CRA commends the House for its swift passage today of the High Performance Computing Revitalization Act (H.R. 28). The bill, which would provide sustained access by the research community to federal HPC assets, assure a balanced portfolio in HPC research pursuits and beef up interagency planning, passed by voice vote. The measure now moves on to the Senate, where previous efforts to reauthorize portions of the Networking and Information Technology R&D program have failed to receive timely consideration.
Here's our previous coverage of the bill, which has a bit more detail.
CRA and USACM joined in issuing a press release applauding the bill's authors and the members of the House for moving the legislation. A copy of that release can be found after the jump.
The House Science Committee's press release has further (positive) reaction from Chair Sherwood Boehlert.
"This is very important legislation that deals with the competitiveness of the United States of America in the global marketplace. We are not going to be preeminent in the competitive world if we don't invest wisely and direct our resources in the proper way, because the competition is all over the place. It isn't one state against another. It's the United States against the world. Right now, we're ahead. That's the position I like. But when we look back, we see a lot of people following closely behind. That's why it's critically important that we do things like invest in high-performance computing so that we maintain our competitive edge."
CRA Press Release
CRA Contact:
Peter Harsha
CRA Director of Government Affairs
P: 202-234-2111 ext 106
E: harsha@cra.org
ACM Contact:
Cameron Wilson
ACM Director of Public Policy
P: 202-659-9712
E: cameron.wilson@acm.org
Computing Researchers, Professionals Applaud Passage of High Performance Computing Legislation
WASHINGTON, DC, April 26, 2005 - Two leading computing societies today praised the House of Representatives for approving a measure that would authorize efforts in high-performance computing research and development. The Computing Research Association and the Association for Computing Machinery's U.S. Public Policy Committee commended the passage of the High Performance Computing Revitalization Act (H.R. 28), which demonstrates the continued importance of federal investment in computing research and development.
“Innovations in IT - the fruits of computing research, including high performance computing research - continue to drive U.S. productivity and enable the new economy,” said CRA Chairman James D. Foley. “The House today sent an important message that a sustained commitment to U.S. leadership in computing research is a prerequisite to future innovation and competitiveness.”
“We commend Rep. Judy Biggert (R-IL), and Rep. Lincoln Davis (D-TN) for introducing the bill, as well as Science Committee Chairman Sherwood Boehlert (R-NY), Ranking Member Bart Gordon (D-TN) and the other co-sponsors for their continued leadership in making the case for federal support of fundamental IT research and development.
“The bill comes at an important time for the computing research community,” Foley said. “Recent changes to the landscape for federal support of computing - most notably, the shift away from support of fundamental IT R&D at universities by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency - have left gaps in the federal portfolio that threaten to constrain future innovation in IT. The passage of the HPC Revitalization Act, as well as a planned May 12, 2005, hearing of the House Science Committee on the issue, demonstrates that Congress is sensitive to these concerns and to the important role federal support plays in the innovation process.”
Eugene H. Spafford, Chair of USACM and a member of the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee, also lauded the action. "IT R&D -- and especially investment in basic research and infrastructure -- is an investment that pays enormous dividends," said Spafford. "It fuels innovation that will help the U.S. retain world leadership in business, develop new jobs and industries, enhance public safety and national defense, and provide means to support research to live longer, healthier lives."
Spafford continued, "Investing in basic research may not often show immediate results, and is thus a difficult choice to make in times of strained budgets. However, history has proven, time and again, that a significant investment strategy in scientific research -- and especially in computing-related research -- pays huge dividends in the future. Fundamental breakthroughs cannot be discovered and matured for the market in a short time scale."
“We commend the House for its quick passage of the HPC Revitalization Act, and encourage the Senate to take up and pass similar legislation soon,” Foley said.
