In a piece about the outsourcing phenomenon and its impact on computer science students, and Microsoft's Bill Gates' recent tour of UIUC, Carnegie Mellon, Cornell, MIT, and Harvard trying to drum up enthusiasm for the discipline, the NY Times cited CRA's Taulbee Survey as evidence of the declining numbers of undergraduates in comp sci. Despite the downturn, Gates used the visits to stress the positives.
In an effort to counter the trend, Mr. Gates, who personifies technological optimism and the potential payoff, sought to reassure students that their futures were no less bright in an era of outsourcing. The effect of computer technology, he told them, is just beginning and opportunity abounds. Computing, he added, is an ideal field for fine minds to make a difference in society.Here's the article: Microsoft, Amid Dwindling Interest, Talks Up Computing as a Career
Thanks to Ellie Young of USENIX for passing this along:
The SCO Group, Inc. (SCO) has recently sued IBM and Novell and launched broad attacks on the legality of and the economic justification for so-called open source licensing, including the free licensing of Linux. (see http://www.osaia.org/letters/sco_hill.pdf) As an organization dedicated to advancing the skills and contributions of computer researchers and developers, the USENIX Association is compelled to address and refute the position SCO has taken regarding open source software.Usenix will be sending this letter to Congress and the press.
The last two days have featured a number of congressional hearings of interest to the computing research community. Here's a brief summary:
Senate VA-HUD Appropriations Subcommittee, Thursday - OSTP Director John Marburger, NSF Interim Director Arden Bement, and National Science Board Director Warren Washington testified before subcommittee chair Sen. Kit Bond (R-MO) and Ranking Member Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) to defend the Administration's FY 05 budget request for NSF and the physical sciences. Bond and Mikulski both cited the large disparity in federal funding between the life sciences supported by NIH and the physical sciences and engineering as supported by NSF. Bond said he was "alarmed by the disparity" and believed it put the nation on track to lose its leadership in technology. "I think we need to treat this as a crisis," Mikulski agreed.
Senate Budget Committee, Wednesday - Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge told the Senate Budget committee that DHS was not using data-mining techniques to threaten the privacy of US citizens. "I can assure you nothing we are doing in the Department of Homeland Security has been designed to collect information or spy on Americans...We are getting access to personal information and to some extent, proprietary information," Ridge said. (Thanks to Tech Daily (subscription req'd) for the quote). Ridge was responding to concerns from Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), the Senator who led the charge against DARPA's Terrorism Information Awareness (TIA) project in 2003. Wyden has a very negative perception of data-mining, and believes its use by the federal government is intrinsically bad. "Nobody is in charge, nobody knows how many programs involve data mining, nobody knows how much money is being spent, or how many agencies, and no one knows whether there are any privacy protections," he told Tech Daily.
House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Cybersecurity, Science, and Research and Development, Wednesday - DHS Undersecretary for Science and Technology Charles McQueary defended his agency's decision to direct the most funding towards research aimed at preventing biological attacks rather than cyber security research. The ranking minority member of the full committee, Rep. Jim Turner (D-TX) criticized the funding level for cyber research, saying "I'm not certain I'm very comfortable with the process that leads us to conclude that $18 million (the DHS request for FY 2005) is sufficient for cyber."
House VA-HUD Appropriations Subcommittee, Wednesday - OSTP Director John Marburger told the House appropriations subcommittee that he satisfied with the President's request for R&D in FY 2005. "We'd be in good shape," if the budget was enacted as proposed, he said. He also noted a few areas of technology he believed would provide the most return on the government investment in research, including nanotechnology, information technology, and biomedical research.
House Science Committee, Wednesday - The Science Committee heard testimony on the impact of US Visa Policy on Scientific Research at a hearing timed to correspond with the release of a new GAO study on the same subject commissioned by the committee one year ago. In the report, GAO found that the average delay in issuing a visa to a foreign researcher or student is 67 days, and that much of that delay is attributable to a faulty process for the Visa Mantis program. Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) noted the concerns the science committee has with the issue: "Americans must keep our doors open to innovation and new ideas. The work of foreign students and the collaboration with their American born colleagues has not only created scientific discoveries and technological advancements for our country, but it has resulted in job creation that our economy so desperately needs. The visa system should incorporate enhanced security checks that do not create unnecessary or burdensome bureaucracies that will only further damage our scientific leadership and image throughout the world."
