Computing Research Policy Blog

2008 NSF/AAAS Visualization Challenge

The saying is that a picture is worth a thousand words. Well, NSF and AAAS agree and are sponsoring the sixth annual Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge. There are five awards categories: Photographs/Pictures, Illustrations/Drawings, Informational/Explanatory Graphics, Interactive Media, and Non-Interactive Media. The deadline for entries is May 31.

The premise of the Challenge is that science is often communicated through visuals better than words, particularly in our web and graphics culture. Winning entries in each category will be published in Science Magazine and Science Online as well as at the NSF web site. One of the winners will be on the cover of Science Magazine’s September 26 issue.

More information and winning entries from the previous five years can be found here.

Reports of AP CS' Demise are Greatly Exaggerated

Today's Washington Post article on the College Board's decision to stop administering certain Advanced Placement tests has been widely circulated -- with some reasonable concern within the computing community. The article appears to suggest that computer science advanced placement tests are on the chopping block. However, that's not quite an accurate picture. Fortunately, Cameron Wilson at CRA-affiliate ACM -- which has become quite involved in the computing education space -- has a more complete explanation on the Tech Policy Blog of what's really going on and why it ultimately could/should be beneficial for the field.

DDR&E Strategic Plan Released

The Department of Defense Research and Engineering released its 2007 Strategic Plan this week. It’s pretty high-level and doesn’t appear to contain any surprises. The DDR&E strategy focuses on countering four different types of threats with research and engineering efforts: traditional, irregular, catastrophic, and disruptive. The plan acknowledges that the DOD has a pretty good handle on dealing with the traditional (ie, Cold War-oriented) threats, but has much work to do to counter the other three. As a result, DDR&E is shifting its priorities slightly to focus more effort on addressing irregular threats (urban operations, war on terror, etc), catastrophic threats (WMDs), and disruptive technologies ("those that could render our most significant weapons systems less effective").

Fortunately, the Department still sees both basic research and research in information technologies as critical to all four efforts. In its list of "enabling technologies that should receive the highest level of corporate attention and coordination," information technology, persistent surveillance technologies, networks and communications, software research, "organization, fusion and mining data," cognitive enhancements, robotics, autonomous systems technologies, and large data set analysis tools all figure prominently. In fact, IT figures in almost all the DOD's "desired capabilities" in the plan.

The whole plan can be found here and is worth a read.

House Science Subommittee Chairs Announced

The House Committee on Science and Technology has announced its membership and subcommittee chairs for the 110th Congress. The committee membership includes 24 Democrats and 20 Republicans with one vacancy on the minority membership. The subcommittee structure is slightly different with this Congress in that the some subcommittee names have been changed to more accurately reflect their jurisdictions and a Subcommittee on Investigation and Oversight has been added. The complete list of committee members as well as the subcommittees memberships is available here.

Subcommittee on Energy & Environment
Chairman Nick Lampson (D-TX)
Ranking Member Bob Inglis (R-SC)

Subcommittee on Technology & Innovation
Chairman David Wu (D-OR)
Ranking Member Phil Gingrey (R-GA)

Subcommittee on Research & Science Education
Chairman Brian Baird (D-WA)
Ranking Member Vern Ehlers (R-MI)

Subcommittee on Space & Aeronautics
Chairman Mark Udall (D-CO)
Ranking Member Ken Calvert (R-CA)

Subcommittee on Investigations & Oversight
Chairman Brad Miller (D-NC)
Ranking Member F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-WI)

Google Anita Borg Scholarship

Google announced today that the 2007-2008 Google Anita Borg Scholarship will be $10,000 for women recipients in the United States and that it is expanding to Europe this year with a €5,000 scholarship for recipients in Europe. All the details can be found on the Google Blog. The deadline for applications is January 15, 2007.

You can learn more about Anita Borg and her contributions to women's involvement in technology development at the Anita Borg Institute.

New Supercomputing Study to be Released Sept. 7

The Council on Competitiveness will unveil a "new study regarding public-private partnerships that leverage supercomputing resources funded by the federal government for greater industry strength" on September 7 during the Third High Performance Computing Users Conference. The announcement can be found on HPC Wire and we'll post more details once the study is released.

IT Salary Survey

Interesting article on Enterprise Systems IT salary survey in Monday's InfoWorld. The survey "found that although application programmers scored the largest pay increases, at almost 9 percent, all IT staff positions with applications and system responsibilities had year-to-year jumps in base salary."