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The Computing Research Association (CRA) is an association of more than 200 North American Academic departments of computer science, computer engineering, and related fields; laboratories and centers in industry, government and academia engaging in basic computing research; and affiliated professional societies. For more information: http://www.cra.org
USACM is the U.S. Public Policy Committee of the Association for Computing Machinery, which is the world's first educational and scientific computing society with almost 80,000 members worldwide. It is widely recognized as the premier organization for computing professionals, delivering resources that advance the computing and IT disciplines, enable professional development, and promote policies and research that benefit society.
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Roll Call's Morton Kondracke writes in an OpEd (sub. req'd) that Congress must act to increase federal support for fundamental research or risk future competitiveness. The good news is, he notes, is that Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA), Chair of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Science, State, Justice, Commerce committee, appears to be up to the challenge.
Wolf, who has led Congressional campaigns against gambling and has focused national attention on religious persecution and other human rights violations around the world, is now putting together an agenda to reverse America's decline in science.Much of the credit for influencing Wolf's position has to go to the Task Force on the Future of American Innovation (of which CRA is a member). Their Benchmarks of Our Innovation Future (pdf) report seems to be resonating well with congressional offices, and special efforts to reach out to Wolf (who has been very receptive) seem to be paying off.On April 12, he and two House colleagues - accompanied by former Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) - announced the introduction of legislation to have the U.S. government pay the interest on undergraduate loans for students who agree to work in science, math or engineering for a five-year period.
Wolf also favors holding a blue-ribbon national conference on technology, trade and manufacturing where leaders of industry would highlight the danger to U.S. leadership. He wants to triple funding for federal basic-science programs over a period of years.
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Wolf told me in an interview, rather diplomatically, that "I personally believe that [the Bush administration is] underfunding science. Not purposefully. I think we have a deficit problem, and previous administrations have underfunded it also."Gingrich is less diplomatic. "I am totally puzzled by what they've done with the basic-research budget," he told me. "As a national security conservative and as a world trade-economic competition conservative, I cannot imagine how they could have come up with this budget."
He continued: "There's no point in arguing with them internally. They're going to do what they are going to do. But I think if this Congress does not substantially raise the research budget, we are unilaterally disarming from the standpoint of international competition."
Now the trick is to turn that enthusiasm into real appropriations -- something that remains a real challenge in current budget environment. We'll keep you posted.
The National Science Foundation has included a new, special section on computing research at NSF on the Foundation's homepage. It's a nice overview of the types of innovation that have resulted from their decades of support for fundamental research in computing, as well as some of the challenges ahead (pulled from CRA's Grand Challenges in Computer Science and Engineering conference).
There's even a snazzy screensaver.
First, there was Jay Vegso's Computing Research News article: "Interest in CS as a Major Drops Among Incoming Freshmen"
Then his blog post.
Then C-Net picked it up.
Then Techdirt.
Now it's hit Slashdot and the comments are pouring in.
Since there's been so much recent coverage of computing R&D issues in the popular press, and since we've been trying to cite so much of it here, I figured I'd make life easy on myself and anyone else looking for a collection of recent articles by creating a new "R&D in the Press" category over there on the left. Clicking the link gets you to an archive of all the posts we've made citing news reports -- though at the moment it only goes back a couple of weeks. When I get some time, I'll go deeper into the archive and tag more relevant posts with the new category.
Enjoy!
This OpEd (free link) by Norman Ornstein, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (a reasonably influential conservative think tank -- Newt Gingrich is also a fellow), ran today in Roll Call (sub req'd), "the Newspaper of Capitol Hill." It's a strong defense of federal support of basic research that cites DARPA's declining support for university computer science research as one of the flawed policy decisions that need correcting to preserve our future competitiveness. Here's a snippet:
But I am growing increasingly alarmed, less because of the dynamism in Asia and more because of our blindness and obtuseness when it comes to our crown jewel: our overwhelming lead in basic research and our position as home to the best scientists in the world.And with that, the (bipartisan) chorus of voices grows....Basic research is the real building block of economic growth, and here we have had the franchise; just look at the number of Nobel Prize winners from the United States compared to the rest of the world combined. Our academic institutions and research labs have been magnets attracting, and often keeping, the best and the brightest. Our academic openness and our culture of freedom have encouraged good research and challenges to orthodoxy. Our politicians have recognized that most basic research has to be funded by the government because there is scant short-term economic benefit for most businesses to do it themselves.
