The President's Council of Advisors for Science and Technology (PCAST) met Wednesday in Washington to hear about the state of U.S. and global science and technology, to get updates on the research initiatives under its jurisdiction, and to begin work on the committee's new responsibility as overseers of the Networking and Information Technology R&D program.
This was the first meeting attended by some of the new members of PCAST -- including CRA's Chair, Dan Reed -- who were named last month by the President to augment the committee's expertise in information technology issues. Reed, the only member of PCAST who served on the now-extinct President's Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC), gave a presentation on the work of that former committee as a way of helping the PCAST get a handle on its new responsibilities.
From the discussion that followed, it appears that the committee's two co-Chairs -- John Marburger, Director of OSTP and Floyd Kvamme -- hope PCAST's examination of NITRD includes a good look at the current structure of the initiative's Program Component Areas to see whether it's still logical, and perhaps determine some appropriate metrics for gauging the quality and effectiveness of the research investment. The review will be undertaken by PCAST's Subcommittee on Information Technology Manufacturing and Competitiveness Networking and Information Technology, chaired by George Scalise, president of the Semiconductor Industry Association.
Marburger pointed out that metrics are very important to the President, who wants to measure not only the inputs (how much we spend) for these programs but the outputs (what we get). He thought that folks in the software industry, who had been "so influential" in making the case for basic research to the White House during the run-up to the introduction of the President's American Competitiveness Initiative, might be very useful in developing some metrics. PCAST ought to reach out to the industry folks who felt so strongly about the need to support basic research, Marburger said, and find out how they measure success.
There was also a lot of discussion of whether workforce considerations -- specifically the issue of "outsourcing" -- ought to be part of the PCAST review. I think the consensus was that workforce is a competitiveness issue and "competitiveness issues are very relevant." In part, the workforce issue determines whether the U.S. will continue to be a "center of innovation," the panelists said, so it's very important. They also noted the national security component of the workforce debate (how the use of offshore labor impacts applications we depend upon for national security purposes).
Scalise, who will be heading the review effort, said the two questions he wants to keep in mind during the review are: Where is the raw innovation in the field coming from? And to what degree is the ecosystem critical to what happens? All members of the panel seemed to agree that IT research community is central to everything -- the economy, health care, national security, the conduct of the sciences -- and the federal government ought then to "keep it innovating."
It's not clear how this study will move forward yet. The subcommittee met yesterday for the first time to hear from various agency representatives about the PCAs. There was much talk and encouragement from the PCAST co-chairs about adopting the "Technical Advisory Group" model for the IT study, just as PCAST used it for its look at the National Nanotechnology Initiative. The TAG would be a "virtual" advisory committee composed of 30-50 prominent members of the field who could be queried by e-mail or phone about issues before the subcommittee. Kvamme claimed this model worked especially well for the NNI study, though the PCAST executive director wasn't quite as enthusiastic about it in her update to the committee in January (response rates were less than hoped). Perhaps members of the computing community will be more willing to serve in that role....
The other highlight from Wednesday's meeting was a presentation from Rolf Lehming, curator of NSF's incredibly useful 2006 Science and Engineering Indicators. The S&E website has the full overview, which is worth a read, but here are some of the points that jumped out at me during the presentation:
We'll obviously have more on the efforts of PCAST as they move forward.
I'm still on vacation, but CRA blogging continues over at the CRA Bulletin, where Jay Vegso has a piece on some new analysis on the "stay rates" of foreign US-degree recipients. One of the concerns surrounding the computing research community's contribution to U.S. competitiveness is the potential that an increasing percentage of the half of CS doctoral students who are not U.S. citizens will choose to leave the U.S. after earning their degree.
Jay points to a recent study by Michael Finn of the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education (done for NSF) that shows that while the stay rates for those students have been surprisingly high (74 percent of temporary visa holders who received doctorates in CS in 2001 were still in the US in 2003), that data seem to suggest a decline in the rate in the years to come:
As Finn points out, though, there are signs that these stay rates have plateaued and may begin to fall. The two-year stay rate for temporary visa holders, while at an all-time high, was the same for the 2001 class as it was for those who graduated in 1999. The one-year stay rate, on the other hand, declined slightly. This followed several years of steady increases. In addition, Finn points out that according to a separate NSF survey, the percentage of foreign doctorate recipients with plans to stay in the US declined each year between 2001 and 2003.Jay's post has more analysis and a nifty chart, too.Finn’s study suggests that stay rates among foreign students have leveled off and may begin to decline. On the one hand, this is not surprising: the rates have been very high and could be expected to reach a limit at some point. However, the next bulletin entry will discuss recent CRA and NSF data that show that the percentage of foreign doctorate students that have found employment outside the US has jumped in the past few years.
