Recognizing that the Pentagon’s science and technology investment “may be inadequate to meet the imposing security threats that challenge our Nation and may not be adequately robust to take advantage of key scientific and technological opportunities that offer breakthrough advantages to our warfighters,” John Young, the current Director of Defense Research and Engineering, has written a pretty remarkable memo to the Secretary of Defense asking for a substantial increase in funding. In his request, he singles out several “priority science and technology areas,” along with about $9.5 billion in suggested increases. IT R&D figures prominently in his “straw man” proposal:
Foundational Sciences (including computing sciences) — $300 – $500 M a year increase (he notes that DOD has been “coasting on the basic science investments of the last century” and writes what we’ve been saying for quite a while: “The DOD must dramatically re-energize and re-invigorate the nation’s foremost scientific minds, especially those in early and mid-career, to focus on discovery, innovation, and synthesis in the physical and analytical sciences most crucial to our Nation’s security.”)
Information Warfare — $100-200 M per year increase
Information Assurance – $100-200 M per year increase
Networking Technologies — $40-70 M per year increase
Organiziation, Fusion, and Mining Large Data Sets — $40-60M per year increase
Software Development Technology — $40-70M per year increase
Autonomous Operation of Networks of Unmanned Vehicles in Complex Environments — $100 M per year
Disparate Sensors, Communication and Spectrum Management — $500 M per year
The memo containing the complete list of priorities is available from InsideDefense.com (subscription required). Overall, Young is proposing about $9.5 billion in increases from FY09-FY13 that would get DOD S&T spending close to 3 percent of the agency’s budget (it’s at about 2.2 percent right now). While there’s no guarantee that the comptroller or the SecDef will give him anywhere close to that amount (though the current SecDef is perhaps more sympathetic to S&T than his predecessor), this sort of stage-setting from the DDR&E is pretty remarkable.
InsideDefense also has an article (sub. req’d) detailing the memo with some reaction from think-tanky-types, which is also worth reading if you’ve got a subscription.
Forbes.com has an interesting article about a survey on the role of women in patents. The survey (PDF), from the National Center for Women & Information Technology, shows that patents by mixed-gender teams are cited more often than those of single-gender teams.
Not a lot of new information in the article but it points out something that CRA and NCWIT have been saying for a long time: a diverse workforce is an asset to American business.
“Our data show that diversity of thought matters to innovation,” says NCWIT Chief Executive Lucinda Sanders, who holds six telecom software patents. “We can say involving women is important because women are half the population and have good ideas, but our study shows the impact for companies.”
Its worth a read.
John Schwartz of the New York Times has an interesting piece today on the rise in complexity of networked applications and the risks that complexity poses. Headlined Who Needs Hackers?, the piece makes the point that the biggest threat to these systems isn’t malicious users, but complexity itself. Understanding how these giant interconnected systems work (or not) is a great challenge for the community.
“We have gone from fairly simple computing architectures to massively distributed, massively interconnected and interdependent networks,” [Andreas M. Antonopoulos, a founding partner at Nemertes Research] said, adding that as a result, flaws have become increasingly hard to predict or spot. Simpler systems could be understood and their behavior characterized, he said, but greater complexity brings unintended consequences.
“On the scale we do it, it’s more like forecasting weather,” he said.
By the way, addressing this challenge is one of the goals of those proposing the Global Enivronment for Networking Innovations research network that we’ve discussed before in this space.
From the CCC Blog
- DARPA Issues PERFECT Solicitation Erwin Gianchandani
- Microsoft Announces New Policy-Focused Internship Program Erwin Gianchandani
- NAE Elects its Class of 2012 Erwin Gianchandani
- NIST to Fund Pilot Projects Advancing Trusted Identities Erwin Gianchandani