But now, in a variety of ways, we are frittering away this asset, and for no good reason. Start with the federal budget. Basic research has been concentrated in a few key institutions: the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency at the Pentagon. After a series of pledges to double the NIH budget and then keep it on a growth path, NIH has stagnated. Budget growth for next year is one-half of 1 percent, which will be below inflation for the first time since the 1980s, at a time when the need for more biomedical research is obvious.
The NSF budget is slated to grow by 2 percent, leaving it $3 billion below the funding level Congress promised in 2002. At NIST, the Bush administration is trying to eliminate the Advanced Technology Program and to slash the Manufacturing Extension Partnership by 57 percent. At DARPA, which originated the Internet but where computer science research has been flat for several years, the money going to university researchers has fallen precipitously, along with a larger focus on applied research for the here and now.
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It is gut check time. The foolish fiscal policies that keep big entitlements off the table, won’t consider revenues along with spending, and have turned the one-sixth of the budget that is discretionary into a vicious, zero-sum game, are truly eating our seed corn in this critical area. Somebody needs to get the White House to wake up, and Congress to understand what it is mindlessly doing.
The Seattle PI makes the economic case for federal support of R&D in an editorial today.
But what happens if the United States not only gives up every trade protection benefit, continues to suffer a loss of manufacturing and fritters away its research leadership in science, medicine and technology?Read it all.That's a lose-lose proposition. And it ought to worry U.S. leaders a lot more than it has so far.
Following in the wake of news stories and OpEds in the New York Times, the San Jose Mercury News editorializes today on the negative impact of DARPA's shift away from university researchers in computer science and engineering.
Of all the government sources of funding for basic technology research, few have delivered more breakthroughs for Silicon Valley and the U.S. economy than the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA.Fortunately, it appears that Congress is getting interested in having that debate. In early May the House Science Committee will hold a hearing on the issue. Testifying before the committee will be John Marburger, Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy; Tony Tether, Director of DARPA; Bill Wulf, President of the National Academy of Engineering; and Tom Leighton, Co-Founder and Chief Scientist at Akamai Industries, and Chair of the PITAC Subcommittee on Cyber Security, which just released it's review of the federal government's cyber security R&D programs. We, of course, will bring you all the details.That's why a shift away from basic and university research in DARPA funding is alarming for the valley and for the future of innovation in the United States. Long-term casualties could eventually include America's competitiveness and military readiness.
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The shift at DARPA is all the more troubling as it goes hand in hand with decreases in funding for basic research across the Pentagon and at the National Science Foundation. What's more, these subtle yet significant changes have occurred without a national debate.
The time to have that debate is now. If these trends continue, America will pay dearly for them.
In the meantime, read the full editorial.
Since Sue, Ed, Andy, and a whole host of my relatives have all sent me a pointer to this OpEd by Thomas Friedman in the NY Times, you may have already seen it. But that doesn't make it any less worth noting.
Friedman picks up where former Clinton defense officials Perry and Deutch left off earlier in the week (which we covered here), who picked up where NY Times reporter John Markoff left off a couple weeks earlier (which we covered here), arguing that the Bush Administration, by cutting the U.S. investment in fundamental research, has put not only our national security at risk (as noted by Perry and Deutch), but our economic security at risk as well.
The Bush team is proposing cutting the Pentagon's budget for basic science and technology research by 20 percent next year - after President Bush and the Republican Congress already slashed the 2005 budget of the National Science Foundation by $100 million.Of course, when Friedman writes regarding the National Innovation InitiativeWhen the National Innovation Initiative, a bipartisan study by the country's leading technologists and industrialists about how to re-energize U.S. competitiveness, was unveiled last December, it was virtually ignored by the White House. Did you hear about it? Probably not, because the president preferred to focus all attention on privatizing Social Security.