House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade and Consumer Protection, Tuesday - In a suprise move, Subcommittee Chair Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-FL) introduced his own version of a database protections bill, reneging on an agreement the committee had reached with the House Judiciary Committee, which has already passed its version of the legislation. Stearns bill, which was subsequently approved by the subcommittee, is a more restrictive version of the judiciary committee bill -- a bill which would provide publishers of databases of facts broad protections against the misappropriations of their databases. Stearns bill sets a more stringent test for content to be protected than the judiciary measure, which is supported by a coalition of database companies, publishers, realtors and newspaper companies. USACM has some great background material on the issue. Wednesday's markup throws into doubt the fate of either bill, as the House Leadership had counted on an agreement between the two committees to work together.
Thanks to all who attended CRA's annual Computing Leadership Summit. We were treated to a great series of talks from:
John Sargent, Senior Policy Advisor, Technology Administration, US Department of Commerce. Sargent went over a fascinating set of statistics he and his colleagues at the Technology Administration have managed to pull out of Bureau of Labor Statistics sources (and elsewhere) that paint an interesting picture of the current and future IT workforce. His slides on "Adequacy of the US Science and Engineering Workforce" and offshore outsourcing are chock full of data.
Peter Rooney, Deputy Chief of Staff, House Science Committee. Rooney brought the summit participants up to date regarding the Science Committee's plans for IT R&D in the coming year.
Anthony Tether, Director, DARPA Tether described the focus of DARPA's IT R&D efforts and addressed concerns university researchers have about the research funding regime at the agency (but was relatively unsympathetic).
Erik Jacobsson, Director, NIGMS Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology. Jacobsson described NIGMS' efforts to ramp up its IT R&D efforts as part of NIH's new Roadmap for Medical Research.
We've been able to post on the CRA government affairs site some of the slide presentations used by the speakers. Thanks to all who participated!
Though Congress killed DARPA's TIA project and eliminated the office in which it was housed, this AP story details how much of the research formerly funded by the agency has been transferred to classified programs at unspecified intelligence agencies.
This is emblematic of a worrisome trend at DARPA of taking formerly unclassified, fundamental research projects and turning them "black" or classified. While there are likely quite a few areas of research which rightly should be classified for national security reasons, there should also be some concern that programs aren't being turned "black" -- and therefore out of public scrutiny -- simply because they might be controversial. There is a cost to the progress of science when research goes black -- results aren't disseminated, certain researchers and institutions are barred from working in the area (for reasons of US or institutional policy), and public oversight doesn't occur....
Thanks to Spaf for pointing out this piece that ran in Government Executive Magazine. Here's the most relevant bit:
The National Institute of Standards and Technology's (NIST) acting chief of staff Mat Heyman has warned that a proposed $22 million budget cut for the agency in fiscal 2004 would force NIST to cut back on its cybersecurity projects, stop all activities under the Help America Vote Act and seriously curtail efforts under the Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP). NIST currently does important work to secure utility control systems and has played a "prominent role in helping state and local election officials implement new voting systems." Under the budget cuts, these efforts, along with the MEP, would have to be significantly scaled back or halted. Members of the House Science Committee are unhappy with the proposed cuts and are looking for ways to mitigate them.The Administration says it's taken care of most of this shortfall in its FY05 budget request, however the numbers aren't quite there. The Administration does include an increase at NIST in the President's request, but doesn't include an estimated $36 million believed to be required to shut down the ATP program at NIST as called for in the budget request.
One possibility is that the FY04 shortfall could be made up in a supplemental appropriation like the one that will be necessary to cover the costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns (costs also not included in the President's budget request).
