Computing Research Initiatives for the New Century
The last two weeks have been incredibly busy. With all of the end-of-semester activities, proposal deadlines, and so on, it’s been two weeks since I last made an entry here — I think this is CSDiary’s longest “dead” period this year! A lot has been happening, though. So now that things are getting back to normal, I’ll be writing more often in an attempt to get caught up on recent items of interest.
One of the things that has been consuming a lot of time has been a project spearheaded by Ed Lazowska, under the aegis of the Computing Community Consortium (CCC), to collect together brief essays on “computing research initiatives for the 21st century”. A subset of the essays we’ve collected so far are available on the CCC web site at http://www.cra.org/ccc/initiatives/. We hope that they will help promote CCC’s mission of advancing important directions in computing research. The brief, two-page format, with specific recommendations for action by the federal government, is designed to attract the attention of policy makers and key members of the Obama transition team. We are using all the channels available to us to make sure these ideas are all communicated effectively to the new Administration.
Related to my previous post on “computer science for future DARPA directors”, Randy Katz and I received a lot of very good input from various sources (including this blog). This has already resulted in some good exchanges with DARPA management, and furthermore got us thinking about broader issues of strategy and management for the agency. Some of our thoughts about “re-envisioning DARPA” can be found on the CCC web site here. In a nutshell, we call for a return to long-term, strategically focused research, a strengthening in the size and quality of the program management staff, and a re-engagement with the nation’s top research universities.
On the same web site you’ll find several other essays on both government policy and research initiatives. The research initiative ideas range from personalized medicine to “big data” computing. I’d love to hear any and all of your reactions to any of these essays (and more are coming soon!). With the transition taking place, it is an incredibly important time to make sure our thoughts and ideas are heard by the new Administration. It’s also an exciting time!
Peter Lee @ December 15, 2008