United States House of Representatives Committee on Science and Technology Hearing on Oversight of the Federal Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) Program Dr. Daniel A. Reed [email protected] Chair, Computing Research Association (CRA) 1100 17th Street, NW Washington, D.C. 20036 Director, Scalable and Multicore Computing Microsoft Corporation Redmond, WA 98052 July 31, 2008Testimony of Daniel A. Reed Chair, Computing Research Association (CRA) July 31, 2008 Good afternoon, Mr. Chairman and Members of the Committee. Thank you for granting me this opportunity to comment on the federal Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) program. I am Daniel Reed, Chair of the Board of Directors for the Computing Research Association (CRA). I am also a researcher in high-performance computing; a member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST); the former Head of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign; and currently Director of Scalable and Multicore Computing Strategy at Microsoft. During our lifetime, information technology has transformed our society, our economy and our personal lives. Imagine a world without consumer electronics, personal computers, the Internet or predictive computational models. As Tennyson so eloquently expressed, we have “… dipped into the future, far as human eye could see; saw the vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be.” Despite our current wonder, the future of computing – the world that can be – is even more amazing, for we are poised on the brink of even greater revolutions: deep understanding of biological and physical processes, personalized medicine and assistive living technology, autonomous vehicles that navigate in traffic and severe weather, strategic and tactical military and intelligence systems with true information superiority, information assistants that enhance our intellectual activities, distributed sensors and actuators that protect our environment, intelligent systems for advanced energy management, and a host of other innovations. Making such visions a reality is the essence of information technology research and the core of the NITRD program. It is also why sustained and appropriate investments in information technology research and development are critical to our nation’s future. In response to your questions, I would like to make eight points today regarding the status and future of the NITRD program, beginning with a synopsis of the recent report of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) assessment of the Networking, Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) program. 1. PCAST: Information Technology Assessment In 2007, I was privileged to co-chair PCAST’s assessment of the NITRD program. The resulting report, Leadership Under Challenge: Information Technology R&D in a Competitive World,1 was the first overall assessment of the NITRD program since that conducted in 1999 by the President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC). The 2007 PCAST report emphasized the following points. • NIT and global competitiveness. Today, the United States is the global leader in networking and information technology (NIT) and that leadership is essential to U.S. economic prosperity, security, and quality of life. However, other countries and regions have also recognized the value of NIT leadership and are mounting challenges. • NITRD ecosystem. The NITRD program is a key mechanism through which the federal government contributes to NIT research and development leadership, and the NITRD program has by and large been effective at meeting agency and national needs. 1 Leadership Under Challenge: Information Technology R&D in a Competitive World, President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), August 2007, http://www.ostp.gov/pdf/nitrd_review.pdfFigure 1 IT Research Transition and Impacts • Research horizons and risks. The federal NIT research and development portfolio is currently imbalanced in favor of low-risk projects; too many are small scale and short-term efforts. The number of large-scale, multidisciplinary activities with long time horizons is limited and visionary projects are few. • Workforce availability and skills. The number of people completing NIT education programs and the usefulness of that education fall short of current and projected needs. Current curricula must be re-evaluated, graduate fellowships increased and visa processes simplified to address these challenges. • Research priority areas. The top priorities for new funding are NIT systems connected to the physical world, software, networking and digital data, with continuing emphasis on high-end computing, cybersecurity and information assurance, human-computer interaction and NIT and the social sciences. • Strategic plans and roadmaps. We must develop, maintain, and implement a strategic plan for the NITRD program, along with public R&D plans or roadmaps and progress metrics for key technical areas that require long-term interagency coordination and engagement. • Interagency coordination. The current nature and scale of NITRD program coordination processes are inadequate to meet anticipated national needs and to maintain U.S. leadership in an era of global NIT competitiveness. With this backdrop, the remainder of my testimony expands and explains the rationale for these PCAST findings along with personal observations on possible actions. However, the opinions expressed herein are my own, not necessarily those of PCAST or the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). I would also like to acknowledge the contributions of Peter Harsha, from the Computing Research Association (CRA), to these remarks.2. The Importance of Information Technology The importance of information technology (IT) in enabling innovation and powering the new economy is well documented. Advances in computing and communications have led to significant improvements in product design, development and distribution for American industry, provided instant communications for people worldwide, and enabled new scientific disciplines like bioinformatics and nanotechnology that show great promise in improving a whole range of health, security, and communications technologies. Several studies have suggested