Another perspective on the outsourcing issue, from an editorial in The News & Observer on February 2nd. Makes the point that even as some computing programming jobs have headed offshore, a large number of "heavy industry" jobs, including the manufacturing of vehicles, computers, electronics and other machinery have actually been "insourced" because "U.S. is still an attractive location for the siting of plants matching advanced technology and equipment with highly skilled labor and modern research."
Click below for the full editorial....
The News & Observer (Raleigh, North Carolina)
February 2, 2004 Monday, FINAL EDITION
SECTION: EDITORIAL/OPINION; Pg. A13; Point of View
HEADLINE: A potent 'insource' of U.S. jobs
BYLINE: Michael L. Walden,
RALEIGH -- Recent headlines have raised concerns about
"outsourcing," or the movement by U.S. companies of jobs to
foreign countries. Some prominent tech companies are considering
moving thousands of well-paying programming positions overseas,
and we've also heard about customer service jobs being sent to
India.
While outsourcing has captured current attention, it is not a
new phenomenon. If the term is defined as jobs operated by U.S.
companies in foreign countries, the current total is 10 million
positions, or 7 percent of domestic U.S. employment. Further,
there's been an upward trend in the number of outsourced jobs
since the mid-1990s, when trade barriers were significantly
reduced following the signing of the NAFTA and GATT agreements.
What is less well publicized and understood is that
"insourcing" also occurs in our economy. Insourcing happens when
foreign companies establish jobs in the United States.
The latest statistics show insourcing accounts for over 6.5
million jobs nationwide. Although this is less than the number of
outsourced jobs, the gap has actually narrowed in the past
quarter century. That is, there's been a recent trend of foreign
companies adding jobs in the U.S. faster than U.S companies have
increased jobs in foreign countries.
Consider what's happened in heavy manufacturing, which
includes the manufacturing of vehicles, computers, electronics
and other machinery. Since the mid-1990s, foreign companies have
added 400,000 jobs in these industries in the U.S. Over the same
time period, U.S. companies moved 300,000 jobs to foreign
countries in the same sectors. The insourced jobs in these
industries are also high-paying, with average compensation per
employee of over $ 65,000.
Insourcing also plays an important role in the North Carolina
economy. The most recent data show 240,000 insourced jobs in
North Carolina, with 100,000 in manufacturing. And the total
number of insourced jobs in North Carolina has risen in recent
years.
With an increasingly globalized economy, more and more jobs
will be candidates for both outsourcing and insourcing. The jobs
most vulnerable for outsourcing are those performing routine
tasks, not requiring close supervision, and where lower-cost
foreign labor is readily available.
For example, 20 years ago computer programming was a new and
cutting-edge job. Today, many programming tasks are
straightforward and routine, and millions of workers worldwide
have been trained to do them. These are the kind of technical
jobs that can go to foreign nations with lower costs.
But as the recent experience with heavy manufacturing
indicates, the U.S. is still an attractive location for the
siting of plants matching advanced technology and equipment with
highly skilled labor and modern research. Foreign companies
looking for such ingredients know they can be found in the U.S.
and, I might add, in North Carolina.
The scorecard on job outsourcing versus job insourcing has
actually moved in the favor of the U.S. in recent decades, and
policy-makers must consider both when evaluating the worldwide
movement of jobs. Jobs increasingly are up for grabs in a new
world without economic borders.
Yet the implication for American workers is the same as my
father gave me years ago: to get a good-paying, you must get an
education. The updated version is: to get and keep a good-paying
job, you must get more and more education.
(Michael L. Walden is a William Neal Reynolds distinguished
professor in the department of agricultural and resource
economics at N.C. State University.)
Just learned today that the House Science Committee is planning a hearing for February 25, 2004, to consider the impact of the current US visa policy on science. CRA has been among many groups within the scientific community that have raised concerns that tighter visa policies post-9/11 have affected international collaborations, conferences, and the participation of foreign students and faculty in US research efforts. No word yet on hearing witnesses, but I'd think the committee would be looking for folks who can speak broadly about the policy implications across disciplines.