Other interesting stats from the survey include:

Application programmers received the biggest salary increases, 8.7 percent over last year

Systems administrators received the smallest increase, 2 percent over last year but their annual bonuses jumped 15 percent

The survey results are being released over the next four weeks at Enterprise Systems web site. The first round of data can be found here.

Another Piece of the Image Problem

Information Week spent a great deal of its July 17 issue discussing the IT workforce shortage and a variety of issues surrounding it. One of the articles, Computer Classes Seen as “Shop Class" at Many Schools, discusses an area of the talent pipeline that is contributing to the image problem of IT. The article starts:

If a kid takes a computer networking class as an elective, will college admissions departments look at it in the same spirit as an advanced physics class--or more akin to wood shop?

It goes on to discuss the different types of computer related courses that can be offered and the constraints that high schools are under as well as an example of a company program that works with schools on computer curriculum. However, it then states the disparity that while some computer classes are in the advanced placement or honors curriculum, others are often in the technical/vocational curriculum which makes parents steer their college-bound children away.

The question is, of course, a much more complicated one than just whether or not computer courses should be considered honors or vocational in high school. But it does raise the issue of how invasive the image problem that computer science suffers can be and the depth of the problem that needs to be addressed.

High Performance Computing Hearing

You may recall that Senator John Ensign (R-NV) promised a hearing on high performance computing back in May while passing innovation legislation out of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation. This morning the Subcommittee on Technology, Innovation, and Competitiveness held a hearing on high performance computing that Sen. Ensign, the subcommittee chair, and Senator Maria Cantwell (D-WA) engaged in. Sen. Ensign acknowledged that he had little knowledge of high performance computing but asked questions and seemed very interested in what policies could help keep the US in a leadership position in the field. The seven witnesses all discussed the importance of high performance computing and the need for government funding to continue and increase to keep a competitive edge. Formal testimony is available online and a web cast should be available in a few days.

Everyone at the hearing tied the advances in high performance computing to America’s competitiveness. One example was when Michael Garrett of Boeing said that the company’s ability to meet it’s performance goals was due, in part, to high performance computing and that had allowed it an edge over competitors in Europe. A couple of the witnesses put great emphasis on networking in high performance computing as opposed to hardware or even software. At the end of the meeting Sen. Ensign asked if Congress needs to direct NIH on how to spend money to get it to invest in high performance computing. Dr. Stanley Burt of the Advanced Biomedical Computing Center said Congress should do so and that collaboration and cross training of scientists is needed for the future of scientific research in biology using high performance computing. Burt said computational biology needs to get to the level that computational physics is currently at as a field.

Interesting Notables

We’ve talked in the past about Microsoft’s efforts to support programs that aim to increase the participation of women and minorities in computing. One effort we haven’t covered, but is worth noting, is their “Channel 9” series on “wm_in – Women in Technology ”. Wm_in introduces women of all ranks in Microsoft, giving a glimpse into what they do and providing some not so subtle encouragements for women to enter into computer science. Women are interviewed about what they do, from a ‘lowly’ intern to a Vice President, giving all aspects and perspectives of working within a huge global company.

Check it out! Unfortunately, (and maybe not surprisingly) it doesn’t seem to work on a Mac.

They also have a posting area populated by folks who seem to work at Microsoft, which makes for interesting reading. It can also show just how much may never change. All kidding aside, this seems to be an interesting and fun way to learn about the behind the scenes action that we rarely see.

Now, I highlight this because this is a medium the web has seen take off, with MySpace.com and video blogs, such as youtube.com, becoming phenomenally popular. This seems to be the sort of format today's high school (and these days, even younger) girls would be willing to check out and maybe learn something. This is awesome! Oh and I’m sure guys could learn something from it as well, although probably not what Microsoft intended them to learn (guys just don’t work that way).

Article on Computer Science For Profit School

There is an interesting article at Forbes.com about Neumont University, a for-profit school in Utah, aiming to fill the need for well trained computer professionals. The school is anything but traditional with classes from 8 to 5, year round and a very hands on learning approach. The idea that Neumont is based on is that there will be a need for 135,000 new computer professionals each year according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics but only 49,000 computer science graduates.

Some snippets:

Physically and philosophically, there's no confusing Neumont with a traditional university. It is housed in a glass-and-steel reflective office building. Students live in nearby apartments--no campus quad, football games, frat houses or keg parties.

Doxey aims foremost to please employers--not students, not parents and certainly not the educational establishment. Produce what business needs, he figures, and graduates will win good jobs, which will in turn attract more paying students.

