What is to be done?

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

------ Forwarded Message
From: Tom Kalil <tkalil () uclink berkeley edu>
Date: Wed, 30 Oct 2002 10:33:49 -0800
To: dave () farber net
Subject: What is to be done?

Dear Dave:

During the last several years, I and
other White House staffers
worked with PITAC (President's Information Technology Advisory Committee)
  to put IT research on  a "doubling" track.  We were reasonably successful
with NSF, but DoD (and DOD's Congressional appropriators)
were less enthusiastic about increasing support
for DARPA's long-term IT research budget.

I think that the PITAC arguments are still valid,
and that much of that agenda remains
unfinished.  You and other members of
the PITAC wrote important reports
that deserve to be acted on.

So - in no particular order - here are
some of the steps that should be considered.

1.  Revive the PITAC - whose membership
has been allowed to expire.  Broaden the
charter to include not only "software" and
Computer Science agenda but "hardware" and
Electrical Engineering topics.

http://www.itrd.gov/ac/

Don't pick an arbitrary number
like doubling - pick
an investment target based on
concrete factors such as:

* Size of grants (average NSF grant is
$100K - enough for 1 grad student!)

* Success rates (should be about 30%)

* Share of IT as a percentage of GDP

* Specific topics that are of national interest,
are exciting to the research community, and
are beyond corporate time horizons (e.g.
cyber-security, reliability/dependability,
Moore's Law beyond silicon CMOS, tele-presence,
pervasive computing)

2. Increase DOD support for long-term research.
Although the Bush FY2003 budget for overall defense
spending proposed an increase of $45 billion -
they proposed cutting basic and applied
research.  Congress adds more - but usually
earmarks it.

See AAAS analysis at
http://www.aaas.org/spp/rd/03pch6.htm

3.  Consider some of the "supply side" measures
for increasing the number of undergraduate and
graduate scientists and engineers, as proposed
by Paul Romer and supporters of the Tech Talent
Bill.

See http://www.stanford.edu/~promer/Mkt-forSE.pdf
http://www.senate.gov/~lieberman/press/01/10/2001A15657.html

4.  Examine whether peer review is having
an overly conservative impact on IT research
and what could be done about it.

For example, get every ACM and IEEE to
organize a "wild and crazy" ideas session
of the kind organized by John Kubiatowicz
at Berkeley for ASPLOS.

http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~kubitron/asplos00/

5.  Pick and fund some "grand challenges" for IT research
that are applications-oriented and understandable to
the person on the street:

My personal favorite is software that approaches
the effectiveness of a one-on-one tutor (2
standard deviations from the mean in
student performance) - but there are many
other good ones that were discussed at
a recent conference organized by CRA.

http://www.cra.org/Activities/grand.challenges/

6.  Get organized!  The research community and
the tech industry has never made these issues
a top priority - or organized the kind of campaign
that was done for the NIH doubling campaign.

Only 1/10th of the effort that was put in to
defeating Bill Lerach on securities litigation
would be required!


- Tom Kalil
Former Deputy Director, White House National Economic Council
UC Berkeley


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