Computing Research Policy Blog

Two Information Week Articles of Interest

Two recent Information Week articles are of interest. The first article discusses the Commission on Professionals in Science and Technology’s newly released report regarding the IT workforce and the need to increase the representation of women and minorities to keep America competitive. This was a theme at the recent conferences in Florida, the Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing and the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Information Technology. The report is free and available at the CPST web site but you do have to register to access it.

The second article is about the National Research Council report encouraging open exchange of science and technology research on the international stage. The article states the Council’s understanding that there are matters of national security that the United States is trying to protect by classifying research but that “the possibility that the United States might lose its edge in technology and research represents one of the greatest risks to national security.” Again the report is available online and is worth reading.

Computerworld on Sputnik, DARPA and Computing

Computerworld has fantastic coverage of the 50th anniversary of the Sputnik launch (Oct. 4th, 1957) and why, in a sense, we can thank the Soviets for helping create the conditions that led the U.S. to become the technological superpower we've become.

Computerworld's Gary Anthes' piece "Happy Birthday Sputnik! (Thanks for the Internet)" does a great job of chronicling how the federal government's reaction to the surprising Soviet launch created an agency and a research funding culture that proved so extraordinarily productive that nearly every billion-dollar sub-sector of the IT economy today bears its stamp. In the process, he checks in with a number of important figures from computer science who note that the productive culture within DARPA responsible for much of that early innovation seems to have waned -- and perhaps isn't even possible today.

Rather than quote snippets from the piece, I'd just encourage you to read all of it -- it's the piece I would've tried to write in honor of Sputnik's 50th if Anthens hadn't (I'm glad he did...it's assuredly better than anything I would've come up with).

Two other portions of the coverage are worth checking out, too. Computerworld did a pretty good job of simplifying the CSTB's "tire tracks" chart that shows the development of technologies from the initial research in university or industry labs to the time the products that resulted became billion-dollar industries.

And there's a good interview with former (D)ARPA director Charles M. Herzfeld on the state of IT research now.

It's all definitely worth a read.

CS Profs and the DOD

Long-time readers of this blog, or anyone familiar with CRA's policy efforts, will know that we've spent a lot of time raising concerns about policy shifts at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) that have cut university participation rates in DARPA-funded computer science research. In congressional testimony and blog posts, we've pointed out that a shift at DARPA -- a focus on nearer-term efforts with an emphasis on go/no-go milestones at relatively short intervals and an increased use of classification -- has sharply reduced the amount of DARPA-supported research being performed in U.S. universities. In fact, between FY 2001 and FY 2004 (the last year for which we have good data), the amount of funding from DARPA to U.S. universities for computer science research fell by half -- and informal evidence suggests university shares are even lower today.

There are a number of reasons we're concerned about this trend. For one, DARPA's diminished support for university CS leaves a hole in the federal IT R&D portfolio -- both in funding, but maybe more importantly, in the loss of the "DARPA model" of research support. Since the early 1960s, the country (indeed, the world) has reaped the benefits of the diverse approaches to funding IT research represented by the two leading agencies -- NSF and DARPA. While NSF has primarily focused on small grants for individual researchers at a wide range of institutions -- and support for computing infrastructure at America's universities -- DARPA's approach has been to identify key problems of interest to the agency and then assemble and nurture communities of researchers to address them. The combination of models has been enormously beneficial -- DARPA-supported research in computing over the last four decades has laid down the foundations for the modern microprocessor, the internet, the graphical user interface, single-user workstations and a whole host of other innovations that have made the U.S. military the best in the world, driven the new economy, changed the conduct of science and enabled whole new scientific disciplines.

But DARPA's policy shift also impacts its own mission, which is to ensure the U.S. never again suffers the sort of technological surprise marked by the Soviet launch of Sputnik (which motivated the establishment of the agency nearly 50 years ago). DARPA's move away from support of university researchers means that many of the brightest minds of the country (indeed, the world) are no longer working on defense-related problems. This loss of mindshare -- the percentage of people working on DARPA-related problems -- is very worrisome to those in the community who understand how much of America's advantage on the battlefield (and in the marketplace) is owed to a network-centric strategy. I hear concerns from the "old guard" in many of America's top university CS departments that there's a whole generation of young researchers who have no experience working with DARPA or the Defense Department and who are not attuned to defense problems -- a fact that doesn't bode well for the future of the U.S. technological advantage and DARPA's goal of preventing technological surprise.

To their credit, the folks at DARPA recognize that this lack of awareness among younger faculty of the types of problems DARPA would really like to solve is a situation that needs addressing. And one way they're approaching the problem is very direct -- they're finding young faculty with research areas of interest to the agency and, well, taking them on a little tour of the DOD. The Computer Science Study Group, run by the Institute for Defense Analysis for DARPA, serves to "acclimate a generation of researchers to the needs and priorities of the DOD," by mentoring, holding workshops, field trips to DOD facilities and fairly elaborate (and pretty kewl) show-and-tells. An interesting article today on Rensselaer ECSE professor Rich Radke's experience has some details on CSSG goals and methods:

The multi-year program familiarizes up-and-coming faculty from American universities with DoD practices, challenges, and risks. Participants are encouraged to view their own research through this new perspective, and then to explore and develop technologies that have the potential to transition innovative and revolutionary computer science and technology advances to the government.

"The basic idea is to expose young faculty to Department of Defense-related activities, via briefings by military and intelligence officers and ‘field trips’ to military and industrial bases," Radke said. "It is truly a hard-core experience filled with days of interesting briefings and up-close show-and-tell with vehicles and equipment."

Read the whole piece for details of his adventures.

2007 was the first year for the CSSG and the $4.5 million program supported about a dozen young researchers. DARPA has requested an increase in the program for FY 08 ($7 million) and FY 09 ($7.7 million), so hopefully we'll see that number start to rise.

The DARPA CSSG program is one part of addressing the overall problem. The larger concern is the importance of bringing DARPA back into the university research fold -- not because it would benefit academic researchers, but because it impacts the mission success of the Department of Defense (and hence our national security). A number of factors suggest that maybe it's time to focus on the goal of increasing mindshare of the best brains working on U.S. defense-related problems. For one, because of U.S. visa policies, increasingly the best minds in the world won't necessarily be coming to the U.S. Second, the research capacity of our potential adversaries increases daily. And finally, the increase in foreign investment in U.S. university research departments means that competition for U.S. university mindshare is only increasing, and in some cases, maybe from countries we'd rather not gain a competitive leg-up on us. So, programs like CSSG are really important. But maybe so are some bigger policy issues across the agency....

Patent team diversity good for business

Forbes.com has an interesting article about a survey on the role of women in patents. The survey (PDF), from the National Center for Women & Information Technology, shows that patents by mixed-gender teams are cited more often than those of single-gender teams.

Not a lot of new information in the article but it points out something that CRA and NCWIT have been saying for a long time: a diverse workforce is an asset to American business.

"Our data show that diversity of thought matters to innovation," says NCWIT Chief Executive Lucinda Sanders, who holds six telecom software patents. "We can say involving women is important because women are half the population and have good ideas, but our study shows the impact for companies."