It's as if we have an industrial-age presidency, catering to a pre-industrial ideological base, in a post-industrial era.
Did you hear about it? Probably not...he's obviously not referring to readers of this blog, who read all about the Council on Competitiveness report back on December 15th. :)
Friedman has hit the Administration and Congress hard (and repeatedly) for allowing NSF to be cut in the FY 2005 appropriations, so I'm glad to see him continue to bang the drum for federal support for fundamental research.
So, read the whole thing, and thanks to Sue, Ed, Andy and my relations for pointing it out.
According to an analysis of results from a survey conducted by HERI/UCLA, the percentage of incoming undergraduates indicating that they would major in CS declined by over 60 percent between the Fall of 2000 and 2004, and is now 70 percent lower than its peak in the early 1980s.
Alarmingly, interest in CS among women fell 80 percent between 1998 and 2004, and 93 percent since its peak in 1982.
Results from CRA's Taulbee Survey show that the number of newly declared CS majors has declined for the past four years and is now 39 percent lower than in the Fall of 2000.
All told, a decline in undergraduate degree production is likely in the next decade.
The full article is here.
The New York Times has an interesting OpEd today from former secretary of defense William Perry and his former undersecretary John Deutch on the lack of support for basic research, applied research and advanced technology development (collectively, "Defense Science and Technology") at the Department of Defense.
Of the Pentagon's $419.3 billion budget request for next year, only about $10.5 billion - 2 percent - will go toward basic research, applied research and advanced technology development. This represents a 20 percent reduction from last year, a drastic cutback that threatens the long-term security of the nation. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld should reconsider this request, and if he does not, Congress should restore the cut.While it's not earth-shattering that members of the previous administration might question the priorities of the current administration, the OpEd adds to the chorus of voices expressing concern about DOD R&D trends.These research and development activities, known as the "technology base" program, are a vital part of the United States defense program. For good reason: the tech base is America's investment in the future. Over the years, tech base activities have yielded advances in scientific and engineering knowledge that have given United States forces the technological superiority that is responsible in large measure for their current dominance in conventional military power.
Worth reading the whole thing.
And watch this space for news of yet another influential voice raising concerns....
There hasn't been much discussion of this bill around town, but today Reps. Frank Wolf (R-VA), Chair of the Science, Justice, Commerce, State House Appropriations Subcommittee, and Vern Ehlers (R-MI), Chair of the Environment, Technology and Standards House Science Subcommittee, will introduce a bill aimed at increasing the number of students in math, science or engineering by forgiving interest on undergraduate student loans for students in those majors who agree to work five years in their fields upon graduate. From the release:
While the need for science and engineering positions in the United States has grown five times the rate of the civilian workforce as a whole since 1980, U.S. colleges and universities have experienced a steady decline in the number of American students earning science and engineering degrees. In 2000, Asian universities accounted for almost 1.2 million of the world's science and engineering degrees, European universities (including Russia and eastern Europe) accounted for 850,000 and North American universities accounted for only about 500,000, according to the most recent statistics available to the National Science Foundation.The press conference (at 1 pm today, outside the Capitol) will bring together Former House Speaker Newt Gingrinch, who wrote about this idea in his recent book, the two congressmen, and Alan Merten, President of George Mason University.America's advantage in science is slipping. This bill is aimed at reversing that trend by attracting and retaining more math, science and engineering undergraduate students.
Apparently Wolf was motivated in part by trends he saw presented in a Task Force of the Future of American Innovation report called Benchmarking our Innovation Future (pdf). (CRA is a member of the Task Force.) We've covered the report, most recently here.
The benchmarks indicate that the U.S. is in danger of losing its leadership role in science and innovation, a position it has held with a firm grip since the end of World War II.
We'll have more coverage on this as it moves forward, but in the meantime, here's a copy of the draft version of the bill (pdf) (for those who like to pick through legislative language).
