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July 18, 2007, 11:11 AM ET
Bush Advisers Try to Fix Tech Policy
We in the United States are in deep technological trouble. That's pretty much what a report to be delivered to President Bush in a few weeks is going to say about national technology policy. It's also going to suggest some high-priority fixes.
On the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, members have spent a year evaluating the 14 federal agencies that support IT research, to the annual tune of $3.1-billion. "Almost all academic computing is covered by this umbrella," said Daniel A. Reed, a council member and vice chancellor for information technology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. But it's a leaky umbrella, and one that's about to be blown away by international competition, he told several hundred academic computer scientists this week at the Microsoft Research Faculty Summit in Redmond, Wash.
The report highlights three urgent problems. First "we have to fix the visa system," which is much too complex, Reed said. American institutions are training good foreign students only to find that they can't get the paperwork done in time to apply for permanent jobs. Or foreign grad students have to go home for a week to deal with a family problem, and end up cooling their heels in Canada for eight months because they can't get back into this country.
Of course, saying this weeks after immigration reform died during a tug of war between Congress and the White House is a bit ironic.
Next, faculty and funders need to stop diddling around with small projects. "We need to have grander visions," Reed said. The report will ask computer scienctists to tackle big problems and take on risky projects. That's going to require an attitude shift on the part of peer-review committees, however, which are usually risk-averse.
The highest IT-research priority isn't creating new software, the report concludes. It's creating systems that interact with the physical world. That means things like sensor networks -- tiny, self-powered motes that spread through the environment, collecting data on pollution, or climate, or population movements and relay it back to users. A more reliable Internet would also be good.
That's the report on the report. Advisory groups are good at reports, however, and as Reed himself notes on his blog, earlier reports have pointed to many of the same problems. Anybody giving odds on whether this latest advice will be acted upon? -- Josh Fischman
Categories: Research
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