Reed's Ruminations: A Blog by Dan Reed

Interesting Times Indeed: Science Debate 2008

I write a quarterly column for the Computing Research Association (CRA)'s newsletter, Computing Research News (CRN). The following is a preview of my upcoming column, which will appear in the November 2008 issue.

That awful gurgling noise you hear in the background is the global economy draining through the hole that is the U.S. subprime mortgage crisis. We do not yet how bad the economic downturn will be. However, if history is a guide, we can expect the weakened economy to depress rates of return on university endowments, tighten state budgets due to decreased tax revenues, constrain corporate R&D spending and increase the already large pressure on federal government discretionary spending. In short, we are likely to experience constraints on faculty and researcher hiring and on overall education and research funding

On the latter front, CRA continues to advocate that the America COMPETES Act be fully funded. You will recall that the Act authorizes greater funding for physical science research in the U.S., but no additional funding has been appropriated. (In Washington-speak, computing is a physical science.) As I am sure at least some of you have noticed, this is a U.S. Presidential election year, with its own set of implications for the future of science policy and research funding.

The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the Council on Competitiveness, the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Institute of Medicine, along with the leaders of many organizations, crafted fourteen questions for the Presidential candidates. (I signed in support on behalf of CRA.) This "Science Debate 2008" includes questions on approaches to research and innovation, education, climate change, energy security, health care, biomedicine and pandemics, space and other topics. The first, and perhaps most important question, concerns innovation:

Science and technology have been responsible for half of the growth of the American economy since WWII. But several recent reports question America's continued leadership in these vital areas. What policies will you support to ensure that America remains the world leader in innovation?

I encourage you to review the responses to all of the questions from both candidates at www.sciencedebate2008.com. (You might also want to read a recent New York Times assessment.) As I write this in early October, the election campaigns are in full flight, but by the time you read this, the election will have been decided, barring the unexpected, and we will know which of these sets of responses is more likely to become reality.

I can also report that the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), of which I am a member, also recommended that the new President appoint the Presidential Science Advisor as quickly as possible, enabling the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) to begin operating expeditiously. My personal hope is that the new President will name the Science Advisor during the transition period after the election and before taking office.

Let us remember that the laurel in the race to the future sometimes goes to the sprinter, but more often the reward accrues to those who have the vision, foresight and persistence to run the long and sometimes enervating marathon that is education, intellectual innovation via research and transfer of good ideas into practice. To hark back to our current financial crisis, the smart money bet (quite literally) is always on innovation.

 

The Long Race for Innovation

Recently, the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) met at the National Academy of Sciences to discuss and approve our most recent draft report on research and innovation, entitled, University-Private Sector Research Partnerships in the Innovation Ecosystem. Quoting from the executive summary (note that the final wording may change slightly), the goal of the study was to

… examine approaches to stimulate interactions between the private sector and universities, including new R&D business models that are scalable to a national level. As part of its study, PCAST also considered policies to incentivize interactions and to address potential barriers, such as intellectual property, tax policies, and organizational challenges. The study is aimed at improving the effectiveness of public and private sector research through cooperative investments, expanding interactions among personnel, and increasing opportunities for technology transfer in its broadest sense.

Perhaps coincidently, but more likely because the meme is both pervasive and compelling, this coupling of ecosystem and competitiveness mirrors that in the earlier study (Leadership Under Challenge: Information Technology R&D in a Competitive World) of the U.S. Networking, Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) program, which I had the privilege to co-chair.

Although the findings and recommendations of the study are manifold, I took two major ideas away from the presentations and the report. The first is based on a funny but pointed remark from Norm Augustine. The second relates to prizes and their ability to inspire our imaginations.

Norm Said the Stock Dived …

I've always enjoyed the fact that the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) staff members rearrange our seating at each PCAST meeting. It gives me a chance to have sidebar conversations with different people during each meeting. At our most recent meeting, I happened to be sitting next to Norm Augustine, the former head of Lockheed-Martin.

