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OCR for page 139
5
Recommendations
This report emphasizes that the computing technology that un-
derpins so much of modern society is in large measure the result of
past advances in CS&E. Where CS&E goes in the future will do
much to shave and influence future developments in computing practice
~ ~ ~ . . . ~ . - . . . 1 · 1 ~ ~
and therefore to equip tne nation to meet tale social ana economic
challenges that dominate public concern and policy.
Unfortunately, the resources available to support CS&E are not
nearly as bountiful as the potential applications of computing to eco-
nomic and social needs. Various constraints always force policy makers
to make decisions about how to allocate resources, and thus the com-
mittee believes it is important to articulate a set of overall priorities
for the field that describe a philosophy within which its subsequent
recommendations are framed.
OVERALL PRIORITIES
Priority 1: Sustain the CS&E Core
The first priority is to sustain the core effort in CS&E, i.e., the
effort that creates the theoretical and experimental science base on
which computing applications build, bearing in mind that the core
effort is highly dynamic as the result of rapid changes in the field.
This core effort has been deep, rich, and intellectually productive
139
OCR for page 140
140
COMPUTING THE FUTURE
and has been indispensable for its impact on practice in the last cou-
ple of decades. But this track record of success has a down side, in
the sense that any field with a long history of successes risks being
taken for granted. Only by continuing support for the core effort
(support whose importance to the nation may well grow if industrial
CS&E research is cut back substantially in the future) will the field
continue to make progress that is broadly applicable over many fields
of inquiry and areas of human endeavor. While tantalizing successes
have been achieved with promising technologies such as distributed
and parallel computing, object-oriented programming, and graphical
user interfaces, the full practical exploitation of these and other com-
puting technologies will require considerable research in the future.
The committee notes with approval that federal funding agencies ap-
pear to recognize the importance of continued support for core CS&E
activities, and it wishes to encourage this trend in every way possible.
The committee calls attention to its use of the word "sustain."
Many in the CS&E community (and some on the committee itselfl
have been concerned about the increasing tightness in the availabili-
ty of research funding for core topics in CS&E and have argued with
some cogency that the first priority should be to strengthen rather
than merely sustain the core. Advocates of this position would say
that the track record of CS&E in research and education has been so
positive and successful that it speaks for itself, that there is not enough
support for computer scientists and engineers to perform the "core"
research in CS&E that will be necessary in the future, that computing
technology will improve as the result of advances in CS&E, and that
the information revolution promises to develop as it has in the past.
Why, these individuals would argue, should a winning research agenda
be changed?
The committee is sympathetic to this perspective and would have
liked to recommend a substantial increase in such funding, especially
in light of the growing numbers of academic CS&E researchers rela-
tive to available research funding. However, it concluded that such a
recommendation amounting in essence to "we should continue to
be supported in the style to which we have been accustomed"-would
have been seen unfavorably by policy makers as an entitlement argu-
ment, particularly in view of the substantial increases in research
funding that will be made available to the CS&E community by the
HPCC Program. In the committee's overall judgment, more benefit
is likely to accrue to the field and the nation if the broadening course
is taken rather than if efforts at the core are redoubled. The reason-
ing is clear: relatively few CS&E researchers are devoted to the pur-
suit of interdisciplinary and applications-oriented work, while rela
OCR for page 141
RECOMMENDATIONS
141
lively many are devoted to investigating problems at the core, and
human and fiscal resources devoted to the former are likely to have a
more significant impact.
Accordingly, the committee was led to its second priority.
Priority 2: Broaden the Field
The second priority is to broaden the field. Given the many
intellectual opportunities available at the intersection of CS&12 and
other problem domains and a solid and vigorous core effort in CS&E,
the committee believes that academic CS&E is well positioned to broaden
its self-concept. Given the pressing economic and social needs of the
nation and the changing environment for industry and academia, the
committee believes that academic CS&E must broaden its self-con-
cept or risk becoming increasingly irrelevant to computing practice.
More specifically, academic CS&E must:
· Increase its contact and intellectual interchange with other dis-
ciplines (e.g., other science and engineering fields).
· Increase the number of applications of computing and the quality
of existing applications in areas of economic, commercial, and social
significance, and understand that from such applications substantive
CS&E problems often emerge.
· Embrace the creation of significant new knowledge and de-
monstrable intellectual achievement as the relevant standards of mean-
ingful scholarship in CS&E, rather than focusing on artificial distinc-
tions among basic research, applied research, and development (as
discussed in Chapter 2~.
· Increase traffic in CS&E-related knowledge and problems among
academia, industry, and society at large, and enhance the cross-fertil-
ization of ideas in CS&E between theoretical underpinnings and ex-
perimental experience.