It’s worth a read.

NY Times on the Challenges of Network Complexity

John Schwartz of the New York Times has an interesting piece today on the rise in complexity of networked applications and the risks that complexity poses. Headlined Who Needs Hackers?, the piece makes the point that the biggest threat to these systems isn't malicious users, but complexity itself. Understanding how these giant interconnected systems work (or not) is a great challenge for the community.

"We have gone from fairly simple computing architectures to massively distributed, massively interconnected and interdependent networks," [Andreas M. Antonopoulos, a founding partner at Nemertes Research] said, adding that as a result, flaws have become increasingly hard to predict or spot. Simpler systems could be understood and their behavior characterized, he said, but greater complexity brings unintended consequences.

"On the scale we do it, it's more like forecasting weather," he said.

By the way, addressing this challenge is one of the goals of those proposing the Global Enivronment for Networking Innovations research network that we've discussed before in this space.

President Will Sign COMPETES Act, Will Be Law Tomorrow!

It's done! It's done! By now, I expect that everyone has heard that both the House and Senate have agreed on the conference report for H.R. 2272, The America COMPETES Act and that the measure is headed to the President for his signature.

Word comes from the White House today that the President will sign the bill in a small signing-ceremony tomorrow with the Members of Congress who were instrumental in moving the bill along. While it's a bit of a bummer that the President isn't making a big "to-do" about this with representatives from industry and academia and lots of press -- it does, after all, enact many portions of his own American Competitiveness Initiative, and it's also an issue that polls really well, a fact you'd think would be important to both a Congress and a President who could use a few good examples of positive, bi-partisan legislation to show off -- the important thing is it's getting signed. After nearly two years of wrangling over this particular set of proposals -- and a lot longer than that to get the Administration and the Congress to understand the import of the problems addressed -- the President will sign the bill and its provisions will be law.

That deserves some kudos, back-patting, and maybe one or two loud "whoo-hoo's."

Especially because this bill has a lot of good things in it. As Cameron Wilson points out over on the USACM Technology Policy Blog, the bill takes two basic routes to fostering the innovation the country will require to stay competitive in an increasingly global world. It addresses federal support for research -- both authorizing large amounts of new funding for three key science agencies (National Science Foundation, NIST, and the Department of Energy's Office of Science), setting a target to double the agencies budgets over 7 years, and by creating a new high-risk research agency at the Department of Energy (called the Advanced Research Projects Agency - Energy, or ARPA-E, in a nod to the DARPA-like character Congress hopes the agency will adopt). And the bill addresses a diversity of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) Education efforts. For these, I'll simply steal what Cameron has already written:

The bill authorizes $43.3 billion over the next three fiscal years for STEM education programs across the federal government. The variety is impressive ranging from new k-12 teacher programs to new opportunities for undergraduate and graduate STEM students. Here is a sampling of the proposals:

• Expands the Robert Noyce program which links students in STEM fields up with education degrees so they can teach STEM in K-12;
• Authorizes two new competitive grant programs that will enable partnerships to implement courses of study in mathematics, science, engineering, technology or critical foreign languages in ways that lead to a baccalaureate degree with concurrent teacher certification;
• Authorizes competitive grants to increase the number of teachers serving high-need schools and expand access to AP and IB classes and to increase the number of qualified AP and IB teachers in high-need schools; and,
• Expands early career grant programs and provides additional support for outstanding young investigators at both NSF and DOE.

In addition, the legislation has several provisions that expand outreach to women and minorities in STEM fields. The lack of females and minorities has been a key problem in computing, so this is another welcome effort.

In addition, the bill contains two particular provisions I wanted to highlight because they're of particular interest to the computing community:

The first is Section 7024, "High-performance Computing and Networking" (if you're following along at home (pdf)) -- the inclusion of the High-Performance Computing Research and Development Act that has been much discussed on these pages since some of the earliest days of this blog. The bill has been proposed in various forms in every session of Congress since the 106th (we're now in the 110th) and has never gained the full approval of the Congress -- almost always for reasons unrelated to the bill. The bill has, in sessions past, been approved by the House only to languish in the Senate due to jurisdictional fights over other bills, approved by the House Science committee only to run afoul of budget disputes with the GOP Leadership, and been held hostage over fights about NASA between the House and Senate. In fact, until the approval of the conference report last week, it was assumed that this version HPC R&D Act might meet a similar fate as word escaped that some of the Senate conferees thought its inclusion might cause some jurisdictional friction between two Senate committees (Energy and Commerce, who both claim HPC jurisdiction). But those problems were resolved, and the bill includes the full House-approved language, plus an extra section that authorizes efforts in "Advanced Information and Communications Technology Research" at NSF, including research on:

• affordable broadband access, including wireless technologies;
• network security and reliability;
• communications interoperability;,
• networking protocols and architectures, including resilience to outages or attacks;
• trusted software;
• privacy;
• nanoelectronics for communications applicaitons;
• low-power communications electronics;
• implementation of equitable access to natinoal advanced fiber optic research and educational networks in noncontiguous States; and
• other areas the Director [of NSF] finds appropriate.

The provision also allows NSF to fund multiyear, multidisciplinary "Centers for Communications Research" to "generate innovative approaches to problems in information and communications technology research."

Otherwise, the HPC R&D Act remains essentially unchanged, which means it includes two provisions we particularly like: it requires the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy to develop and maintain a research, development, and deployment roadmap for the provision of federal high-performance computing systems; and there's now an explicit requirement that the President's advisory committee for IT (now PCAST) review not only the goals of the federal Networking and Information Technology Research and Development program, but the funding levels as well and report the results of that review to Congress every two years.

The second noteworthy provision in the COMPETES bill is one (Sec. 7012) that was originally included in the House-passed NSF Authorization Act of 2007 (H.R. 1867), that should help clarify NSF's role in supporting efforts that seek to encourage the participation of women and underrepresented groups in computing, science, technology, engineering and mathematics. As we noted back in March, this is a response to long-standing concerns from CRA and other members of the computing and science communities about NSF's role. Basically, NSF's general policy is to only support efforts that represent novel approaches. Yet, what's often needed in these cases isn't a novel approach, just a sustained one. The House Science and Technology Committee agreed and included language in the NSF Authorization that addresses the issue by allowing the Director of NSF to review such programs one year before their grants expire and issue extensions of up to three years without recompetition to those efforts that appear to be successful at meeting their stated goals. It also emphasizes that the committee believes this sort of effort -- maintaining the strength and vitality of the U.S. science and engineering workforce -- is appropriately part of the agency's mission. So, we're thrilled that the provision survived the conference and will become law with the President's signature tomorrow.

This is, of course, not the end of innovation efforts in the Congress or the Administration. While this bill sets nice, juicy funding targets for NSF, NIST and DOE Office of Science, it doesn't actually appropriate a single dime, so the focus will continue to be on House and Senate appropriators as they wind their way through the appropriations process later this year. We're still expecting a meltdown in that process, so nothing is guaranteed, despite all the supportive words from Congress and the President. And there will be further efforts to address some of the pieces of the various innovation agendas that aren't represented in H.R. 2272 -- like a permanent extension of the R&D tax credit.