Norm is a fascinating guy, with wonderful stories and a piercing belief in the importance of research as the critical enabler of the long-term, global competitiveness of the United States. You may remember that Norm led the group which produced the seminal report, Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Future, which in turn led to the America COMPETES Act. (Despite bipartisan support, the COMPETES Act, which would double federal funding for physical science research, remains unfunded.) But I digress from my story …

During the comment period after the public presentation of the draft PCAST report on the innovation ecosystem, Norm told a wonderful but sad story that could be a parable for our economic times. (Any inaccuracies or errors in the story are mine.) During his time as Lockheed-Martin CEO, Norm said they had identified a set of promising applied research directions that could yield long-term competitive advantage to company, after the requisite time and investment. Pleased and excited by this possibility, he dispatched one of his senior people (a group president, as I remember) to brief the Wall Street financial analysts.

Norm went on to say that the analysts nearly ran from the room at the end of the briefing to sell their Lockheed-Martin stock, which then dropped precipitously on the markets. He noted ruefully that it was nearly two years before the stock recovered to its price before the briefing. Chagrined by this experience, Norm said he asked the analysts at the next briefing why the company had been so punished for its planned R&D investment and for seeking to assure its long-term competitive position. The answer came back clearly and pointedly. Most investors held the stock less than eighteen months, and corporate investment beyond this horizon was viewed as a drain on the corporate coffers.

A Parable for Our Time

Norm told his story to highlight the dangers of short-term thinking and the risk to our competitive future, a point he also made recently in a Science editorial (Vol. 321, No. 5896, p. 1605
September 19, 2008), from which I cannot help but quote an excerpt:

Much has been accomplished since The Gathering Storm was published. A new research university was established, with an opening endowment equal to what the Massachusetts Institute of Technology amassed after 142 years. Next year, over 200,000 students will study abroad, mostly pursing science or engineering degrees, often under government scholarships. Government investment in R&D is set to increase by 25%. An initiative is under way to create a global nanotechnology hub. An additional $10 billion dollars is being devoted to K-12 education, with emphasis on math and science. And a $3 billion dollar add-on to the nation's research budget is in process. Of course, these actions are taking place in Saudi Arabia, China, the United Kingdom, India, Brazil, and Russia, respectively. What about in the United States?

The laurel in the race to the future sometimes goes to the sprinter, but more often the reward goes to those who have the vision, foresight and persistence to run the long and sometimes enervating marathon that is education, intellectual innovation and technology commercialization.

Perhaps more pointedly, Norm was quite literally telling his story as the U.S. government was desperately seeking to develop a rescue plan during the largest financial crisis since the Great Depression. Call it coincidence if you like; I view it as a warning.

Prizes: Powering the Imagination

During the PCAST meetings we heard from a variety of academic, government, industry and non-profit groups. One of the clear messages concerned the power of prizes to catalyze competition and innovation, with the sub-orbital space flight X Prize being the most visible and recent example. PCAST member Fred Kavli's foundation has also offered prizes for scientific innovation.

The incentive for such prizes is rarely the direct financial reward to the winner, but rather the collateral opportunities that accrue to the winner. For example, Paul Allen undoubtedly spent far more on Burt Rutan's Spaceship One than the $10M X Prize, but the international publicity was enormous, and Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic has booked revenue-paying passengers for future flights.

Even more important than the economic incentives is the power of prizes to focus the imagination and intellectual talent of a community on accomplishing something both difficult and audacious. In that spirit, in 2006 the U.S. Congress directed the National Science Foundation (NSF) to establish a prize program. Also, the National Academy of Sciences recently released a report outlining a series of detailed recommendations for how to conduct a prize program.