More details as they emerge....
CRA Grand Challenges in Information Security and Assurance participant Dan Geer is the subject of an Associated Press piece today on his concerns about a software "monoculture." Yahoo! News - Experts Warn of Microsoft 'Monoculture'
Demonstrating the critical role software plays in the nation's critical infrastructure, a software bug in a widely-used energy-management system appears to have suppressed an alarm that should have alerted one of the first utilities involved in the blackout early enough for them to have averted its spread. Security Focus has the story.
The biggest news from the annual House Science Committee budget briefing was confirmation that NSF Director Rita Colwell was indeed resigning and that NIST Director Arden Bement would become interim director beginning February 22, 2004.
Colwell will become head of the newly created Canon U.S. Life Sciences, Inc., and accept academic appointment with UMD and Johns Hopkins University.
Other budget hearing highlights:
When asked what she would do with any additional funding Congress might be able to secure for NSF for FY 05, Colwell responded that her first priority would be to improve average grant size and duration.
The Director of OSTP, Jack Marburger, said that the Administration's position on outsourcing was to make sure we have a "strong innovation infrastructure to create value-added jobs" and to "make basic investments in infrastructure for innovative technologies to get into the marketplace."
McQueary's written testimony suggests that research at the Department's Homeland Security Advanced Research Projects Agency (HSARPA) will include "5 to 10 percent" basic research in FY05.
Overall, other than Colwell's announcement, a pretty generic budget hearing. All five administration witnesses did their best to defend a very austere R&D budget, with Marburger going so far as to say (paraphrased) "what's important isn't the final funding number but the 'symbolism' of the increase on a percentage basis...".
It's going to be a challenging appropriations season.
From the New York Times:
Intel Says Chip Speed Breakthrough Will Alter Cyberworld
Silicon chips that can switch light like electricity....
The Chronicle for Higher Ed reports that NSF Director Rita Colwell will announce her resignation today and that Arden Bement, current director of NIST, will take over NSF on a temporary basis beginning Feb 21. Here's the scoop: The Chronicle: Daily news: 02/11/2004 -- 02
I'm headed to the Science Committee budget hearing today, so I'll fill in the rest of the details when I get back.
If the entertainment industry can't agree with hardware, software and electronics producers on how best to protect digital content, they will look to Congress again this year for legislation mandating a technological solution, the National Journal (subscription req'd) reports.
The problem "can be fixed with legislation later this year," requiring technology companies to apply anti-piracy technology to the analog outputs of computers, digital televisions and digital videodisc players, said Ron Wheeler, senior vice president of content protection for Fox."I would guess that Congress would do what it takes to help the United States' number one export industry," said Mitch Singer, executive vice president of Sony's digital policy group. "At some point, we are going to need help. We may see some interesting assistance from Congress."
...Wheeler and Singer, who dominated a panel on the piracy of feature films, said more anti-piracy tools must be mandated. Wheeler said he believes a proposal will be put forward later this year to require computer companies to use technologies that detect invisible watermarks on analog content and stop the copying or redistribution of that content.
The mandate would apply to "devices that digitize analog inputs of all kinds" and require them to apply digital copyright restrictions "on all analog-to-digital conversion," Wheeler said. He said the technology would help close the analog hole and fight movie piracy from Movielink, from digital video recorders or from DVDs.
Fortunately, the entertainment industry didn't get the action they wanted in 2002 when they last tried this (though they did get a favorable FCC decision in 2003 requiring digital TV manufacturers to honor a "digital flag" protecting content). The technology community was united in opposing it. We'll see if the alliance holds this time around....
INTERNATIONAL STUDENT ENROLLMENT GROWTH SLOWS IN 2002/2003,
LARGE GAINS FROM LEADING COUNTRIES OFFSET NUMEROUS DECREASES
--India Remains The Top Sending Country-
-- IIE Online Survey Suggests Visa Application Process and Sluggish Global Economy Are Affecting Fall 2003 Enrollments --
After five years of steady growth, the number of international students attending colleges and universities in the United States in 2002/03 showed only a slight increase over the prior year, up less than 1%, bringing the 2002-03 total to 586,323, according to Open Doors 2003, the annual report on international education published by the Institute of International Education (IIE) with support from the State Department's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs.
