Digital Government Fellow to Speak at Government Technology Conference

Kevin C. Almeroth has been named a Computing Research Association (CRA) Digital Government Fellow and will give a lecture on advanced networking and Internet2 (www.internet2.edu) at the Government Technology Conference on Wednesday, May 16 at the Sacramento Convention Center in Sacramento, CA.

Dr. Almeroth earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1997. He is currently an associate professor at the University of California in Santa Barbara where his main research interests include computer networks and protocols, multicast communication, large-scale multimedia systems, and performance evaluation.

CRA's Digital Government Fellow program, which is supported by the National Science Foundation's Digital Government program, is intended to build ties between the academic and industrial computing research communities on the one hand and the information technology workers in federal, state, and local governments on the other. Each CRA Digital Fellow is expected to give a public lecture to an audience that includes a significant number of government information technology workers.

Government Technology Conferences are the largest intergovernmental events in the country, attended by over 47,000 public sector professionals. Held annually in Sacramento, California; Albany, New York; Austin, Texas and Raleigh, North Carolina; GTC features educational programs addressing important policy, management and technology issues facing state and local. (www.govtech.net/)

NSF CAREER Program for Faculty, July 24 Deadline

The National Science Foundation's Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program is now accepting applications through July 24 for those in Computer and Information Science and Engineering. The CAREER program offers NSF's most prestigious awards for new faculty members. Nominees for Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers are selected each year from among the new CAREER awardees. The Presidential Award is the highest honor bestowed by the United States Government on scientists and engineers beginning their independent careers. For more information visit www.nsf.gov/home/crssprgm/career/start.htm