Research, Teaching and Service: Dynamic Balance

The following is a preview of my regular column for Computing Research News (CRN), the newsletter of the Computing Research Association (CRA), which will appear in September 2008. Today, corporate employers make much of work-life balance and the importance of workforce development and sustainability. They also strive to inculcate the corporate culture and ethos. Research universities also have a culture and ethos, one that is reinforced by tenure and promotion evaluation criteria and processes.

I worry that we are devaluing teaching and service, to the possible detriment of academia in general and computing in particular. If there is a lesson from the evolution of the American university, it has been its increasing democratization of access and emphasis on delivering value to the children of each generation. We need to remember that.

Advice to a Young Scholar

You are a newly minted Ph.D. recipient, who landed a faculty position at a research university. The fall semester is just beginning, and you are simultaneously excited and a bit apprehensive. University life is unchanged and also surprisingly new – writing research proposals, teaching classes and serving on faculty committees. Your friends and new colleagues are giving you sometimes conflicting advice on time management and priorities. What really matters? How do you choose? How do you find your own path?

Research, teaching and service: they are the standard academic mantra, which one suspects Socrates himself whispered in Plato's ear. The disquieting truth is that we honor them to varying degrees, but often in that rank order. All too often, those of us with graying hair whisper to our junior colleagues, "Focus on your research!" Or, we opine, "You need to be a decent (but not great) teacher to get tenure." Then there's service, where we inevitably say, "Make sure you serve on program committees for good conferences, but leave time consuming service for later."

These are the oft-unspoken rules for success and tenure at major research universities. They define our academic culture, creating expectations and defining behavioral norms, passed across the academic years. I generalize and exaggerate, of course, and the relative emphases on research, teaching and service vary greatly across institutions. However, I find even the generalizations worrisome because the academic child becomes the adult, remembering the lessons of youth. I believe we need better balance, recognizing the criticality of the triumvirate to computing's future.

Rebalancing the Future

Do not misunderstand my comments on balance; our emphasis on research really matters. As I testified to the U.S. House Science and Technology Committee in July, economic growth and innovation are fueled worldwide by information technology research, conducted by talented and engaged faculty at research universities. In my testimony, I urged Congress to fund the America COMPETES Act fully and to encourage greater risk taking in long-term, innovative research across our universities and laboratories. The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is also working to foster long-term research agendas; I encourage you to participate.

Nevertheless, our passion and commitment to teaching and education are equally important. We have an image problem in information technology, and I believe we need to rethink our curricula and approaches to computing education, as well as the rewards and recognition we extend to committed educators, if we are to broaden the base of participation in computing and attract the diverse talent needed for the future. The CRA Education Committee (CRA-E), chaired by Andy van Dam, is hard at work on a set of best practices and suggestions for computing education. I know Andy would be delighted to hear your ideas and suggestions.

Remember, though, that Chaucer long ago captured the shared passions for research and teaching that define the best aspects of academic scholarship, "And gladly would he learn and gladly teach." We need to translate those passions into 21^st century reality. Research and teaching are but two manifestations of the same quest. As every young professor has learned, sometimes to his or her chagrin, there is no better way to truly understand something than to teach it.

A final, worrisome cultural manifestation is our occasional reluctance to serve the discipline when the need and opportunity arise. Each generation owes a debt to the preceding one, a debt best repaid to the generation following. Whether it be community advocacy, service as a funding agency program officer, a term as department chair, dean, provost or chancellor, or a host of other important roles, service advances our field and ensures a vibrant, rich and attractive environment for a new generation of students and scholars. Each of us owes a debt to our mentors, our colleagues and our friends. We need to better honor those who serve our community.

The Triumvirate

Research, teaching, service; these three points define a plane of excellence. We need not sacrifice one for another. Teach, explore and serve – in balance. We will all be better for it.

