Yesterday, Yahoo, Hewlett-Packard, and Intel announced they are partnering with three universities and their governments in United States, Germany, and Singapore to build a new cloud-computing research initiative. Google and IBM launched a similar program last fall, which centered around six American universities. (Microsoft and Intel also launched a different university research partnership earlier this year.)
The new program will provide researchers with six test-bed data centers (one at each of the university and industry partners), each furnished with between 1,000 and 4,000 processors. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will represent American academia in the partnership, and will be supported in part by the NSF.
As the New York Times’ Steve Lohr points out, “This is competition at its best.”
Tomorrow Dan Reed, CRA’s Board chair will testify before the House Science and Technology Committee on the state of the Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) program. Dan is a part of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), which released a report last summer on the state of NITRD.
Testifying along side Dan will be Dr. Chris Greer, Director of the National Coordination Office of NITRD, Dr. Craig Stewart, Associate Dean of Research Technologies at Indiana University and representing the Coalition for Academic Scientific Computation, and Don C. Winter, Vice President of Engineering & Information Technology at Phantom Works, a Boeing Company.
The hearing charter is available online and the witness testimony should be posted soon. The hearing will be web cast so you can watch it live at 10 am. We’ll bring you highlights here after the hearing.
A couple of small announcements:
First, those of you who attended CRA's biennial conference at Snowbird last week already heard this call, but for those who didn't (or who need to be reminded), we want your research highlights! CRA and the Computing Community Consortium are in the process of gathering recent computing research highlights to feature prominently in CRA and CCC publications -- on the web, in our advocacy efforts, and in our print publications -- and we'd like yours.
What we're asking is that you add this e-mail address -- highlights@cra.org -- to any press release distribution list your department or institution may have to publicize your exciting research results. We're gathering those interesting stories, putting them into a searchable database, and then highlighting selected ones on the CRA and CCC websites. The model here is something like the very popular Astronomy Photo of the Day, where each day a new photo or graphic (or video) having something to do with astronomy is featured along with a nice succinct description. While we don't anticipate being able to feature new computing research daily, we hope to refresh it frequently enough (weekly?) to make it worth checking back often. But, to do that, we need your highlights.
To fill the pot, we're accepting any release your department or institution may have sent in the last 24 months or so. Obviously, we'd like to feature the most timely ones, but we don't mind pushing the clock back a bit for anything truly exciting. So, please submit yours today, and make sure your press offices have highlights@cra.org on their distribution lists.
In other news, we've created some new CRA-related "groups" on two popular social networking sites: LinkedIn and Facebook. Both are for those involved in, or just fans of, CRA. To join the LinkedIn one, go here and we'll approve you. On Facebook, you can find us here. We hope you'll take a look!
Last Tuesday, NYT science commentator John Tierney discussed how Congress has recently ramped up enforcement of Title IX among universities' science departments. Will a "quota system"--an idea Tierney floats in the third paragraph of his piece--be an outcome of Title IX enforcement?
So far, the increased enforcement has only consisted of periodic compliance reviews, which had been long-neglected by the NSF, Department of Energy, and NASA, according to a 2004 Government Accountability Office report. These reviews are intended to make sure grantee departments are not discriminatory.
Of course, since some fields like computer science have many more men than women--both among students and faculty--there is concern that the government might start considering everyone "discriminatory" using the yardstick of proportionality and quotas. For athletics departments, such rigorous Title IX enforcement has led to a huge increase in the participation and achievement of women athletes, but at the expense of some male sports.
The sciences are not necessarily in the same boat as sports: although most would agree that women face an uphill battle in the sciences, how much of the gap can be explained by discrimination remains an open question. "60 percent of biology majors and 70 percent of psychology Ph.D.'s" are women, raising the possibility that more women simply prefer other fields, as psychologist Susan Pinker argues.
Another possibility is that if discrimination is having any effect, most of it happens before girls reach college. One study suggests that differences at adolescence explain different outcomes 20 years later.
For now, though, the compliance reviews haven't rocked any boats. But the threat of a Title IX bludgeon hanging over departments' heads is sure to add urgency to debates about the shortage of women in fields like computer science and what to do about it.
Voters’ ballots may be more partisan than ever, but the vast majority of Americans can agree that we need to invest in science and technology, according to a recent poll.
71 percent of polled voters said they would be more likely to vote for a candidate who “is committed to making sure the federal budget invests in scientific research.” And a whopping 86 percent said they would be more likely to vote for a candidate committed to “public investments in science and technology education.”
Such investments have majority support among democrats as well as republicans (and independents, too), demonstrating the broad bipartisan consensus behind funding for science.
Hat tip: Gene Spafford
Ed Lazowska, Chair of the Computing Community Consortium, has a passionate post today on the CCC Blog about what the latest numbers from CRA's Taulbee Survey really mean. The news is not, he points out, that computer science bachelors degrees show another year of decline -- that was completely predictable from the enrollment statistics for freshman CS majors published four years ago in the survey. The real news (as we noted back in March) is that for the first time in many years, freshman interest in CS as a major increased and enrollments have stabilized -- indicating that perhaps we may have turned a corner. What's responsible for the turnaround? According to Lazowska:
[B]y far the most important factors are (a) the job market (or people’s sense of the job market), and (b) the level of “buzz” associated with the field.Ed also talks about the experience at his institution, the University of Washington, tries to put the "crisis" in computer science in perspective by offering up some comparisons to the other science and engineering disciplines, and emphasizes the bright outlook suggested by various Dept. of Labor workforce projections (pdf). In typical Lazowska style, it's a forceful but accurate refutation of the standard story on CS enrollments we've seen for the last few years. It's definitely worth a read (and comment!) over at the excellent CCC Blog (Disclaimer: CCC is an activity of CRA, but that doesn't make it any less awesome.)Let’s start by considering graduate enrollment, rather than undergraduate enrollment. For the past 15 years, the number of Ph.D.s granted annually in computer science has been in the 900-1100 range. Suddenly, though, in the past 2 years, it has climbed to 1800. Why is this? The answer is totally obvious:
This is not a news flash — it didn’t take a genius to predict, a few years ago, that it was going to happen, and it doesn’t take a genius to explain it, either.
- In 2001, lots of startup companies went bust.
- This dumped onto the job market a number of the best bachelors graduates from a few years before, who now had two or three years of experience under their belts.
- This made it hard for some excellent new bachelors graduates of 2001 and 2002 to get the super-exciting jobs they had anticipated — they were competing with people whose academic records were every bit as good as theirs, but who also had 2 or 3 years of experience working at a hot startup.
- Because these great new bachelors graduates couldn’t get exciting jobs, they went to graduate school instead.
- And, mirabile dictu, 6 years later, they’re emerging with Ph.D.s.
Similarly for bachelors degrees. Starting in about 2002, there was lots of news about the tech bust. Tech was no longer sexy. Jobs were no longer plentiful. Subsequently, there was a lot of misleading information about the impact of offshoring. And the newspapers never bothered to report that by late 2004, US IT employment was back to the 2000-2001 level — we had fully recovered from the bust — somehow that wasn’t considered newsworthy. So it’s not surprising that interest in bachelors programs decreased sharply, and that 4 and 5 years later, the number of degrees granted precisely mirrored this decline.
Also, it’s not surprising that things are turning around. Google is hot. Tech in general is hot. There are startups everywhere. It’s clear to anyone that there are plenty of jobs. (By the way, given the incredible state of today’s bachelors job market, it doesn’t take a genius to predict that the number of Ph.D. graduates in 2014 will show a decline. When you read the scary headlines 6 years from now, remember that you heard it here first!)