...

But some in the educational establishment are still skeptical of Neumont's rush-through, hands-on approach. "What you learn in technology is gone in five years, so you need to learn the principles," says Pradeep Khosla, dean of the engineering school at Carnegie Mellon. Khosla says students need to know how semiconductor chips and operating systems are built, not merely how to program them.

But Halpin, the professor who came from Microsoft, finds Neumont's mix of theory and practice just right. "I have five degrees. I use some of the theory and 5% of the math," he says. "There are clearly areas where we could go deeper, but you've got to ask yourself: Will they use it?" He notes that he is now overseeing students who are creating software that can query multiple databases using logical algorithms, a fairly sophisticated project. President Doxey points to research from the nonprofit NTL Institute in Alexandria, Va.; it estimates that learning retention rates for those working in groups can range from 75% to 90% versus just 5% for students zoning out in lectures.

Read the whole article here.

Can't Resist...

Jay Vegso suggested this should load on CRA's homepage, but I think I can get away with it here.

Yip-yips meet the computer.

2005 Internet Privacy Survey

NC State prof and former CRA Digital Government Fellow Annie Antón sends word that The Privacy Place is conducting its 2005 survey of online privacy policies and user values. The Privacy Place is an inter-disciplinary team of researchers at North Carolina State University's Computer Science and Business Management departments as well as the Georgia Tech College of Computing, the Purdue University Computer Science Department and the University of Lugano Communication Sciences department -- all committed to disseminating information and creating tools and techniques that help IT professionals and policy makers bring privacy policies and system requirements into better alignment.

They hope to get a few thousand respondents to their survey, so Annie's asked for some help getting the word out. I just took the survey and it only took me a few minutes (and I'm pretty dense). Here's Annie's request with all the details:

ThePrivacyPlace.Org 2005 Privacy Survey is Underway!

Researchers at ThePrivacyPlace.Org are conducting an online survey about privacy policies and user values. The survey is supported by an NSF ITR grant (National Science Foundation Information Technology Research) and will help us establish with our investigations of privacy policy expression and user comprehension thereof.

The URL is: http://survey.theprivacyplace.org/

We need to attract several thousand respondents, and would be most appreciative if you would consider helping us get the word out about the survey which takes about 5 to 10 minutes to complete. The results will be made available in 2006 via our project website.

Prizes include
$50 Amazon.com gift certificates
and
IBM sponsored giveaways!

On behalf of the research staff at ThePrivacyPlace.Org, thank you!

Annie Antón

India will produce 73,500 engineering grads in 2006

If American students aren't going to take up computer science, Indian students will. SiliconIndia.com and Hindu Business Line report, "Rising salaries and a growing software industry may have made IT one of the most sought-after careers for Indian students. An estimated 73,500 engineering graduates are expected to take up hi-tech jobs this fiscal [year]."

The article cites the Taulbee Survey's finding that American CS enrollments have fallen by 19 percent, although this statistic was considered somewhat out of context. Nonetheless, the article gives a clear indication as to how the Indian technology press is covering workforce issues: America is losing IT workers and India is picking up the slack.

India is creating not just new computer scientists, but jobs as well:

"In software alone, 120,000 new jobs are likely to be created this year, against 110,000 in 2004-05, and 50,000 in 2001-02," Sunil Mehta, Vice-President of Nasscom, said.

Nasscom expects 73,500-84,000 engineering graduates to go for IT jobs in the current financial year, compared to 56,000-64,000 in 2004-05. The balance will flow from the B.Sc stream with students opting for GNIIT courses, as well as students from other disciplines going in for diplomas. [Typos corrected. -DMR]

To put this in context, it appears that India and the United States will produce roughly the same number of computer science and engineering graduates in per capita terms next year. What's particularly important to note is that India's enrollment statistics are trending up, while America's are stagnating or declining.

AAAS Report on Women and Minorities in the IT Workforce

MSNBC has some interesting coverage of an important but oft-overlooked part of our IT workforce: students seeking vocational rather than research-oriented IT training. The article covers the recent AAAS report entitled Preparing Women and Minorities for the IT Workforce: The Role of Nontraditional Educational Pathways. The article begins:

Pop quiz: Which schools produced the most degrees in computer science in 2001? MIT? Carnegie Mellon? Georgia Tech?

If you guessed any of these, you’re wrong: try Strayer University and DeVry Institute of Technology.

[...]