But for now, I think it's probably appropriate to take a deep breath and savor this win for a day or two. This is a big victory for the science community and a long-time coming for those of us who have been working these issues around the Hill over the better part of the last decade. We commend the President and the Congress for having the vision and the commitment to push ahead on these issues, even when it didn't seem as politically popular as it is today. And we commend the members of the science community for speaking up on these issues, serving on the advisory committees, and partipating in the grassroots efforts to make Congress aware of the issues. Now, just make sure you go out and do world-leading science -- take risks, think audaciously...demonstrate as you've done so well in the past why America needs to continue to be an incubator for invention, discovery, and innovation.

And keep it tuned here for all the details... :)

Update: (8/9/07) -- It's official!:

President George W. Bush signs H.R. 2272, The America Competes Act, Thursday, Aug. 9, 2007, in the Oval Office. Pictured with the President are, from left: Director John Marburger of the Office of Science and Technology Policy; Senator Jeff Bingaman of N.M.; Congressman Bart Gordon of Tenn.; and Senator Pete Domenici of N.M. White House photo by Chris Greenberg

Update2: (8/10/07) -- Here are the President's comments about the bill and ACI, as well as an OSTP-produced fact sheet.

NSF Reports on Research Publishing

The National Science Foundation has published two reports on American research and the decline of journals publishing it. The reports show that beginning in 1992 journals began to publish less American based research with a corresponding rise in research from Europe and Asia being published. In 1992, the share of American research published in journals was 37 percent and in 2003 it was 30 percent. The reports give a number of possible reasons for the decline, including the increase in scientific research being performed in Europe and Asia as well as more international collaboration on research in all fields.

Both reports are interesting and worth a read along with an article about them in Inside Higher Education. A third report on the topic is planned.

GENI Gets Some Press

The Chronicle of Higher Education (sub. req’d.) has a great article on the future of the Internet and the Global Environment for Network Innovations or GENI. It contains quotes from many participants of the new Computing Community Consortium (CCC) that CRA helped launch.

The article talks about the problems with the current state of the Internet:

Identity theft, viruses, and attacks on Web sites are on the rise — a few weeks ago the country of Estonia was practically shut down, digitally, by deliberate attempts to jam government computers. Spam, which was less than 50 percent of e-mail traffic back in 2002, is now close to 90 percent, according to Commtouch Software Ltd., an Internet-security company.

Moreover, the Internet has great difficulty coping with the sharp increase in mobile devices like cellphones and laptops, and handling bandwidth-hungry traffic such as video, now demanded by an increasing number of users.

GENI and its possibilities are discussed in great detail:

The people pushing for change are the very people at universities and colleges who built the Internet in the first place. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of California at Berkeley, and the University of Southern California, among others, have joined Mr. Peterson in the GENI planning process. Industry players such as chip-maker Intel are also on board.

…

In late May of this year, the science foundation awarded Cambridge-based BBN Technologies the job of planning GENI, giving them $10-million to spend over the next four years. The company has deep roots in the old Internet: It built the first network segment connecting four universities back in 1969.

Chip Elliott, the BBN engineer who will be running the GENI project office, thinks the project calls for two approaches. "First, if you don't like conventional Internet protocols, try something completely different. Second, do it on a large enough scale, with enough users, so that your results actually mean something." People associated with GENI say that "large enough" means access for experimenters at several hundred universities and, eventually, a user community in the tens of thousands.

Thousands of users will provide a crucial dose of reality, say planners. Over the years, there have been many papers published on new Internet design, and simulations run on networks such as PlanetLab. "But you don't know how an Internet design will behave until a large group of people actually use it," says Ms. Zegura, who will co-chair a GENI science council charged with rounding up ideas from the research community. "They will do things that you don't expect, just like in the real Internet, and then you'll see how robust your idea is. That's where the rubber meets the road."

Washington Post Op-Ed on DARPA Short-term Thinking

The computing community has had these concerns for quite a while, so it's not surprising to see other disciplines noting similar issues with DARPA in this OpEd written by David Ignatius in Friday's Washington Post:

DARPA once liked to boast that it took on impossible problems and wasn't interested in the merely difficult. But in recent years, the scientists argued, DARPA has become nearly as cautious and prone to micromanagement as the government's science behemoth, the National Institutes of Health. Before making most of its grants, the NIH demands such detailed evidence of success that it is "funding the past, not the future," one scientist complained.

"DARPA seems to be shifting to the NIH model -- more near-term, more risk-averse," said Don Ingber, a professor of pathology at Harvard.

For more background, in addition to all the links above, be sure to check out CRA's Information Technology R&D page which has tons of links to previous press reports on the issue....

A Little Bit of Press for America COMPETES Act

David Broder writes about the America COMPETES Act in his column today at the Washington Post. It contains this great quote from Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN), one of the sponsors of the Act:

"Last week," he said, "while the media covered Iraq and U.S. attorneys, the Senate spent three days debating and passing perhaps the most important piece of legislation of this two-year session. Almost no one noticed."

Alexander has a point. The bill, boldly named the America Competes Act, authorized an additional $16 billion over four years as part of a $60 billion effort to "double spending for physical sciences research, recruit 10,000 new math and science teachers and retrain 250,000 more, provide grants to researchers and invest more in high-risk, high-payoff research."

Read the whole thing.

Another Article on the Innovation Agenda

Interesting article (requires free registration) on the innovation agenda in the San Jose Mercury News. While it does focus mostly on the energy and environmental areas that could be helped, it also touches on almost all aspects of the overall innovation agenda such as funding basic research and increasing STEM K-12 teachers. There is also a good quote from Sen. John Ensign (R-NV) who said, "I'm a fiscal conservative, but the dollars we invest in basic research will come back to us in spades in terms of stimulating economic activity and helping the United States remain at the forefront of global innovation."

Time on GENI

Time Magazine has a pretty decent piece on NSF's Global Environment for Networking Innovations program, which has the goal of "[enabling] the research community to invent and demonstrate a global communications network and related services that will be qualitatively better than today's Internet."

Although it has already taken nearly four decades to get this far in building the Internet, some university researchers with the federal government's blessing want to scrap all that and start over.

The idea may seem unthinkable, even absurd, but many believe a "clean slate" approach is the only way to truly address security, mobility and other challenges that have cropped up since UCLA professor Leonard Kleinrock helped supervise the first exchange of meaningless test data between two machines on Sept. 2, 1969.

The Internet "works well in many situations but was designed for completely different assumptions," said Dipankar Raychaudhuri, a Rutgers University professor overseeing three clean-slate projects. "It's sort of a miracle that it continues to work well today."

No longer constrained by slow connections and computer processors and high costs for storage, researchers say the time has come to rethink the Internet's underlying architecture, a move that could mean replacing networking equipment and rewriting software on computers to better channel future traffic over the existing pipes.

Even Vinton Cerf, one of the Internet's founding fathers as co-developer of the key communications techniques, said the exercise was "generally healthy" because the current technology "does not satisfy all needs."