Washington Post science and technology writer Rick Weiss riffs off of the recent news that NASA plans to pull the plug on the Voyager missions to demonstrate that the U.S. support for research has become too mundane -- too evolutionary rather than revolutionary, too focused on short-term gains versus long-term results. The two Voyager probes, three decades after being launched on their tour of the outer planets, are now tickling the edge of interstellar space and still sending back data. NASA's FY 2006 budget request eliminates funding for the Voyager program and a suite of other space probes (total cost savings = $23 million in FY 06) as part of the agency's effort to refocus on the President's Moon/Mars initiative -- an initiative that has led to significant cuts elsewhere in the agency as well. Unfortunately, the problems aren't just limited to NASA:
It would be less disheartening if the move to kill the Voyager program were an isolated example. But the U.S. scientific enterprise is riddled with evidence that Americans have lost sight of the value of non-applied, curiosity-driven research -- the open-ended sort of exploration that doesn't know exactly where it's going but so often leads to big payoffs. In discipline after discipline, the demand for specific products, profits or outcomes -- "deliverables," in the parlance of government -- has become the dominant force driving research agendas. Instead of being exploratory and expansive, science -- especially in the wake of 9/11 -- seems increasingly delimited and defensive.We've covered the DARPA story and its impact on computer science research pretty extensively (latest here).Take, for example, the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency -- arguably the nation's premier funder of unencumbered scientific exploration, whose early dabbling in computer network design gave rise to the Internet. Agency officials recently acknowledged to Congress that they were shifting their focus away from blue-sky research and toward goal-oriented and increasingly classified endeavors.
Similarly, in geology, scientists have for years sought funds to blanket the nation with thousands of sensors to create an enormous, networked listening device that might teach us something about how the earth is shifting beneath our feet. The system got so far as to be authorized by Congress for $170 million over five years, but only $16 million has been appropriated in the first three of those years and just 62 of an anticipated 7,000 sensors have been deployed. Only in fiscal 2006, thanks to the South Asian tsunami, is the program poised to get more fully funded -- out of a narrow desire to better predict the effects of such disasters here.
The Department of Energy in February announced it is killing the so-called BTeV project at Fermilab in Batavia, Ill., one of the last labs in this country still supporting studies in high-energy physics. This field, once dominated by the United States, promises to discover in the next decade some of the most basic subatomic particles in the universe, including the first so-called supersymmetric particle -- a kind of stuff that seems to account for the vast majority of matter in the universe but which scientists have so far been unable to put their fingers on.
"We seem to have reached a point where people are so overwhelmed by the problems we face, we're not sure we really need more frontiers," said Kei Koizumi of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, noting that the only segments of the nation's research and development budget enjoying real growth are defense and homeland security.
Anyway, it's a good piece -- it even starts with a Star Trek quote. Read it all here.
As the appropriations season gets underway in earnest, Representatives Vern Ehlers (R-MI) and Rush Holt (D-NJ) have once again begun their push to secure more funding for the National Science Foundation by asking fellow members of the House to urge the Chair and Ranking Member of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Science, State, Justice and Commerce to fund NSF at $6.1 billion in FY 2006 -- an increase of $627 million over FY 2005 (11 percent). Ehlers and Holt have circulated a Dear Colleague (pdf) letter to the members of the House, laying out a concise case for NSF:
Advances in science and technology underpin our ability to meet many of the challenges that America faces today, including securing the homeland, preventing terrorism, fostering innovation and economic development, and educating our children to be able to compete in the knowledge-based, global economy. As a nation we must continue to invest in our scientific enterprise.The Dear Colleague then asks the member to sign a letter (pdf) that will be delivered to Appropriations Subcommittee Chair Frank Wolf (R-VA) and Ranking Member Alan Mollohan (D-WV). That letter makes a more detailed case for NSF (it's worth reading (pdf)).Supporting the National Science Foundation (NSF) is key to maintaining our preeminence in science and technology. NSF investments are aimed at the frontiers of science and engineering, where advances in fundamental knowledge drive innovation, progress, and productivity. NSF supports the education of scientists and engineers as well as the workforce of tommorrow -- a workforce in which all workers, from office assistants to rocket scientists, will require basic math and science skills.