Such broadening would serve the interests of society at large by
coupling the formidable intellectual resources of academic CS&E more
directly to the practice of computing, thereby increasing the likeli-
hood that the full potential of computing can be realized. It would
also serve the field by increasing intellectual opportunities and di-
versifying the sources of funding.
Priority 3: Improve Undergraduate Education
The third priority is to improve undergraduate education in CS&E.
As discussed in Chapter 4, undergraduate CS&E education is highly
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142
COMPUTING THE FUTURE
variable in quality and outlook from institution to institution. Given
the importance of CS&E to computing practice and the large flow of
those with undergraduate CS&E degrees to business and industry,
the quality of undergraduate CS&E education is inextricably tied to
the state of computing practice in all sectors of society. Moreover,
better undergraduate education is necessary for better research, since
it is necessary for transmitting recently developed core knowledge to
the next generation and for providing the intellectual basis in CS&E
for individuals pursuing a broader research agenda. Thus, improv-
ing undergraduate education is a necessary component of both prior
. .
sties.
The natural evolution of undergraduate CS&E education will ul-
timately result in the synthesis and dissemination of modern approaches
to CS&E, enhancing the present skills and future adaptability of CS&E
graduates as well as providing a good foundation on which to build
knowledge in other fields. But natural evolution occurs on the time
scale of several decades. A major program aimed at accelerating the
process could reduce the time to a decade or less. More importantly,
the nation is likely to reap considerable benefits from such a pro-
gram, since undergraduate CS&E programs from non-Ph.D.-granting
institutions supply a considerable fraction of the computer specialists
responsible for implementing and maintaining the software systems
in all areas of application that underlie the information age.
To suggest more specifically how these priorities translate into
an action plan, the committee grouped its recommendations into two
categories: research) and education. Each category contains action
items for universities and federal funding agencies. Taken together,
these action items constitute a coherent plan that will improve the
state of the CS&E discipline on a much shorter time scale than would
otherwise be possible, to the benefit of the discipline and the nation
as a whole in a rapidly changing world.
All of the action items described below will demand considerable
leadership from the academic CS&E community. If the community is
to adapt to changing circumstances in a proactive and constructive
manner, senior researchers in the academic CS&E community the
ones whose words and actions shape the values of the community-
must take the lead in promoting the cultural changes necessary for
success in the new environment. Moreover, senior academic researchers
in the CS&E community are widely regarded as spokespersons for
the discipline, and their continuing presence and participation in policy
debates in both the executive and legislative branches of the federal
OCR for page 143
RECOMMENDATIONS
143
government will be necessary for years to come if federal policy and
funding are to evolve in the best interests of the field.
RECOMMENDATIONS REGARDING RESEARCH
To Federal Policy Makers
As noted in Chapter 1, federal policy toward computing and CS&E
has had an enormous impact on the field's shape and development.
As the scale of computing activities increases, the importance of a
strong federal role can only grow.
Recommendation 1. The High Performance Computing and Com-
munications (HPCC) Program should be fully supported through-
out the planned five-year program. Full support for the HPCC Pro-
gram will entail about $3.7 billion dollars over the next four years, or
about 1.2 percent of the entire federal research budget.2
The HPCC Program is of utmost importance for three reasons.
The first is that high-performance computing and communications
are essential to the nation's future economic strength and competi-
tiveness, especially in light of the growing need and demand for ever
more advanced computing tools in all sectors of society. The second
reason is that the program is framed in the context of scientific and
engineering grand challenges. Thus, although the program will sup-
port research and development in a variety of fields, the program is a
strong signal to the CS&E community that good CS&E research can
flourish in an applications context and that the demand for interdis-
ciplinary and applications-oriented CS&E research is on the rise. And
finally, a fully funded HPCC Program will have a major impact on
relieving the funding stress affecting the academic CS&E community.
Consistent with Priority 1, the committee believes that the basic re-
search and human resources component of the HPCC Program is
critical, because it is the component most likely to support the re-
search that will allow us to exploit anticipated technologies as well
as those yet to be discovered through such research.
The committee is concerned about the future of the HPCC Pro-
gram after FY 1996 (the outer limit on current plans). If the effort is
not sustained after FY 1996 at a level much closer to its planned FY
1996 level than to its FY 1991 level of $489 million, efforts to exploit
fully the advances made in the preceding five years will almost cer-
tainly be crippled. In view of the long lead times needed for the
administration's planning of major initiatives, the committee recom
OCR for page 144
144
COMPUTING THE FUTURE
mends that funding necessary for exploitation of recently performed
research and the investigation of new research topics be fully as-
sessed sometime during FY 1994 with an eye toward a follow-on
HPCC Program.