We've covered the progress of GENI previously in this space, including the most recent announcement by the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) of the naming of the initial members of the GENI science council. As it stands now, GENI is a "Horizon" project in NSF's 2007 Facilities Plan -- a step away from "Readiness Stage," which would allow for extensive pre-construction planning. There are currently 10 projects listed in the plan as "Horizon" projects, and just one in the "Readiness Stage" for FY 2008 (the Advanced Technology Solar Telescope). For FY 2008, NSF has requested $20 million to ramp up GENI pre-construction planning -- so the program is moving forward, but still has some distance to go before it's ready to be included in the queue of projects being considered for the "Major Research Equipment and Facilities Construction" account in future budget years.

Ken Kennedy

The New York Times has a nicely-written obituary for computing pioneer Ken Kennedy, penned by John Markoff. Here's a snippet:

A member of the generation of researchers who were the first to have access to modern supercomputers, Mr. Kennedy spearheaded early work on software programs known as parallelizing compilers, systems that can automatically spread workloads among a large number of processors, vastly speeding calculations.

Early computers were based on a single processor that would perform the steps of a software program sequentially. But in the 1970s and 1980s researchers began to look for ways to increase computing speed by harnessing tens, hundreds and even thousands of processors, in much the fashion that adding lanes to a freeway will allow more traffic to flow.

The challenge that such systems presented was the need to create programming tools that would hide the interdependencies and complexity from the scientists and engineers who wanted to use the machines as problem-solving tools.

"These compilers made it possible for mere mortals to write advanced programs," said Edward Lazowska, the Bill and Melinda Gates professor of computer science at the University of Washington in Seattle. "Ken was the No. 1 person in parallel compiling." (Parallel compilers are software programs that translate programmers’ language-oriented instructions into numeric codes that control computer operation.)

The software technology he developed has served as the foundation for successive generations of scientists and engineers who developed advanced simulations, including weather and climate prediction and the model of automobile collisions. Moreover, the fruits of his technology are now rapidly reaching broad consumer audiences both through the latest generations of personal computers and through videogame players, which now come equipped with parallel processors.

Kennedy also played an important role on the first incarnation of the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC), which put together the 1999 Information Technology Research: Investing in our Future report. The strong, well-supported recommendations in that report helped pave the way for a dramatic expansion of the federal government's support for computer science research. Kennedy was also a co-PI on CRA's Computing Community Consortium proposal, which was ultimately successful.

I was privileged to have a few interactions with Kennedy over the six years or so I've been at CRA and was always impressed with his grasp of policy and his willingness to do more than was necessary in service of the field.

Update: Chuck Koelbel from Rice passed along these additional details:

A memorial service for Dr. Kennedy will take place at First Presbyterian Church, 5300 Main Street, Houston, on Thursday, February 15 at 3pm. In lieu of flowers, the family suggest gifts be made to Rice University, Ken Kennedy Memorial Fund. Checks may be mailed to Rice University MS-81, P.O. Box 1892, Houston, TX, 77251-1892. To contribute online, visit giving.rice.edu, click "Make a Gift Online", choose "Designation-Other, and type "Ken Kennedy Memorial Fund" in the Special Instruction box.

Gingrich/Gordon OpEd on Basic Research, Security and Competitiveness

Today's Washington Times features an OpEd from two champions of science from opposite sides of the aisle: Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and the new Chair of the House Committee on Science and Technology, Rep. Bart Gordon (D-TN). The piece was motivated by the recent Task Force on the Future of American Innovation report, (covered previously) which calls for a strong federal investment in fundamental research in order to help preserve the Nation's economic leadership and ensure our continued security. Gingrich participated in the roll-out event for the Benchmarks report and was quite eloquent on the national security implications of basic research, themes he and Gordon return to in this OpEd:

Throughout history, national security has been dependent on economic prosperity, and visa versa. An economically strong America is better able to defend itself. Likewise, the nation's ability to defend itself is a prerequisite to maintaining the infrastructure and other elements of a strong national economy.

Unfortunately, the nation has forgotten one of the most important ways our economic prosperity and national security are linked — investment in fundamental scientific research. Investments made in fundamental scientific research after World War II and during the Cold War have been essential to making our fighting men and women today the best equipped in the world. These previous investments and the new knowledge they generated also made enormous contributions to our economic vitality.

But our commitment to that defense-oriented fundamental research — the kind of research that pays off not in a year or two but in the long run, sometimes decades in the future — has eroded. If we do not renew this commitment, it will harm our global economic competitiveness as well as the effectiveness and safety of our troops.

The piece is very well-timed, given the current deliberations on the stalled FY 2007 Appropriations process and the President's forthcoming State of the Union Address. Its bipartisan authorship highlights the bipartisan support for fundamental research in Congress. With a flood of new Members of Congress in Washington, and "old" Members with new positions of responsibility, this is a drum that will need continuous beating in the coming months...as we try to make up for the painful stumbles late after a year of fantastic progress.

Read the whole piece.

NYT Article on Impact of CR on Science

The Sunday New York Times featured an article on the impact of the continuing resolution on science research. The article starts:

The failure of Congress to pass new budgets for the current fiscal year has produced a crisis in science financing that threatens to close major facilities, delay new projects and leave thousands of government scientists out of work, federal and private officials say.

It touches on a number of agencies, programs, and labs that are hurting and facing possible discontinuation. Regarding NSF it states:

The National Science Foundation, which supports basic research at universities, had expected a $400 million increase over the $5.7 billion budget it received in 2006. Now, the freeze is prompting program cuts, delays and slowdowns.

"It's rather devastating," said Jeff Nesbit, the foundation's head of legislative and public affairs. "While $400 million in the grand scheme of things might seem like decimal dust, it's hugely important for universities that rely on N.S.F. funding."

The threatened programs include a $50 million plan to build a supercomputer that universities would use to push back frontiers in science and engineering; a $310 million observatory meant to study the ocean environment from the seabed to the surface; a $62 million contribution to a global program of polar research involving 10 other nations; and a $98 million ship to explore the Arctic, including the thinning of its sheath of floating sea ice.

A number of quotes are included but one that sums up the thoughts of most of the community is from Mike Lubell at the American Physical Society, a fellow member of the Task Force on the Future of American Innovation.

"The consequences for American science will be disastrous. The message to young scientists and industry leaders, alike, will be, ‘Look outside the U.S. if you want to succeed.’ "

Permanent R&D Tax Credit Legislation Introduced

The new chair of the Senate Finance Committee, Max Baucus (MT), introduced legislation on the first day of the 110th Congress to permanently extend the R&D tax credit an article in Congressional Quarterly stated (Sub Req'd).

The R&D tax credit has always been a priority of the high-tech community on Capitol Hill and there have been previous attempts to make it permanent rather than extending it each year. However, the cost of such a permanent tax credit has generally kept this from happening. After much wrangling (most not related to the merits of the R&D tax credit itself, but rather the other tax proposals it was packaged with), the 109th Congress passed the R&D tax credit for 2006 retroactively in the waning days of the session in December and included the extension through 2007.

