In his major address on immigration policy on July 1, President Barack Obama noted: “And while we provide students from around the world visas to get engineering and computer science degrees at our top universities, our laws discourage them from using those skills to start a business or power a new industry right here in the United States. Instead of training entrepreneurs to create jobs on our shores, we train our competition.” Read the full text here.

“There is a variety of mechanisms through which the research community can participate in agenda-setting. One model I have found to be very valuable is exemplified by the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) … “CCC has played an important role in identifying and promoting exciting “visions” for the future of Information Technology (IT) research — ideas that have the potential to attract the best and brightest to the field, drive economic growth, and address national challenges in areas such as health, energy, and education … “These papers and workshop reports have had a clear influence on Administration budget and recruiting decisions and have already sparked collaborations between government, industry, and academia. […]

Attached is a new DoD directive, reinforcing and clarifying the role of fundamental research at universities.  Roughly speaking, the new DARPA policies governing fundamental research at universities are now being adopted across all of DoD.  This means no pre-publication reviews, no export controls, and no issues with foreign researchers, except in “rare and exceptional circumstances.” It’s remarkably how rapidly things are returning to a sane state!

The Computing Community Consortium was launched three years ago –- in the Spring of 2007. The “long version” of what we’ve been up to is detailed in a formal self-assessment submitted to NSF in the Summer of 2009. The “PowerPoint version” is contained in an overview slideset. Here, I’m going to focus on just a few specific activities, to argue the benefits of having our act together as a field. Broad agenda-setting During the transition period to the Obama administration, we had the opportunity to feed a number of “white papers” into the transition team’s planning process.  Thanks to the receptiveness of the incoming administration, these white papers had impact […]

Three quick notes … First, I can’t believe that there weren’t more comments on John King’s terrific post,  “Fratricide and the Ecology of Proposal Reviews.”  This is serious business.  And it’s not “new news” — CISE has had the lowest average proposal scores in NSF for years.  We are killing ourselves in a misguided effort to show how smart we are.  (The number of “highly ranked proposals” that can’t be funded is, quite naturally, a criterion argued within NSF for the allocation of funds among Directorates.)  For god’s sake! Second, the NSF Graduate Fellowship awardees have recently been announced.  Did you know that the number of fellowships awarded to each […]

John Markoff had an extremely interesting profile of DARPA Director Regina Dugan in today’s NY Times.  Be sure to read it, here. This follows on the heels of Dr. Dugan’s impressive and heartening House Armed Services Committee testimony, blogged here, and a Computing Research News article by Lazowska and Patterson describing “New Directions at DARPA,” here. Here’s my favorite paragraph from Dr. Dugan’s HASC testimony: “Upon arrival at DARPA, we were determined to understand and repair the breach with universities. We discovered the following: Between 2001 and 2008, DARPA funding to US research university performers did decrease in real terms, by about half. But, as importantly, a noble and recent […]