Demonstrating how much work remains to be done with the House Republican leadership, the House Republican "High-tech Task Force" led by Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) today introduced its "Innovation and Competitiveness Act," which wholly ignores the central recommendation of the President's American Competitiveness Initiative, two bi-partisan bills in the Senate, the National Academies "Gathering Storm" report, and just about every high-tech industry association (pdf), by not including any commitment to increase funding for fundamental research in the physical sciences.
Instead, Goodlatte's bill
is a comprehensive piece of legislation to get Congress engaged in the business of promoting innovation in America by creating additional incentives for private individuals and businesses to create and rollout new products and services so that America will remain the world leader in innovation," said Goodlatte. "This legislation also recognizes that government sometimes is the problem - not the answer to the problem - so it also addresses government-imposed hurdles to innovation."Here's what's included:
The bill was actually previewed yesterday at a press conference of the High Tech Working Group attended by a whole slew of Republican House members and the entire Republican House leadership, including Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL) and new majority leader John Boehner (R-OH). Among the attendees, the only one who mentioned anything about the need to increase research funding in the physical sciences was Science Committee Chairman Sherwood Boehlert (R-NY). Boehlert emphasized that this innovation package wouldn't be the only one moving through the House this summer and that he would make sure research funding was addressed in the innovation/competitiveness bills before his committee and in the deliberations of the appropriators this year.
Still, this has very bad "optics," as they say. The House leadership is clearly behind an innovation plan that bears little resemblance to the one introduced by the President and endorsed by Republicans in the Senate. The House Republican leadership has now had two opportunities to be supportive of bipartisan innovation efforts molded on the recommendations of the NAS and others, and has chosen not to be supportive both times. The first was Majority Leader Boehner's biting response to a Democratic innovation event held last month, which we covered here.
It will be interesting to see how members of the high-tech industry associations, for whom this Goodlatte plan is ostensibly for, react to this approach. They were, after all, very much supportive of the President's ACI, the Senate bills, and the Democratic Innovation Agenda (which are all very similar). They've gone above and beyond the call of duty in making increased support for research a priority in their own advocacy efforts. But they're needed again. It's time for those companies who believe in this cause to pick up the phone and tell the Republican leadership what's missing from their plan.
Citing ACM's report on globalization the New York Times today editorializes on the mismatch between the perception of the high-tech industry job market and the reality.
The Association for Computing Machinery, the professional organization that issued the report, says that there are more information technology jobs today than at the height of the dot-com boom. While 2 to 3 percent of American jobs in the field migrate to other nations each year, new jobs have thus far more than made up for the loss.We covered the report from ACM's Job Migration Task Force recently in this space. Given the amount of work I know went into it, I'm pleased that the report appears to be having such significant impact....
That picture, of course, stands in contrast with the more familiar gloomy depiction of runaway outsourcing. Perhaps that explains what the report says is declining interest in computer science among American college students. Students may think, Why bother if all the jobs are in India? But the computer sector is booming, while the number of students interested in going into the field is falling.
The industry isn't gone, but it will be if we don't start generating the necessary dynamic work force. The association says that higher-end technology jobs — like those in research — are beginning to go overseas and that policies to "attract, educate and retain the best I.T. talent are critical" to future success. Given the post 9/11 approach to immigration and the state of math and science education in America, that is hardly encouraging.
Information technology jobs won't go away unless we let them. Computing in the past five years has become, according to the report, "a truly global industry." In the next few years, jobs won't just land in our laps. We have nothing to fear but the fear of competing itself.
Update: (9:40 am, 3/1) - The Wall Street Journal has a related piece today titled Market is Hot for High-Skilled in Silicon Valley. I assume it's publicly available. If not, I'll excerpt it a bit. But the lead tells the story:
Five years after the dot-com bubble burst, job growth has returned to Silicon Valley. But it's a different kind of growth than in past recoveries, favoring higher-skilled workers.