Last year, Ehlers and Holt, with the help of the scientific community, were able to convince 157 of their colleagues (but only 41 Republicans) to sign a similar letter, which was a good symbolic result, but didn't mitigate the 2 percent cut the agency suffered as a result of the FY 05 appropriations process. The hope this year is to encourage more members to sign on and greatly increase the number of Republicans...
...Which makes this a good time to consider -- if you haven't already -- joining CRA's Computing Research Advocacy Network (CRAN), our electronic mailing list that delivers timely information about key advocacy opportunities. CRA will once again be involved in this effort, and the CRAN will likely play a significant role. All the details to join are here!
Update: (4:45 pm, 4/8/05) Corrected the count of GOP signers.
Just want to note that CRA-affiliate organization ACM's U.S. Public Policy Committee (USACM) has crafted a sharp analysis of some of the technical pitfalls contained in the controversial Real ID Act, which attempts to set minimum standards for state driver's licenses and an interstate compact to govern the sharing of driver's license data between states. The bill has already passed the House and was included in a rider on a must-pass supplemental funding bill to be considered by the Senate. The Senate, however, has indicated they will strip the controversial bill from the supplemental they consider, guaranteeing a fight over the issue in conference.
Cameron Wilson has a summary of the situation as well as a copy of the letter USACM sent to Sen. Lamar Alexander, who recently expressed support for the concept of a national ID (but not this particular bill). USACM adds considerable value to the policy debate with this kind of analysis.
John Markoff writes in detail in Saturday's NY Times about DARPA's diminishing investment in university-based computer science research and its potential impact.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency at the Pentagon - which has long underwritten open-ended "blue sky" research by the nation's best computer scientists - is sharply cutting such spending at universities, researchers say, in favor of financing more classified work and narrowly defined projects that promise a more immediate payoff.Markoff's piece is largely based on answers the agency provided the Senate Armed Services Committee in response to the committee's questions about DARPA's historical support of IT R&D and the role of universities. In their response, DARPA noted that their overall support for computer science activites has averaged $578 million a year (inflation adjusted) for the last 13 years and that university participation in that research over the last 4 years has plummeted. (Due to "data constraints" they don't have figures prior to FY 01.) In FY 01, DARPA funded $546 million in IT research overall, $214 million in universities. By FY 2004, the overall funding had risen to $583 million, and the university share had dropped to $123 million.Hundreds of research projects supported by the agency, known as Darpa, have paid off handsomely in recent decades, leading not only to new weapons, but to commercial technologies from the personal computer to the Internet. The agency has devoted hundreds of millions of dollars to basic software research, too, including work that led to such recent advances as the Web search technologies that Google and others have introduced.
The shift away from basic research is alarming many leading computer scientists and electrical engineers, who warn that there will be long-term consequences for the nation's economy. They are accusing the Pentagon of reining in an agency that has played a crucial role in fostering America's lead in computer and communications technologies.
"I'm worried and depressed," said David Patterson, a computer scientist at the University of California, Berkeley who is president of the Association of Computing Machinery, an industry and academic trade group. "I think there will be great technologies that won't be there down the road when we need them."
DARPA cited five "factors for the decline":
1. A change in emphasis in the high performance computing program from pure research to supercomputer construction;
2. Significant drop in unclassified information security research;
3. End of TIA-related programs in FY 2004 due to congressional decree, a move that cost universities "a consistent $11-12 million per year" in research funding;
4. Research into intelligent software had matured beyond the research stage into integration;
5. Classified funding for computer science-related programs increased markedly between FY 2001 and FY 2004, but Universities received none of this funding.
Essentially, they conceded that their focus in IT R&D is increasingly short-term (at least in the unclassified realm) and that universities are no longer significant performers of DARPA IT R&D (classified or unclassified). Not surprisingly, these are the two major concerns CRA has repeatedly cited about the agency.
Anyway, the article is a must read.
Update: (4/3/2005) - Noah Shactman at Defense Tech has a bit more: