Help Requested in Support of Defense Authorization Amendment

On July 21, 2005, In Funding, By Peter Harsha

Update July 22, 2005: Jason Van Wey of the Coalition for National Security Research (CNSR) has more on the effort to see the amendment passed, including the news that the amendment has picked up a number of important cosponsors. As of this morning, joining Collins and Kennedy on the amendment are Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY), Elizabeth Dole (R-NC), Joe Lieberman (D-CT), Barbara Mikulski (D-MD), Pat Roberts (R-KS) and Rick Santorum (R-PA). Though this bipartisan list of co-sponsors bodes well for passage, your calls are still needed as the Senate works through the amendments to the Defense Authorization today and Monday!
Originally posted July 21, 2005: Word comes from AAU that Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) and Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA) will introduce an amendment this afternoon to the FY 06 Defense Authorization bill under consideration today that would increase funding for a number of programs of interest to the computing research community, including a $10 million plus-up to “fundamental computer science and cybersecurity research at DARPA.” Senators need to be made aware of the amendment and urged to support it. Here are the details from AAU:

During Senate consideration today of the FY06 Defense Authorization Act (S. 1042), Senators Edward Kennedy (D-MA) and Susan Collins (R-ME) will offer an amendment to authorize additional funding for the Department of Defense SMART National Defense Education Program, a new scholarship and fellowship program aimed at attracting more students into science and engineering fields.  The amendment also provides additional authorization for basic research programs at U.S. universities.

CFR members are urged to contact their Senators to ask that they support the Kennedy/Collins amendment when it is considered on the Senate floor.

A copy of an AAU statement (pdf) supporting the amendment is attached, along with talking points prepared by the Senators’ offices and the text of the amendment.

THE AMENDMENT
The amendment would authorize an additional $50 million for university research and education programs at the Department of Defense.

Specifically, the Kennedy/Collins amendment:
 

  • Increases the SMART National Defense Education Program by $10 million;
  • Increases the Army University Research Initiatives (URI) account by $10 million;
  • Increases the Navy University Research Initiatives (URI) account by $10 million;
  • Increases the Air Force University Research Initiatives (URI) account by $10 million; and
  • Increases the DARPA account by $10 million and specifies that money should be spent on fundamental research in computer science and cybersecurity.

    The amendment also includes a Sense of the Senate that the Department of Defense set a goal to invest 15 percent of its science and technology budget in basic research programs.  The current percentage varies between 11 percent and 12 percent. 

    • The amendment would “pay for” the increases — every funding increase in an amendment to the bill has to be offset by a reduction somewhere else — by reducing a planned $2 billion increase to the “defense-wide operations and maintenance fund for IT” by an equal amount.
    The university community here in DC (along with CRA) is mobilizing to contact senators about the amendment. More calls would surely help. Urge your senator (by phone) to support the Collins-Kennedy amendment to the FY 06 Defense Authorization Bill. The bill is on the floor today, so the time is now! We’ll have updates as developments warrant….
    Here’s a copy of the amendment as well as some talking points. Here’s AAU’s statement.

     
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    AAAS Report on Women and Minorities in the IT Workforce

    On July 20, 2005, In Misc., By DanRothschild

    MSNBC has some interesting coverage of an important but oft-overlooked part of our IT workforce: students seeking vocational rather than research-oriented IT training. The article covers the recent AAAS report entitled Preparing Women and Minorities for the IT Workforce: The Role of Nontraditional Educational Pathways. The article begins:

    Pop quiz: Which schools produced the most degrees in computer science in 2001? MIT? Carnegie Mellon? Georgia Tech?

    If you guessed any of these, you’re wrong: try Strayer University and DeVry Institute of Technology.

    [...]

    If you guessed [the typical student is] a young geeky guy with a pocket saver, guess again: try a 35-year-old African American or Hispanic woman who already has a full-time job at a company where information technology (IT) skills are a key to advancement.

    She’s the one taking the night courses at one of the for-profit institutions like Strayer or DeVry that have a wide variety of locations, and offer courses in the early morning and evening, as well as on-line courses.