The CQ article also states that competitiveness issues will be a priority for Baucus as the chair of the Finance Committee. We certainly hope that is true, not just for the Finance Committee, but for all of Congress.

Task Force Releases Benchmarks II

As mentioned previously in this space, the Task Force on the Future of American Innovation held a press conference for the release of the Benchmarks II report on Thursday. Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, David Abshire, President of the Center for the Study of the Presidency, and Larry Wortzel, Chairman of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission and Vice President for Foreign Policy at the Heritage Foundation addressed a full house of Congressional staff, reporters, and other interested members of the DC crowd. This year’s Benchmarks report, called “Measuring the Moment: Innovation, National Security, and Economic Competitiveness,” focused more on defense and homeland security related research than the previous report.

National Journal’s Technology Daily and GovExec.com both ran an article on the event and report. A bit from the article:

A group of high-tech leaders and national security experts is asking President Bush to include basic defense research in his American competitiveness initiative.

The Task Force on the Future of American Innovation backed the request Thursday with a new report that warns that while funding for military research and development is at a record high, recent increases have focused on applying existing ideas to new weapons and equipment.

"We have been under-investing in the basic research needed for the next-generation military technology," the report warned. The task force was formed in 2004 to advocate for more federal support for research in the physical sciences and engineering…

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said the long-term goal should be not just combating terrorism but leading in science by investing in national security advances. "Otherwise we'll have opponents that have scientific capabilities we don't understand," Gingrich said.

He added that his biggest mistake as House speaker in the mid-1990s was not also tripling the National Science Foundation budget when Republicans doubled the National Institutes of Health budget.

We’ll keep you updated on the Task Force’s activities, press coverage of the report, and any impact it might have moving forward as we work with the Congress through the end of the year and into the next budget cycle.

A PDF of the Benchmarks II report can be found here.

Highlighting Cyberinfrastructure

NSF Director Arden Bement encouraged colleges and universities to expand high speed networking tools as a path to innovation in a speech to The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Technology Forum yesterday. The Chronicle article on the speech is available for free here for the next five days and then to subscribers only here.

A couple highlights from the speech and article:

"Leadership in cyberinfrastructure may well become the major determinant in measuring pre-eminence in higher education among nations," he said. "Indeed, to be even more provocative, I would suggest that leadership in cyberinfrastructure may determine America's continued ability to innovate -- and thus our ability to compete successfully in the global arena...."

Mr. Bement said cyberinfrastructure was a "comprehensive phenomenon that involves creation, dissemination, preservation, and application of knowledge." He said it was not just about building new networking tools, but new "norms of practice and rules, incentives, and constraints that shape individual and collective action."

Task Force Event Thursday!

In the previous entry, I mentioned that the Task Force on the Future of American Innovation (of which CRA is a member) was planning an event on November 16th to release its "Benchmarks II" report and press Congress to finish its good work on funding the President's American Competitiveness Initiative. Well, we can now share some details about it. Should be a good event!:

** MEDIA ADVISORY **

WHO:

• Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the House
• David Abshire, President, Center for the Study of the Presidency, former Special Counsel to President Reagan and former Ambassador to NATO
• Larry Wortzel, Chairman, U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission and Vice President for Foreign Policy, Heritage Foundation
• Rep. Jim Cooper (D-TN), House Armed Services Committee.

WHAT:
1. Participants will challenge the Administration and Congress to provide greater Defense Department funding of basic research.
2. Participants will support full funding of President Bush's American Competitiveness Initiative.
3. Release of the 2006 Benchmarks Report of the Task Force on the Future of American Innovation. To read 2005 report, go to http://futureofinnovation.org/PDF/Benchmarks.pdf (pdf).

WHERE:
Reserve Officers Association
One Constitution Avenue, NE
5th Floor Conference Room

WHEN: Thursday, November 16, 11:00 AM to Noon

- # # # -

The Task Force on the Future of American Innovation (www.futureofinovation.org), comprised of organizations from industry and academia, advocates increased federal support for research in the physical sciences and engineering.

Formed in 2004, the Task Force urges strong, sustained increases for research budgets at the National Science Foundation, Department of Energy Office of Science, National Institute of Standards and Technology, and Department of Defense.

For more information, to RSVP, or to request an embargoed copy of the report, please contact:

Anne Caliguiri
202.682.4443
anne_caliguiri@aeanet.org

Barry Toiv
202.408.7500
barry_toiv@aau.edu

Watch this space for all the details....

NY Times on Computing's Future

Steve Lohr has a great piece today in the NY Times on the state of CS, called "Computing, 2016: What Won't be Possible?" The essay was apparently spurred by last week's CSTB's 20th Anniversary symposium, which I regret that I couldn't attend. (Fortunately Cameron and David from ACM's U.S. Public Policy Committee did and have some great write-ups.)

Here's a snippet from the NY Times piece:

Computer science is not only a comparatively young field, but also one that has had to prove it is really science. Skeptics in academia would often say that after Alan Turing described the concept of the “universal machine” in the late 1930’s — the idea that a computer in theory could be made to do the work of any kind of calculating machine, including the human brain — all that remained to be done was mere engineering.

The more generous perspective today is that decades of stunningly rapid advances in processing speed, storage and networking, along with the development of increasingly clever software, have brought computing into science, business and culture in ways that were barely imagined years ago. The quantitative changes delivered through smart engineering opened the door to qualitative changes.

Computing changes what can be seen, simulated and done. So in science, computing makes it possible to simulate climate change and unravel the human genome. In business, low-cost computing, the Internet and digital communications are transforming the global economy. In culture, the artifacts of computing include the iPod, YouTube and computer-animated movies.

What’s next? That was the subject of a symposium in Washington this month held by the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, which is part of the National Academies and the nation’s leading advisory board on science and technology.

Glad to see that the CSTB event succeeded in getting the message across that computing is a discipline still rich with challenges and contributions to make. Let's hope this piece gets as wide a circulation (and has as big an impact) as this previous NY Times piece....

You can read all of Lohr's piece today here.

On Declining Interest in CS and What Can Be Done...

A few interesting pieces/tidbits to juxtapose this morning. Sam Liles helpfully forwarded this piece from The Tennessean on the declining interest in computer science as a major, which is apparently getting a fair bit of play on digg.com. The article asks the now familiar question:

Computer science majors make some of the highest starting salaries for college graduates in the country, at about $50,000 a year. Computer science and computer engineering jobs are some of the fastest-growing occupations in the nation, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.

So why are university computer science departments watching their enrollments slide?

The article puts the finger on student's perceptions about the state of the job market -- that potential majors shy away from CS because of fears about offshore outsourcing. But it also does an "ok" job of showing how that might be a mistaken impression:

The East South Central region, which includes Tennessee, Kentucky, Alabama and Mississippi, is the fastest growing in the country in terms of information technology jobs, in part because of economic growth here, according to her agency's latest survey.

Some 23 percent of chief information officers in that region plan to hire more workers this year and only 1 percent plan cutbacks.