NITRD: Come, Let Us Reason Together

On Wednesday, July 31, I testified to the U.S. House Committee on Commerce, Science and Technology in the Rayburn Building on Capitol Hill. The full committee hearing, chaired by Rep. Bart Gordon, was on oversight of the Networking, Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) program and the 2007 report of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), entitled, Leadership Under Challenge: Information Technology R&D in a Competitive World. Some of you may remember that George Scalise (Semiconductor Industry Association) and I co-chaired the PCAST subcommittee that produced this report, which reviewed the U.S. NITRD program.

The complete hearing charter is on the Committee web site.  UPDATE: A video of the complete hearing is now online. (Click on the icon at the upper right of the web page.)

The other members of the hearing panel were

• Chris Greer, Director, NITRD National Coordination Office (NNCO)
• Craig Stewart,Chair, Coalition for Academic Computing (CASC), Associate Dean, Indiana University
• Don Winter, Vice President, Engineering and Information Technology, Phantom Works, Boeing 

Participating in the Process

In response to the PCAST report, the Federal Subcommittee on NITRD has issued a request for information (RFI) to a five year strategic plan, which will "…focus primarily on R&D goals that require interagency coordination, including multi-agency investments and joint programs, and respond to the priorities of the Federal government as a whole." You can find the full text of the RFI in the Federal Register and here on the NITRD web site. The deadline for responses is August 25, 2008, and I strongly encourage you to participate.

Finally, for you high-performance computing (HPC) readers scoring this at home, I remain a passionate advocate of HPC as an enabler of innovation and scientific discovery. In that spirit, remember the following excerpt from the 1999 President's IT Advisory Committee (PITAC) report (when the committee was co-chaired by Bill Joy and the late Ken Kennedy), which recommended Expeditions to the 21^st Century, that would

… report back to the Nation what could be accomplished by using technologies that are quantitatively and qualitatively more powerful than those available today. In essence, these centers will create "time machines" to enable the early exploration of technologies that would otherwise be beyond reach for many years.

A Few Observations    

In my testimony, I made some of the same points I have made repeatedly, namely the importance of strategic planning, interagency coordination and balanced participation, an appropriate mix of low and high risk projects and periodic reevaluation of our plans and portfolio. The key takeaways, from my perspective, are

• Taking the long view, as innovative, high risk research rarely has immediate payoffs. Indeed, in many cases the reward is not apparent until ten or even twenty years later. As they say in the sporting world, "No guts, no glory."
• Creating a strategic R&D roadmap for interagency planning and collaboration, along with some metrics that have enough specificity to determine if agencies are meeting expectations. (Note that I am not recommending planned outcomes – that is the definition of development, not research – but stretch objectives that inspire and motivate both the agencies and the community.)
• Fixing our national image of IT and our computing curricula, so they are more multidisciplinary and relevant and are more attractive to a diverse workforce. Many groups, including CRA and ACM are working on this.
• Rebalancing agency participation in a more equitable way, as the diversity of agency approaches has been a historical strength. More to the point, some agencies are not supporting their fair share of the work at present.
• Funding the America COMPETES Act to address funding shortfalls and address pressing needs in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) fields.
• Reconstituting the President's IT Advisory Committee (PITAC) to regularly (perhaps annually) review the NITRD program and its progress against strategic plans. Eight years elapsed between the 1999 PITAC assessment of the NITRD program and the 2007 PCAST reassessment. In computing, eight years is multiple technology lifetimes.

My oral testimony follows, with the key points highlighted. Within a few weeks, my written testimony and that of the other witnesses will be posted on the Committee's hearing page, and in due time (many months), our oral testimony will also appear in the Congressional Record.

Oral Testimony

Good morning, Mr. Chairman and Members of the Committee. I am Daniel Reed, Chair of the Board of Directors for the Computing Research Association (CRA) and co-chair of the PCAST subcommittee that produced the 2007 NITRD program assessment.

Today, I would like to make five points regarding the NITRD program, followed by a set of specific recommendations for the future.