From the AP: Pentagon Cancels Internet Voting System
Concerns from computer security experts apparently led the Pentagon to reconsider allowing US citizens overseas to cast their votes on the Internet.
A press release from the folks at CISE:
The NSF Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering is delighted to name Dr. Sangtae Kim as the new Director for the Division of Shared Cyberinfrastructure, to be effective February 17, 2004.
Sangtae "Sang" Kim, a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineers, joins us from Purdue University where he has served as the Donald W. Fedderson Distinguished Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Distinguished Professor of Chemical Engineering since 2003. Sang brings to NSF many noteworthy accomplishments made during his distinguished career in both academe and industry. Until 2003, Sang served as vice president and information officer of Lilly Research Laboratories, a division of Eli Lilly and Company, where he provided both vision and leadership for cyberinfrastructure in the data-intensive, post-genomic environment of the research-based pharmaceutical industry. He joined Lilly in 2000 from Parke-Davis Pharmaceutical Research.From 1983 to 1997, Sang was a faculty member in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he earned the rank of full professor for his work in mathematical and computational methods for microfluidics. In 1990, in recognition of his teaching and research accomplishments in high performance computing, Sang was extended a courtesy faculty appointment in the Department of Computer Sciences at Wisconsin. He also served on the peer review boards of the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. His research and education activities continue, currently focusing on the intersection of applied mathematics, biological sciences, and informatics. Sang's research citations include the Allan P. Colburn Award of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers and the Award for Initiatives in Research from the National Academy of Sciences.
Born in 1958 in Seoul, Korea, Dr. Kim received concurrent BSc and MSc degrees (1979) from the California Institute of Technology and a PhD from Princeton (1983). He also studied at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at Cambridge University (1981). He received a Presidential Young Investigator award from NSF in 1985.
Clearly no stranger to the world of cyberinfrastucture, Sang will draw upon his unique combination of leadership experiences to help NSF meet the cyberinfrastructure needs of the broad science and engineering community.
Here's a pointer to an interesting article by Richard Florida, courtesy of Spaf: "Creative Class War", http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2004/0401.florida.html. Very interesting article. I personally have to discount the Democratic Party biases, but what's left is still quite meaty in terms of understanding how IT outsourcing has taken place so much faster these days than in the past by the very nature of the subject matter. Intellectual hotspots that support entrepreneurship are springing up worldwide. I still feel that we in the U.S. should move foward by emphasizing the value of complex interactions among fields of expertise, such as bioinformatics, nanobiology, and information science, where we can maintain a competitive advantage. The arguments Richard Florida makes are interesting to consider.
Purdue and the Lafayette community hosted Richard for a 2-3 day visit about six months ago. I had an opportunity, along with several others in the admin, to have a sit-down lunch discussion with him on his new book. The Provost got us each copies a couple weeks before. He's a fascinating guy. He travels with an entourage/research team, including an ex-rocker, and spends almost all his time away from CMU, where he feels an outcast. Go figure.
Thanks to Tom Jones of CNSR for pointing this out:
NEWS TRANSCRIPT from the United States Department of DefenseDoD News Briefing
Under Secretary of Defense (Comptroller) Dr. Dov Zakheim
Friday, January 30, 2004 - 9:00 a.m. ESTQ: Why don't you invest more in S&T? I looked in the R1 books and each
of the three components --Briefer: Glad you had them, huh?
Q: Yes, they were helpful.
Briefer: No thanks to me, I can tell you that.
Q: They dropped down, the amount dropped down in all three categories of S&T for all the services with the exception of basic research for the Air Force. So you've seen a real drop.
Briefer: Not at all. Why do you say that? A drop relative to what? To the enacted?
Q: Yes.