Movva said she hasn't been able to find experienced consultants in Nashville, and has had to hire outside the region, including signing visas for foreign nationals, to fill job openings.

"There are lots of jobs but not enough people are entering this field,'' said Sandeep Walia, who is opening an e-commerce software office called Ignify on West End Avenue.

With Oracle database experts making as much as $150,000 a year, "you wonder why more people aren't getting into this,'' Walia said.

Vanderbilt professors are worried about the perception that jobs aren't out there.

The department's Web site includes a plea from the chairman to prospective students that says: "Contrary to what you may be reading in some publications, there are jobs. …

"The jobs are out there, but the perception is that they're not,'' said Richard Detmer, the chairman of the computer science department at Middle Tennessee State University.

Jonathan Waite graduated with a bachelor's degree from Vanderbilt in May. But he says the job market is saturated with computer scientists. He feels that way even though he got three job offers in three months of looking for a job.

But students' perceptions of the job market aren't the only aspects of the problem worth addressing. Increasingly, CS departments are realizing that the way they teach computer science might have something to do with declining interest in their major, too. And that's the focus of this piece in today's Inside Higher Ed, "New 'Threads' for Computer Science." The piece (which must be good because it quotes my boss, Andy Bernat, and CRA Board Member Rich DeMillo) focuses on the announcement of planned curriculum changes in the College of Computing at Georgia Tech, where DeMillo is Dean.

The Georgia Institute of Technology is today unveiling what some experts believe is a much broader approach to the problem. The institute has abolished the core curriculum for computer science undergraduates — a series of courses in hardware and software design, electrical engineering and mathematics. These courses, in various forms, have been the backbone of the computer science curriculum not just at Georgia Tech but at most institutions.

In their place, Georgia Tech is introducing a curriculum called Threads.

...

Underlying this approach is the view that "the one size fits all approach to computer science just isn’t working anymore," said Richard A. DeMillo, dean of the College of Computing at Georgia Tech. The plans were developed by professors, who prepared a white paper outlying how this approach would create "symphonic thinking" graduates — another way of saying graduates whose jobs wouldn’t be outsourced, a fear keeping many out of the field.

"The really big change here is that we were willing to give up the idea of a core curriculum," said DeMillo. "If you have 90 percent of your courses occupied with the core, you don’t have the flexibility to do anything creative."

The Georgia Tech approach is noteworthy, not just because it's an interesting approach to the problem, but because -- as Andy points out in the article -- it's being undertaken by one of the bigger schools in computing. There's plenty of additional detail on Georgia Tech's approach in the article and on the Georgia Tech website.

Additional efforts in improving the quality of CS education will likely be give a boost by NSF's very recent solicitation for its new CISE "Pathways to Revitalized Undergraduate Computing Education" (CPATH) program. The new program will make $6 million in awards in FY 2007 to encourage "colleges and universities to work together, and with other stakeholders in undergraduate computing education including industry, professional societies and other types of organizations, to formulate and implement plans to revitalize undergraduate computing education in the United States."

While the image of computing still requires a lot of work, it's also becoming increasingly clear that the field needs to reexamine the way it educates its undergraduates. In the coming months, I think we'll see further efforts by the various computing societies (including CRA) to put a focus on CS education. Hopefully the NSF solicitation will uncover some interesting ideas and approaches within the discipline as well.

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.

Commerce Department Wisely Rethinks Deemed Export Plan

Last June, CRA joined with over 300 other science and university groups in filing comments (pdf) opposing the Department of Commerce's proposed change to so-called "deemed export" regulations that would seriously impact university research efforts. A deemed export occurs when a foreign national "uses" technology subject to export restrictions while in the United States. The proposal would have made a number of significant changes:

• Deemed export applications would be evaluated not just on country of citizenship and permanent residence, but on country of birth as well;
• Expand the definition of “use” of controlled technologies to any form of instruction on their operation, including access to manuals and, by a conservative reading, visual access to a machine or source code; and
• Exclude from the fundamental research exemption all research conducted under government sponsorship that is subject, either by regulation or prudential practice, to prepublication review.

CRA objected to the rule changes for a number of reasons -- it's unjust and anti-democratic to judge people on their country of birth; the rule changes concerning the word "use" are confusing; the rule would impose tremendous costs on researchers, their institutions and the Department of Commerce; the rule shows a misunderstanding of editorial review and how scientific research works; and we weren't sure that a credible problem exists.

The Department of Commerce has apparently listened to the community in opposition and decided to step back from it's proposed rule. A Bloomberg story with some of the detail is here. This is my favorite quote:

"I came to the conclusion it was a much sounder approach to actually think about the overarching policy and revisit basic assumptions and revisit objectives," said [David] McCormick, [U.S. undersecretary of Commerce for industry and security].

Read the whole thing.

Here's CRA's original coverage of the proposed rule and our filed comments (pdf).

A nice win for the science community....

Sen. Sununu on Competitiveness and R&D

Sen. John Sununu (R-NH), known as one of the biggest budget hawks on the Hill (in fact, he's the highest ranked "taxpayers' friend" in the Senate, according to the National Taxpayers Union) has his take on the current push for competitiveness legislation in today's Washington Times. While it's not surprising that he sees lots of "waste" when he looks at the competitiveness bills currently floating around the Senate, it's encouraging that the essence of his Op-Ed is that the federal government's real role in advancing competitiveness is in supporting fundamental research. Here's a liberally-quoted bit from the piece (no pun intended):

As this debate moves forward, any legislation designed to promote American competitiveness and innovation should adhere to the following rules to ensure that American taxpayer dollars are not wasted or misused:

Focus on the basics. Federal funding for research and development should be applied toward basic science and technology, (such as chemistry, physics, material science and computational mathematics) rather than applied research, technology transfer or commercialization efforts. The private sector — not the federal government — has the obligation to advance the findings of basic research into marketable products and technologies. Equally troubling, legislators await the movement of a competitiveness bill in hopes they may attach pet research projects or fund a favored industry. Politicizing the process only undermines the integrity of peer review and dilutes the effectiveness of these resources.

Don't over-promise. To date, Senate competitiveness bills are littered with increased authorization levels for various purposes. Billions of dollars would be needed to actually fund programs at such inflated levels. Given this scenario, reasonable authorization levels must be utilized to ensure that funding can actually be secured through the appropriations process. It would not be beneficial to repeat an example from 2002, when Congress reauthorized the NSF with the goal of doubling its annual funding. Ultimately, NSF appropriations never approached such levels.

Limit new programs. Like so many other sound-bite driven "debates" in Congress, competitiveness proposals often boil down to the usual simplistic solution: Create more government programs. How many times do we have to go down this same costly road? And when was the last time we dealt effectively with a complex problem by creating new federal programs? One Senate bill would create more than 20 new programs without eliminating a single one. Dozens already exist, including the Advanced Technology Program, the Manufacturing Extension Partnership, and other questionable expenditures of funds. Congress should not create new programs without a thorough review of the value and efficacy of existing programs. Otherwise, we are merely diverting funding to new programs and layers of bureaucracy when such money could be used on basic research.