If you guessed [the typical student is] a young geeky guy with a pocket saver, guess again: try a 35-year-old African American or Hispanic woman who already has a full-time job at a company where information technology (IT) skills are a key to advancement.

She’s the one taking the night courses at one of the for-profit institutions like Strayer or DeVry that have a wide variety of locations, and offer courses in the early morning and evening, as well as on-line courses.

The study found that women, minorities, and non-traditional students were especially likely to take advantage of CS/CE educational opportunities from for-profit institutions. It is a helpful reminder that the future of computer science and engineering in the United States is dependent not just on researchers but on a non-research oriented IT workforce that can deploy the advances of CS/CE research and development throughout all areas of society.

CRA's Taulbee Survey maintains information about women earning CS/CE degrees from PhD-granting institutions. Results from recent years:

New History of SRI; Interesting DARPA Quote

The Mercury News has an interesting piece today on a new book by Don Nielson detailing the important history of SRI (formerly Stanford Research Insitute). The institute, founded in 1946 at Stanford University, has played a role in an number of significant innovations in IT including serving as one of the first four nodes on the ARPAnet, the invention of the mouse, packet-switched radio, and wireless communications. Neilson's history apparently focuses on about 50 of the projects the institute was responsible for, though he had nearly 50,000 projects over the institute's 59 years to choose from.

One quote in the article struck me and I thought I'd note it here. It's a perspective that's very useful to remember in these times of uncertain funding for research that's increasingly short-term.

Paul Saffo, director of the Institute of the Future in Menlo Park, believes that SRI's most important legacy is the swath of engineers, scientists and other researchers who have passed through it.

``You can focus on the inventions, but the inventions are literally an artifact of the most important thing that SRI did. It trained a whole generation of engineers,'' Saffo said. ``That kind of long-term look was damn scarce back then and today it's scarcer than ever. Today, it's swimming against a stream at a time when the whole country is obsessively focused on the short term and a federal government that has crippled DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency).''

Researchers and engineers have founded a host of companies upon leaving SRI, a list that Nielson includes at the back of his book. He noted the list is by no means comprehensive, as SRI does not really keep track of how many of its former employees start companies. The list of companies ranges from early valley pioneers such as Granger Associates and Raychem to software developers Symantec and ANSA Software, online trading system developer E-Trade Financial, market researcher Dataquest (now owned by Gartner Group) and the Institute of the Future.

Saffo, who was not part of the Institute of the Future's founding team from SRI, also noted that swarms of former SRI engineers who worked at companies ranging from Apple Computer to Cisco Systems have led revolutions of their own.

Anyway, the book looks very interesting. Maybe I'll take it up after I finish my current "metro reading" book: What the Dormouse Said: How the '60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer by John Markoff. Jim Horning, who "was there" during the relevant period, has a good review of the Markoff book....

ACM Washington Update: May 2005

ACM's U.S. Public Policy Committee puts together a great monthly newsletter with all the DC happenings of interest to the tech community. The May edition is out now and chock full of good stuff, including updates on ACM's Voter Registration Database study, the Real ID Act, spyware legislation, and a look ahead to June.

Check it out here.

Reaction to Trends in CS Majors article

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.

Housekeeping Note: New Blog Category

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!

Interest in CS as a Major Drops

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.

Catching Up: Senate Reorganization (Appropriations and Commerce)

[Apologies once again for the lag in posts. I've been in babyland.]

The Senate has finally begun to get its act together and organize some key committees, announcing yesterday the chairs and ranking members of the 10 Commerce Committee subcommittees and last week announcing a reorganization of the Appropriations Committee to fall more in line with the House Appropriations revamp (as we predicted).

On the Commerce Committee, the new chairs and ranking members that are likely most relevant to computing researchers are Sens. Kay Bailey Hutchinson (R-TX) and Ben Nelson (D-NE) who take over as the chair and ranking member of the Subcommittee on Science and Space; and Sens. John Ensign (R-NV) and John Kerry, chair and ranking member of the new Subcommittee on Technology, Innovation and Competitiveness. The agenda for this new subcommittee hasn't yet been set, but given that it's grown out of the work of the Senate Republican High-Tech Task Force headed by Ensign, chances are good that it will involve itself in issues important to the computing community.

