IP: Information technology initiative will spread funding across agencies

[Dave Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>]

WASHINGTON FAX   November 5, 1998


Information technology initiative will spread funding across agencies

National Science Foundation competing for leadership role


Last August a special committee appointed by President Clinton issued its
menu for a new research policy for information technology (IT). It
recommends an additional $1 billion over the next five years be distributed
among the key agencies that do and sponsor R&D in the field, whose current
spending totals about $1.1 billion

A scramble is now on among those units to stake their claims on the new
initiatives in their FY 2000 budgets. Especially anxious is the National
Science Foundation (NSF), which hopes to be named the lead agency for the
interagency enterprise. Involved, besides NSF, are the Defense Department,
Energy Department, NASA, and National Institute of Standards and
Technology.

And in spite of the recommendation of the report's authors, some question
whether NSF should indeed be the lead agency in a field that has become so
huge and socially embracing.

The report--President's Information Technology Advisory Committee Interim
Report to the President (the PITAC report)--is a popular piece of
literature around Washington and is available on the World Wide Web. The
president and Vice President Gore are committed to its findings, and the
interagency politics are hot. PITAC is co-chaired by Bill Joy, founder and
vice president of research at Sun Microsystems, and Ken Kennedy, director
of the Center for Research on Parallel Computation and professor of
computer science at Rice.

Their report draws two major conclusions. The first is that federal R&D in
infotech is "inadequate," and the second that it is "too heavily focused on
long term problems." Two paragraphs pretty much tell the whole story:

"The Nation is gravely under-investing in the long-term, high risk research
that can replenish the reservoir of ideas that will lead to innovations in
IT in generations to come. IT R&D investment should increase by roughly a
billion dollars over the next five years with emphasis placed on support
for fundamental research.

"Much of the federal investment in IT R&D is being handled by the mission
agencies. In the face of enormous increases in information technology
problems to be addressed, funding agencies have had to prioritize their
investments. Inevitable, priority has been given to short-term
mission-oriented goals over long-term research. This reflects the situation
in the private sector as well. This trend threatens to interrupt the flow
of ideas that has driven the information economy in this decade and
threatens efforts to solve nationally important problems."

The report goes on to describe the kinds of research needed in software,
scalable information infrastructure, high-end computing, and socioeconomic
and workforce impacts. On the latter it warns of shortages in the workforce
in all the important areas. It also elaborates on a series of "visions" for
the field and the "transformation" that will inevitable occur in a field
that for all its promise for linking up the world also conjures images of
vast economic and social disruptions.

Whether NSF winds up as the lead agency is problematical. A question is
whether the field has grown too large for a single broad-band research
agency to oversee. White House Science Adviser Neal Lane says he hasn't
made up his mind on the matter and is awaiting strategic plans from several
agencies. "Much turns on what one means by `lead' agency," says an OSTP
staffer. "Right now the agencies are coming in with a fascinating flow of
new research ideas for incorporation in the next budget. They are coming in
with totally new areas of research. The problem is to sort out the ideas
because we can't fund them all."

The report calls for three main federal initiatives--support for projects
"of broader scope and longer duration," establishing "virtual centers for
Expeditions into the 21st Century," and establishing several "enabling
technology centers."

The "President's Information Technology Advisory Committee Interim Report
to the President" (the PITAC report) is available on the National
Coordination Office for Computing, Information, and Communications (CCIC)
web site at [http://www.ccic.gov/ac/interim/].

Another key report issued in August is the interagency plan "Computing,
Information, and Communications: Networked Computing for the 21st Century"
by the National Science and Technology Council's subcommittee on Computing,
Information, and Communications. It is available on the CCIC web site at
[http://www.ccic.gov/pubs/blue99/].

- --Special to Washington Fax



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_____________________________________________________________________
David Farber         
The Alfred Fitler Moore Professor of Telecommunication Systems
University of Pennsylvania 
Home Page: http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~farber