Briefer: Of course, because the enacted always is higher than what's in the requested and we always compare it to our requested. The reason is that a lot of what's enacted are things that the Congress believes are important for us to do research in but we don't necessarily share that same assessment.
Q: Are you meeting the three percent large goal that's --
Briefer: No, because I don't think it's relevant any more. Three
percent might have been relevant but first of all we never met it. We were at 2.69 percent, now we're going to go down to 2.62 percent. But the real question is, is that really a meaningful measure when you're at a budget of $400 billion? That means we're approximately $100 billion over where we were three years ago. Does that mean that we necessarily must throw $3 billion at universities and so on? There's an argument for putting more money in but there's not a knee-jerk argument percentage wise that says well, you increased $100 billion because you're fighting a war in Iraq and you're modernizing, you're transforming, you're doing this, that and the other. I need my three percent bite. It just doesn't work.I think what you're finding here is by having $1.3 billion in basic research you're putting an awful lot of money into universities, into labs, into research centers, and you don't know if anything's going to come out in military terms because that's what basic research is all about. The same to some extent with applied research. And I would even argue the same to some extent with exploratory development. There's a lot of money going into this and I don't think three percent's the relevant measure.
I am going to have to stop here. I apologize for not being able to walk you through the rest of the slides, but I am sure that my colleagues both in the services and OSD will help you out.
Still parsing the numbers, but here's a more detailed look at NSF
Overall - $5.745 Billion; an increase of 3 percent over FY04
Highlights - $761 million for NSF's lead role in NITRD, $305 million for National Nanotech Initiative, and $210 million for climate change science. Five priority areas: Nanoscale Science and Engineering; Biocomplexity in the Environment; Mathematical Sciences; Human and Social Dynamics; and Workforce for the 21st Century. The ITR initiative, one of four NSF programs rated "effective" (the highest designation) by OMB, ends in FY04 and program funds will revert to "NSF's fundamental science and engineering core in 2005."
CISE would grow to $618 million in FY05, an increase of 2.2% or $13 million over FY 04.
* The bulk of the decline in EHR is apparently the result of the Administration moving most of the Math and Science Partnerships Program to the Department of Ed.
House Science Committee Chairman Sherwood Boehlert's statement: "I am very disappointed in the proposed science budget, and I will be working with the Administration and my Congressional colleagues to improve the numbers as we move through the budget process. I understand that we are in a very tight fiscal situation and that the Administration has tried to treat research and development (R&D) as favorably as possible. But we just have to find a way to do better. ...
"The budget chapter on R&D includes the quotation that 'Science is a horse. Don't worship it. Feed it.' The budget does not reflect that advice. After a few years of spending at the levels proposed in this budget, science would be an emaciated, old, grey mare, unable to produce any new ideas or young scientists."
"We need to remember that the decade of unprecedented economic growth that began in 1992 and that lasted into this new century was a result of previous investments we had made in science and technology, particularly in areas such as information technology and the health sciences. If the current recovery is to be sustained, we need to invest now in R&D. A healthy investment in R&D is the only way to ensure that our economy will continue to create jobs over the long term.
"Yet basic and applied research in this budget would increase at less than the rate of inflation. And while we are still reviewing the specific budgets of individual agencies, some glaringly bad decisions already stand out. Primary among them is the proposal to move the Math and Science Partnerships from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to the Department of Education. We will fight that decision tooth-and-nail. For some reason, the remaining, close-out money proposed for the Partnerships is moved to the research account of NSF, where it artificially inflates what would otherwise be a mediocre rise in research spending. And I remain concerned about embarking on new missions for NASA at a time when other science agencies are being cut in real dollars.
"There are, of course, positive aspects of this budget. The laboratories at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) would receive a 20 percent increase after being cut by Congress in fiscal 2004. Restoring funding to those labs will be one of my top priorities this year. And, as in the past, the Administration has selected well in choosing interagency R&D initiatives.
"We will be continuing to get more details on the budget in the coming days and weeks. We will have our work cut out for us in figuring out how to ensure that science can continue to thrive in a time of fiscal distress."
NITRD FY 05
More details to come...