Information Technology, NITRD and Innovation

Information technology, driven by basic research investments, has transformed our society and our economy. Imagine a world without personal computers, mobile devices or the Internet, without rich computational models or deep data mining. The future can be even more amazing – if we sustain our IT research ecosystem.

Historically, the diversity of our NITRD agencies has been a major strength, fostering multiple approaches to complex problems. The Internet began as a DARPA project, grew with National Science Foundation (NSF) support and blossomed with commercial funding. The Human Genome Project was a triumph of biomedicine and IT, building on NIH, DARPA, NSF and DOE research and birthing personalized medicine.

This brings me to my second point, balancing risk and participation.

Research Horizons and Risks: The Funding Monoculture

Today, the NITRD ecosystem's health is threatened, due to an over-dependence on a single funding source and inadequate research funding overall. DARPA's retreat from fundamental computing research at U.S. universities unbalanced the NITRD ecosystem. NSF now provides 86 percent of all academic IT research funding, and fierce competition has driven researchers to focus on short-term, low risk projects. Like a stock portfolio, our long-term success depends on planning, balance and regular reassessment.

This brings me to my third point, NITRD coordination and planning.

NITRD Coordination: Strategic Planning and Execution

In general, the NITRD program has effectively fostered informal communication and coordination across agencies. However, the focus on individual agency agendas has made the NITRD program much less effective in managing coordinated projects, particularly multidisciplinary ones of rising importance

This brings me to my fourth point, research opportunities and foci.

Research Priority Areas: Identifying Innovation Foci

In 2007, PCAST revisited the priority areas identified by PITAC in 1999, concluding they remained deeply relevant. IT systems that interact with the physical world, a special case of software systems, emerged as the new top priority. These cyber-physical systems embed computing, sensors and actuators in objects that span scales from our national infrastructure to implanted biomedical devices. Their creation also requires workers with new, ever more multidisciplinary skills.

This brings me to my fifth point, sustaining the IT workforce.

Workforce: Ensuring Quality and Quantity

Today, IT has a serious image problem, affecting workforce quantity, diversity and quality. Many groups are working to dispel stereotypes and create new, multidisciplinary curricula, but much work remains. We must also do more to retain the best and brightest international students who obtain graduate degrees here. Our international competitiveness depends on the availability of qualified and diverse workforce.

This leads to my recommendations for the future.

Remaining Competitive: A Call to Action

To ensure the health of the U.S. IT ecosystem, we should fully fund the America COMPETES Act. This will fuel the IT innovation engine – fundamental research by U.S. universities and laboratories -- and broaden STEM education. I commend you and your colleagues, Mr. Chairman, for working hard on this effort.

Second, we must rebalance participation in the NITRD program so the responsibility for fundamental research is not borne by one agency. Third, we must create and regularly update a strategic R&D plan and associated metrics that define interagency accountabilities, with a mix of project scales and research risks.

Finally, we must regularly review our research investment against the strategic plan. I also believe the NITRD program is best served by a standalone and active PITAC composed of computing experts from academia and industry. Eight years between NITRD reviews has been far too long.

Mr. Chairman, thank you and this Committee for your interest in the future of the NITRD program and its importance to U.S. competitiveness and national security. At the appropriate time, I would be pleased to answer any questions you might have.

KAUST IT Summit Reflections

I just returned from the KAUST IT Summit, hosted by Saudi Aramco. You will recall from my earlier post that this summit was convened to discuss the computing technology needed to support a new science and technology university, scheduled to open in 2009. (Thanks to Amazon CTO Werner Vogels for the photograph. Incidentally, Amazon was the only place I could find a travel guide to Saudi Arabia.)

KAUST is intended to serve as a catalyst for a knowledge economy in Saudi Arabia, with a $10B operating endowment and a new campus being built on the Red Sea. King Abdullah has charged Saudi Aramco with the design and initiation of the campus, its faculty and its students. The trip was a fascinating experience, for many reasons, personal, cultural and academic.