    The study found that women, minorities, and non-traditional students were especially likely to take advantage of CS/CE educational opportunities from for-profit institutions. It is a helpful reminder that the future of computer science and engineering in the United States is dependent not just on researchers but on a non-research oriented IT workforce that can deploy the advances of CS/CE research and development throughout all areas of society.

    CRA’s Taulbee Survey maintains information about women earning CS/CE degrees from PhD-granting institutions. Results from recent years:



     
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    Gates on CS/CE Enrollment and Funding

    On July 19, 2005, In Funding, People, Policy, R&D in the Press, By Peter Harsha

    InternetNews.com has coverage of the opening of Microsoft Research’s sixth annual Faculty Summit, a “a unique opportunity for faculty members and Microsoft researchers, architects, and executives to collectively discuss a vision for the future of computing.” Microsoft Chairman and CEO Bill Gates had some interesting comments to open the event (along with ACM past-President Maria Klawe). Here’s a sample:

    But today, Gates and Klawe focused on the present; specifically, how to encourage more students to enroll in computer-science programs so that the industry will have enough qualified engineers to work on those future innovations.
    Klawe presented some grim figures: The popularity of computer science as a major has fallen more than 60 percent between 2000 and 2004, she said, even though the software engineering and several related jobs will be among the fastest growing through 2012.
    Some of that slack might be taken up by girls if they didn’t have such a seeming aversion to the field. Klawe said participation of women in computing has gone down over the past 25 years, with only around 15 percent of computer-science Ph.D.s going to women.
    When Klawe asked Gates what could be done, he seemed to flounder. When he responded, “There’s no magic answer. Maybe get women in the field to be more visible?” Klawe hooted him down.
    “No, that’s not the answer,” she said. “We all do it, but we’re not getting anywhere with it.”
    “You lose them at about five stages,” Gates agreed. “And, if there aren’t enough women in field, it makes it less attractive, even if everything else is good. There’s a critical-mass element to this.”
    The decline in federal funding for academic research and graduate education doesn’t help, the two agreed. Money from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) dropped by half last year.
    “The biggest payoff for federal funding or research is in computer science,” Gates said, pointing to the economic and technology boom of the 1990s. “Department of Defense money was one of the elements that allowed us to turn this into one of the greatest success periods the U.S. has ever had.”
    Computer science could fuel another such boom in the next 10 years, according to Gates.
    “Computer science is becoming the toolkit for all the sciences,” he said. As all disciplines become more data-driven, they’re turning to computer science to make sense of the huge amounts of data. “Computer science helps model the world,” he added.

    Newsday also has coverage of the event, focusing on the declining enrollment in CS/CE question:

    Speaking to hundreds of university professors, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates said Monday that he’s baffled more students don’t go into computer science.
    Gates said that even if young people don’t know that salaries and job openings in computer science are on the rise, they’re hooked on so much technology _ cell phones, digital music players, instant messaging, Internet browsing _ that it’s puzzling why more don’t want to grow up to be programmers.
    “It’s such a paradox,” Gates said. “If you say to a kid, ‘Yeah, what are the 10 coolest products you use that your parents are clueless about, that you’re good at using,’ I don’t think they’re going to say, ‘Oh, you know, it’s this new breakfast cereal. And I want to go work in agriculture and invent new cereals or something.’ … I think 10 out of 10 would be things that are software-driven.”
    …
    Gates said computer scientists need to do a better job of dispelling that myth and conveying that it’s an exciting field.
    “How many fields can you get right out of college and define substantial aspects of a product that’s going to go out and over 100 million people are going to use it?” Gates said. “We promise people when they come here to do programming … they’re going to have that opportunity, and yet we can’t hire as many people as we’d like.”

    Both pieces are chock full of interesting quotes and worth reading. We’ll have more on how the computing research community is organizing to take on these issues soon, so watch this space….
    Update: Here’s the transcript from Gates and Klawe’s opening remarks. And here’s a video.

     
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