Make hard decisions. Once realistic authorization levels are established, Congress needs to make the necessary adjustments to ensure funding increases actually occur. Spending billions on a competitiveness agenda through deficit spending restricts future economic growth, and stunts future innovation and competitiveness. If we are to increase funding for a competitiveness agenda, legislation needs to include necessary rescissions and program repeals to remain budget neutral.

Don't play favorites. Given the popularity of a competitiveness initiative, it is disappointing that agencies integrally involved in basic research are being ignored. For instance, NASA's basic science mission, referred to by many as its crown jewel, results in significant scientific findings. Ironically, the administration recently proposed that planned spending for these accounts be cut by more than $3 billion over the next few years, a decision NASA Administrator Michael Griffin admitted was made solely for budgetary reasons. How is this internally consistent for the administration?

If done for the right reasons, a successful plan to invest new resources in scientific research can have a positive impact. Without discipline and focus, however, Congress is doomed to repeat the same mistakes, fund more failed programs and expand federal bureaucracy.

America's technology-driven economy grows despite, not because of, government intervention. That is a lesson we all need to learn before trying to "fix" what ails us.

While we could quibble with a lot of that -- the difference between "basic" and "applied" research is often not so cut and dried as he implies, authorizing NSF's doubling sent an important signal, etc -- it's hard to imagine getting a more favorable endorsement from a fiscal conservative of the portions of the ACI we care most about. It's certainly a more thoughtful response to the President's plan than a recent conservative think tank take, which ignored the R&D portion of the ACI completely....

Anyway, even if you disagree with the perspective, Sununu's OpEd is worth reading.

Federal Computer Week on ACI and Cyber security

Another quick pointer to some articles of potential interest of readers. FCW has three noteworthy pieces today.

Michael Hardy has a good article on whether government and industry remain committed enough to research to keep the U.S. competitive in the years to come.

At one time, the United States was the undisputed center of innovative technology development in the world — and the U.S. government led the charge. Because of government research, sleek cylinders carried men to the moon, and later, sleek cables carried data worldwide, a breakthrough that would come to be known as the Internet.

Times have changed. Other countries are emerging as technology centers, and the U.S. government has stepped back from its leadership position, letting the private sector try to fill the gap. Technology has made the world flat, in the words of author Thomas Friedman, so that oceans and borders are no longer boundaries to the flow of expertise and inspiration.

This evolution has many ramifications. Some fear that the United States is losing its stature as a world leader in innovation. Others point to the profit motives of industry, saying that research without a probable commercial application is less likely to get done if government doesn’t do it.

And Aliya Sternstein has two pieces of interest. One is a good survey of some of the legislation currently in circulation surrounding the competitiveness and innovation issue. The other details the NSTC Cyber Security plan we covered recently. Sternstein has a good quote from former CRA board chair (and current Government Affairs committee co-Chair) Ed Lazowzka:

Ed Lazowska, co-chairman of the President’s IT Advisory Committee from 2003 until its authorization expired in June 2005, said the government must increase funding to reach the goals listed in the report.

"So my entreaty to Dr. Marburger is, 'Spare me the commendations and show me the money,'" Lazowska said. "It's time for leadership and investment."

Links to all the stories:

The Next Bright Idea

Legislative ideas

Cybersecurity research plan identifies threats

Posted by PeterHarsha at 10:41 AM
Posted to R&D in the Press

CS Faculty Opine on CS in Computerworld

Just a quick pointer to an interesting Computerworld article featuring comments from Kenneth Berman, Randy Bryant, John Canny, Jaime Carbonell, Bernard Chazelle, and William Dally on the current state of computer science. Here's a snippet:

How can CS be made a more attractive choice for students?

Bryant: We should stop scaring them away. Predicting that all IT jobs will move offshore could become self-fulfilling. New jobs are growing faster than old jobs are moving offshore, and that trend will continue. We need to stop putting them to sleep. Students who take computer science classes in high school are taught how to write programs in Java, and their assignments have them writing code that does tedious things like sort lists of numbers. They do not learn about any of the big ideas of computer science.

Chazelle: I roll my eyes when I hear students say, "CS is boring, so I'll go into finance." Do they know how dull it is to spend all-nighters running the numbers for a merger-and-acquisition deal? No.

People have run away from CS because they are worried about outsourcing. This is a valid concern that can't be waved away by simply repeating the mantra that CS is cool.

Dally: We need to clear up many misconceptions about the field. Prospective students should understand that there are plenty of CS jobs in the U.S. and they pay well, that most CS jobs involve working with teams of people and place a premium on communication skills and teamwork -- it's not just a bunch of nerds working individually at terminals -- and that CS is so central to so many aspects of our economy that a CS education is good preparation for many careers.

Canny: We're losing in quality -- principally to bioengineering, which is now the best students' top choice -- and diversity. It's a problem of social relevance. Minorities and women moved fastest into areas such as law and medicine that have obvious and compelling social impact. We've never cared much about social impact in CS.

Read the whole thing.

Budget Update: Really Wonky, But Some Good News at the End

The Congressional Budget Resolution -- the first real step in the annual appropriations process -- has not gotten off to the smoothest of starts. The budget resolution is Congress' response to the President's budget request and, if passed, would set the total level of discretionary spending the appropriators would have to hand out over the course of passing their annual appropriations bills. Beyond that top-level number, the rest of the resolution isn't incredibly significant. The budget resolution is divided into a number of "budget functions" that describe general areas of federal discretionary spending. "Function 250," for example, is the "General Science, Space and Technology" account, from which NASA, NSF, DOE Office of Science and DHS S&T would ostensibly receive their money. In truth, however, the budget functions described in the Congressional budget resolution only loosely correlate to the final agency appropriations levels.

[Here's the wonky digression....] If the House and Senate agree on a budget resolution, that top-level discretionary number becomes binding. It's what's called the 302(a) allocation, and it would represent the total amount of discretionary funding the government has available to spend this year. From that number, the House and Senate leadership and the respective Appropriations committees have to decide how that money gets parceled out to the appropriations subcommittees, each responsible for a single appropriations bill this year. Confusingly, the subcommittee jurisdictions don't line up neatly with the budget functions laid out in the resolution, however. Three different subcommittees, for example, are responsible for agencies that receive funding from the Function 250 account mentioned above: the Science, State, Justice, Commerce (or, more confusingly, just the Commerce, Science, Justice committee in the Senate) subcommittee; the Energy and Water subcommittee; and the Homeland Security subcommittee. Since the budget resolution doesn't specify funding levels for particular agencies, the appropriators and leadership sort of, well, wing it when it comes to parceling out the 302(b)s. Ok, it's not quite winging it, but they do only use the budget resolution to "advise" the process, not direct it explicitly.

So, why does this all matter then? And what's going on with the budget resolution this year?

The budget resolution is a prime indicator of the political climate for various funding issues. It's the first clear opportunity we get to assess the mood of the two parties -- and maybe more importantly, the various factions within the parties -- towards funding the programs we care most about. This year's budget resolution so far tells us that funding for science has strong support in the Senate, strong support from the House Democrats, and not much obvious support from the House GOP leadership. This isn't terribly surprising given recent events, but it's also not terribly encouraging as we move forward with the appropriations process.

