The following is a special contribution to this blog by CCC Council member Stephanie Forrest.  She reports on her department’s opinions about PostDocs in computer science.  We welcome your thoughts about Stephanie’s summary — as well as the broader PostDoc issue — below or at http://cra.org/postdocs.  (More information about the CRA-facilitated conversation on CS PostDocs is available here.) The University of New Mexico’s Computer Science Department has considerable experience training post-doctoral fellows because of its long tradition in interdisciplinary research.  We discussed the pros and cons of post-doctoral fellows at a recent Faculty meeting.  Several of us have had positive experiences with post-docs — they have enriched our department during their stay — and […]

Several items of interest this Monday morning:

President’s FY 2012 Budget Unveiled

President Obama will reveal his budget request for FY 2012 at 10:30am ET this morning. For live coverage, check your favorite news source. Later today, there will be budget briefings by Federal funding agencies, notably the National Science Foundation — including the CISE Directorate — and the Department of Energy’s Office of Science. Our colleagues at CRA’s Policy Blog will have complete coverage of the President’s anticipated $3.7 trillion request — and specifically what it says about Federal funding for R&D.

You gotta love having geeks in the White House!  In this short video, Austan Goolsbee, Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, explains the National Wireless Initiative, which includes a significant research component.  Watch the video here.  Learn more about the National Wireless Initiative here.

The Computing Research Association — the umbrella organization of the CCC — today launched an effort to engage the computing research community in a conversation about PostDocs, at a time when a growing number of recent PhDs in computer science and allied fields are pursuing postdoctoral fellowships. According to data from CRA’s annual Taulbee Survey, the numbers of new PostDocs soared from 60 in 1998 to 159 in 2009 (three-year rolling averages), while the numbers of new tenure-track faculty positions declined sharply, from 224 in 2004 to 151 in 2009 (again, three-year rolling averages).  Moreover, the numbers of recent PhDs who are hired into industry immediately out of graduate school […]

As we blogged in this space a few weeks back, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology issued a report on the nation’s $4.3 billion Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) program in mid-December.  The report calls for new multi-agency NIT R&D initiatives that support high-risk/high-reward research in areas of particular importance to the nation, including health information technology, energy and transportation, and security and robustness of cyber-infrastructure. As part of the report roll-out, the importance of information technology research and development was highlighted by several leading Federal officials — including Aneesh Chopra, the nation’s Chief Technology Officer; Vivek Kundra, the Chief Information Officer; and Tom Kalil, Deputy […]

A few interesting news stories in the past week: What is “Watson”? Word came on Tuesday that “Watson,” an IBM supercomputer system, will take on Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter — the two most successful players in “Jeopardy” history — on three episodes of the show slated for broadcast Feb. 14-16, 2011. As we’ve previously highlighted in this space, the New York Times Magazine profiled “Watson” this past summer.  In that article, the Times Magazine provided a step-by-step account of the AI/machine learning challenges and advances underlying the development of the advanced “question answering” machine. Now, in the man v. man v. machine challenge scheduled to air early next year, […]