An announcement from CRA:


CRA NAMES 16 TO FIRST COMPUTING COMMUNITY CONSORTIUM COUNCIL
WASHINGTON, DC – The Computing Research Association, in consultation with the National Science Foundation (NSF), today announced the membership of the first permanent Council for the Computing Community Consortium (CCC). The council will direct and oversee the operations of the CCC as it provides scientific leadership and vision to computing research and future large-scale computing research projects.
CRA created the CCC under a $6 million, three-year agreement with NSF to identify major research opportunities and establish “grand challenges” for the computing field. The CCC will create venues for community participation in developing a vision for computing research and in launching new research activities.
Today’s announcement names 16 leaders of the computing research community from industry, government and academia to terms on the permanent CCC Council ranging from 1 to 3 years. Those named to the council are listed below.
Edward Lazowska, University of Washington, Chair
Three-year terms
Bill Feiereisen, Los Alamos National Laboratory
Susan Graham, University of California at Berkeley
David Kaeli, Northeastern University
John King, University of Michigan
Peter Lee, Carnegie Mellon University
Two-year terms
Andrew McCallum, University of Massachusetts
Beth Mynatt, Georgia Institute of Technology
Fred Schneider, Cornell University
David Tennenhouse, New Venture Partners
Dave Waltz, Columbia University
One-year terms
Greg Andrews, University of Arizona
Anita Jones, University of Virginia
Dick Karp, University of California at Berkeley
Bob Sproull, Sun Microsystems
Karen Sutherland, Augsburg College
“We’re pleased to have assembled such a strong council with a broad range of interests and backgrounds,” said Daniel Reed, chair of the Computing Research Association and director of the Renaissance Computing Institute. “Having representatives from such a wide array of sub disciplines, from schools both large and small, and from industry and government research labs should provide the diversity of thought necessary to enhance our community’s ability to envision and pursue long-term, audacious computing research goals.”
Reed said key tasks for the council will be to help the CCC catalyze the computing research community to debate long-range research challenges, build consensus around research visions, and develop the most promising visions into clearly defined initiatives.
The council members’ terms begin July 1, 2007.
About CRA: The CRA was established 30 years ago and has members at more than 250 research entities in academia, industry and government. Its mission is to strengthen research and advance education in the computing fields, expand opportunities for women and minorities, and improve public and policymaker understanding of the importance of computing and computing research in society.
CRA: http://cra.org
CCC: http://cra.org/ccc

Update: Some of the term limits in the original press release were wrong. Edward Lazowska, Chair, currently does not have a fixed term limit. Fred Schneider, Cornell University, has a two year term. These have been corrected in the list above.

 

The Senate Appropriations committee released their “302(b) allocations” and it looks like science does very well. We previously discussed the House 302(b)’s here and the Senate’s numbers look as good, or better, than the House numbers.
The Senate Commerce, Justice, Science subcommittee received $54.4 billion, $1 billion more than the House allocation and more than $4 billion more than FY07. The Energy and Water subcommittee received an increase of $1.9 billion over FY07, a $600 million more than the House allocated for this year.
The Labor/HHS/Education subcommittee received a $4.7 billion increase, the only subcommittee allocation to be lower than the House allocation but still an increase of almost $9 billion more than the President’s request.
As we’ve stated here before, these allocations don’t guarantee that the funding will keep Congress on the path to doubling the budgets of NSF, NIST, and DOE Office of Science over the next 10 years, as planned. But if the House’s appropriations committee bills are any indication, that is where we are heading. Of course, given the disparity between some of the allocations, there will probably be some compromises worked out in conference but even if we get the lower numbers allocated for each subcommittee, we’ll still be in a good position with increased funding in all our areas.
A bigger concern at the moment is whether the appropriations process is going to continue to move or if it’s headed for meltdown over the disposition of earmarks in some upcoming bills. At the moment, House Republicans and Democrats have reached a tentative truce that will keep the bills moving, but it wouldn’t take much for the process to break down again. At issue is a Democratic plan to bring appropriations bills to the House floor without earmarks included, then add them in conference with the Senate. House leaders argue that appropriations staff haven’t yet had time to review the 32,000 requests for earmarks (keep in mind, there are only 435 members of Congress…that’s an average of 74 requests per member), so rather than delay the bills, they want them to move and they’ll add the earmarks later. House Republicans argue that the plan hardly promotes transparency in the earmarking process and were using procedural motions to tie up the bills until the Dems agreed to allow the House to vote on the bills with earmarks present — though not in all of the bills. The House this week should finish work on the Homeland Security and Military Construction appropriations bills, and those will not see their earmarks added until the conference. The Energy and Water appropriation also will not have earmarks in it when it reaches the floor, but will get a pack of earmarks added to it before it heads over to the Senate. If the deal holds, the remainder of the appropriations bills will have earmarks included when the bills hit the House floor (and therefore, subject to amendment). We’ll have all the details as the bills begin to move.

 

House Science Committee on Globalization of R&D

Just a quick placeholder here…. The House Science and Technology Committee is holding a hearing today on “Globalization of R&D and Innovation.” Here’s the hearing website. CRA has provided written testimony for the hearing record, which you can read here (pdf).
We’ll have more when we’re back from the hearing.