Here's where we stand:

The Senate passed its version of the FY 07 budget resolution in mid-March. Included in the Senate resolution is enough funding for the President's American Competitiveness Initiative, plus some additional spending -- $16 billion over the President's proposed discretionary cap of $873 billion, in part to make up for cuts in Health and Education proposed in the President's budget.

On March 29, the House Budget Committee passed a more parsimonious version of the resolution, sticking to the President's cap, but not guaranteeing budget space for the President's ACI. In the House version, the account that would include funding for the ACI-targeted agencies (NSF, NIST and DOE Office of Science) along with funding for NASA -- the "Function 250" account, for which the President requested $26.3 billion -- would receive $300 million less than the President's request. (In contrast, the Senate included $100 million more than the President's request for Function 250 in their budget resolution.)

The House leadership was hoping to vote on their resolution two weeks ago, before the Congressional "Spring/Easter Break." However, that process faltered when two factions of the GOP -- the moderates and the appropriators -- rebelled and threatened to vote against the measure. The moderates don't believe the measure provides enough discretionary spending for their priorities (which, for some, include fully-funding the ACI), the appropriators are concerned about language that would force them to get approval from the budget committee before considering any "emergency supplemental" spending bills, which have proven to be attractive vehicles for pork. So the leadership pulled the resolution without allowing a vote and decided to take advantage of the two-week spring Congressional recess to try to make some deals. The leadership plans to continue working this week to strike a deal with enough GOP members to put the resolution to a vote again next week.

Failing to get a deal done could have serious consequences. In the House, it's actually not too big a problem. In the absence of a deal, the House leadership can "deem" a budget with an $873 billion discretionary cap. It opens them up to charges of being a "do-nothing" Congress from the Democrats and isn't a great showing by Majority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) in his first budget negotiation, but for all practical purposes, the House leadership would probably be fine with the $873 billion figure.

The Senate doesn't have the ability to "deem" a final number, however, so failing to reach an agreement would mean that the Senate would be forced to use the FY 07 budget number contained in the FY 06 Budget Resolution passed last year -- which would set the discretionary number at $866 billion, $7 billion below the President's request and $23 billion below the number the Senate passed last month. Finding $23 billion to cut in the President's budget won't be easy, and unfortunately, one juicy target would be the increases proposed as part of the ACI.

So, the science community is hoping that a deal can be struck to get the House and Senate numbers a little closer together. The computing community is part of the effort to urge the House leadership to include funding for ACI in the budget resolution, citing the ACI's importance to computing research and computing research's significant contribution to current and future American competitiveness. The leadership and supporters of the computing research community have taken advantage of this opportunity to put the case to the House Leadership, at a time when they can take a relatively easy step to address it (all told, the increase for R&D in the ACI is less than $1 billion). Here's the letter (pdf) that resulted (and was delivered on Friday):

SUPPORTING COMPUTING RESEARCH AND INNOVATION

April 21, 2006

The Honorable Dennis Hastert
Speaker
U.S. House of Representatives
Washington, D.C. 20515

Dear Speaker Hastert,

As leaders and supporters of the computing research community, we write to express our concern that the proposed House Budget Resolution does not assume full funding for President Bush’s American Competitiveness Initiative. We respectfully request that Congress embrace this initiative by fully funding the President’s request in the budget resolution.

Numerous high-profile reports have pointed out the significant challenges that America faces from fierce and growing global competition. The President’s plan recognizes the critical linkage between the federal investment in fundamental research and the rise in innovation that will be required to respond to these challenges. The President’s call for increasing investment in basic research in the physical sciences represents a historic opportunity to secure the Nation’s leadership in research in information technology and other physical sciences and help ensure America’s future competitiveness.

The computing research field is a very concrete example of how federal investments in fundamental research drive economic growth. The field has a long history of creating revolutionary technologies that have enabled entirely new industries and driven productivity growth so critical to U.S. leadership in the new economy. A 2002 National Academies report found that federal support for computing research helped create 19 multibillion-dollar industries and made America the global leader in information technology. Further, several noted economists, including Alan Greenspan have cited the key role that information technology continues to play in driving U.S. productivity. Flat or declining agency budgets supporting computing research have created a significant concern within our community that we will cede these gains and our leadership by putting future innovation at risk.

The President’s American Competitiveness Initiative provides more funding for the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, and the core labs program at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Each agency plays an important role in funding computing research. While the House Budget Resolution does increase funding for sciences broadly, it is not clear that the increase will be enough to fund the President’s initiative. We specifically ask that the budget resolution allocate enough funding to ensure the President’s proposal can be met during the appropriations process.

Thank you for considering our request. We look forward to working with you as the Budget Resolution and appropriations for these agencies move through Congress.

Sincerely,

The American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)
The Association for Computing Machinery, U.S. Public Policy Committee (USACM)
Cisco Systems, Inc.
The Coalition for Academic Scientific Computation (CASC)
The Computing Research Association (CRA)
The Electrical and Computer Engineering Department Heads Association (ECEDHA)
Intel Corporation
Microsoft Corporation
The Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM)

Thanks especially to Cisco, Intel and Microsoft who put some of their political capital on the line to sign on to this important message. Their presence is very good news for our efforts and lends considerable weight to this letter.

Also good news is the fact that the President continues to tour the country making the case for the ACI. Last week the President stumped on the issue at a high school in Maryland, at Tuskegee Institute, and at Cisco in Silicon Valley. Tom Abate of the San Francisco Chronicle has coverage of the President's visit to Cisco. The visit spawned this very supportive editorial in the San Jose Mercury News. Here's a snippet:

As the president himself pointed out at Tuskegee University on Wednesday, it was through federally funded research that ``the Internet came to be.'' Other fruits of government-funded research include search technologies that spawned companies like Google, microprocessors breakthroughs that turned Apple, Sun Microsystems and Silicon Graphics into powerhouses, and countless technological advances that delivered enormous benefits to the economy. Future research in new energy technologies, for example, could help reduce America's dependence on foreign oil and turn the nation into a world leader in clean energy.

And without the investment, America's eroding ability to compete globally is certain to deteriorate further. Nations such as China and India, Russia, Ireland and countless others are emerging as economic powers in part because they are willing to invest in themselves, in the education of their children and in the training of their workers.

...

The seeds of America's prosperity over the past few decades were planted in the late 1950s, when the launch of Sputnik by the Soviet Union prodded President Eisenhower to call for massive investments in education, infrastructure and research. The time to secure our children's prosperity is now.

The President's continued efforts and the support of industry (pdf) are crucially important in getting ACI enacted and the funding levels called for in the initiative appropriated. As that last pdf points out, the amounts we're talking about here are not large -- indeed, in the context of the federal budget they are quite literally a rounding error -- and yet the potential payoff is dramatic. Hopefully the leadership will figure that out as they decide on their allocations....

NY Times Editorial: Outsourcing Isn't as Bad as You Think

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.

...

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.

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.

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 differ