The Senate Appropriations Committee, initially reluctant to adopt the House Appropriations reorganization, ultimately decided that failing to adopt some realignment would guarantee chaos come conference time and agreed to reshape the panel to reflect most of the changes made by the House. Most importantly to computing researchers, the Senate VA-HUD committee, which included responsibility for NASA and NSF, was dissolved and its jurisdiction the two science agencies was placed in the new Commerce-Justice-Science panel, matching the House plan. Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL) will take the helm of the new subcommittee, meaning that long-term NSF champion Sen. Kit Bond (R-MO) will no longer oversee the agency in the appropriations process. It's not clear how Shelby's leadership will impact the NSF budget, though he has apparently said that within the committee, NASA and NSF are his number one and two priorities. In any case, a new chairman represents a new opportunity for the science community to make the case for priority. On the minority side, Sen. Barbara Mikulski, long-term NSF champion and former ranking member on VA-HUD, will join Shelby as ranking member on the new panel.

New Defense R&D Blog Worth Checking Out

The Coalition for National Security Research has begun a blog to note and comment on the latest news in Defense R&D.

CNSR is "a broadly-based coalition united by a commitment to a stronger defense science and technology base. Participants include scientific, engineering, mathematical and behavioral societies, academic institutions, and industrial associations." And CRA.

Anyway, it's definitely worth taking a look. Tom Jones, CNSR's co-chair, has been blogging up a storm already.

Full Disclosure: Any ugly HTML/PHP coding on the CNSR blog is my fault.

Turning My Bad HTML into a Teachable Moment

Jim Horning uses the frustration he and I faced yesterday trying to figure out why he was having trouble with a link in Wednesday's post on R&D funding to make some observations about the risks of lenient parsing. He's got the whole story there.

His interesting blog is Nothing is as simple as we hope it will be.

RSS Feeds - A Primer

From time to time I get questions about the Syndicate this Site (XML), Atom (XML) and Sub Bloglines links on the left side of this page. All represent various ways of accessing this site via an "RSS" feed. What's an RSS feed? CRA Board Member Tim Finin at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County put together a handy guide to RSS feeds for the latest Computing Research News which is now available online.

Here's a sample:

RSS (Rich Site Summary ) is a way to disseminate information on the Web that is somewhere between the push of email and the pull of browsing web portals. In that sense, it is like the venerable Unix newsgroups, but differs in that anyone can start an RSS channel by putting it on the Web and the content is under your complete control. RSS is viewed as a lightweight tool for the syndication of web site content to be incorporated into web pages, portals, and personalized information sources. As more and more information becomes available via RSS feeds, it is becoming a valuable tool to deal with the overwhelming amount of information available today.

How It Works

RSS is a XML standard for publishing ‘summaries’ of articles or news items—for example, a headline, date, short description, and a link to the full item. The full specifications define about 20 metadata fields and the XML encoding supports additional extensibility. Information providers, like the CRA, Slashdot, The New York Times, and bloggers publish RSS ‘feeds’ or ‘channels’ as XML files at an advertised URLs. As the original content changes, for example, new stories are posted to Slashdot, the corresponding RSS channel is updated, typically including only the 10 or 15 most recent items. Most blogging systems can automatically update an RSS feed containing the summaries of recent items at the same time as it publishes the regular blog pages. RSS files are also easy to maintain with simple programs or to generate from other sources such as databases....

Read the whole thing: CRA Policy Blog Available as an RSS Channel

Interesting Online E-Voting Discussion

SiliconValley.com is running an interesting online discussion of e-voting featuring a few of the luminaries in the field, including Avi Rubin and David Dill. I even saw an appearance by Jim Horning, former member of CRA's board.

Worth a view.

[Via Slashdot.]

Amusing Diversion: E-voting

Dave Barry on electronic voting: Low-carb leader will get my vote.

Here's a bit:

So this year many states are switching to electronic voting machines, which use computer technology -- the same reliable, foolproof technology we use in the newspaper industry to wwr _)(%$@!@hkjhou((*7**%$ ERROR ERROR DELETING EVERYTHING FROM DAWN OF TIME

Whoops! It turns out that things CAN go wrong with computer technology. One big concern is that electronic voting machines could be tampered with by ''hackers,'' as was the case recently when an 11-year-old New Jersey boy named Jason Feeblehonker, using only his GameBoy, was able to get himself elected governor of both North Carolina and Wisconsin. (He's actually doing a decent job, although some state police officers are not thrilled about having to carry light sabers.)

Read the whole thing (via the Miami Herald).

Maybe They'll Call it ...

...the iSmell.

Smelly robot eats flies to generate its own power

Link via Slashdot.

Rubbing It In.

The view from Snowbird.

Update:

Snowbird Keynote Speaker Vint Cerf discusses his interplanetary network ("InterPlanet") at Sunday dinner.

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