Recommendation 2. The federal government should initiate an
effort to support interdisciplinary and applications-oriented CS&E
research in academia that is related to the missions of the mission-
oriented federal agencies and departments that are now not major
participants in the HPCC Program. Collectively, this effort would
cost an additional $100 million per fiscal year in steady state above
amounts currently planned.3
For the participating agencies, the HPCC Program is a good mod-
el for how to encourage interdisciplinary and applications-oriented
research in CS&E. But many federal agencies are not currently par-
ticipating in the HPCC Program, despite the utility of computing to
their missions, and they should be brought into it. (As noted in
Chapter 2, 12 federal agencies controlling over $10 billion in FY 1991
obligations for scientific research each allocated less than 1 percent to
computer science research.)
Such agencies can be divided into two groups: those that sup-
port substantial research efforts, though not in CS&E, and those that
do not support substantial research efforts of any kind. The commit-
tee believes that both groups would benefit from supporting interdis-
ciplinary or applications-oriented CS&E research, but for differen
reasons.
Support of interdisciplinary CS&E research, i.e., CS&E research
undertaken jointly with research in other fields, should be taken on
by mission agencies with responsibilities for those other fields. That
research will often involve an important computational component
whose effectiveness could be enhanced substantially by the active
involvement of researchers working at the cutting edge of CS&E re-
search. Examples of interdisciplinary CS&E research were discussed
in the Chapter 2 section "A Broader Research Agenda."
The case for support for applications-oriented CS&E research from
agencies that do not now support research is less obvious, but to the
committee nevertheless cogent. While these agencies are generally
focused on operational matters (e.g., processing tax forms or income
support payments) and thus are expected to make the best use of
available technology, it may be that in many cases the efficiency of
their operations would be substantially improved by some research
advance that could deliver a better technology for their purposes. A
OCR for page 145
RECOMMENDATIONS
145
case in point is the research in the application of image-recognition
technology to the processing of government forms that is being per-
formed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology in
support of the Bureau of the Census and the Internal Revenue Ser
vlce.~
Moreover, the federal government's computer operations are of-
ten conducted at scales of size and complexity whose ramifications
are poorly understood. Without an adequate understanding of these
ramifications, it will be difficult to prevent computer-related disaster
or reduce the likelihood of computer-related inefficiency or fraud.
Given its operational responsibilities, the federal government must
do the best it can with what it has, but CS&E research undertaken to
better understand these problems could have substantial payoff later
with respect to reliability, security, efficiency of operation, lower cost,
and so on. An additional benefit is that applications explored and
developed in such a context may have considerable "spin-off" benefit
to the private sector, since many government information processing
needs (e.g., for security) are similar to those found in the private
sector.5
How can the talents of the academic CS&E research community
be tapped to provide maximum benefit to the nation in these inter-
disciplinary and applications-oriented areas? A first step would be
to establish a research program within mission agencies that would
tap the talents of CS&E researchers in the service of each agency's
own needs. This may be easier said than done, since CS&E research-
ers interact primarily with only the four federal agencies that con-
tribute the bulk of CS&E research supports group of agencies that
places a high value on research and provides many opportunities for
interaction between agency staff and researchers. The very existence
of such a program would prompt strong interest on the part of aca-
demic computer scientists and engineers in pursuing interdiscipli-
nary and applications-oriented research, but some care must be taken
to ensure that the "bridging of cultures" between CS&E and others is
successful.
Agencies might jointly sponsor research on problems of collec-
tive importance. For example, several agencies process vast amounts
of Eager and might benefit from advanced imaging and database
technologies; another group of agencies might have a special interest
in using computers and communications to facilitate service for the
disabled. When the work is specified and undertaken, it is essential
that such work be done by investigators from CS&E and other disci-
plines and areas who regard each other as intellectual equals; only in
OCR for page 146
146
COMPUTING THE FUTURE
this way will it be possible to maintain both an understanding of the
future state of the art in computing and an appreciation of the real
problems in the application domain. One way of ensuring true col-
laborative work is to consider only proposals whose principal inves-
tigators are drawn both from both CS&E and some other discipline
or area.
The location of such a program within the federal government is
a sensitive issue. On balance, the committee believes that the exist-
ing HPCC Program provides the most reasonable home for this pro-
gram, subject to one crucial provision to be discussed below. (Other
organizations have developed similar positions; for an example, see
Box 5.1.) The HPCC program has strong support from Congress, the
White House, and the Office of Management and Budget; thus indi-
vidual agencies have strong incentives to participate. Most impor-
tantly, the Federal Coordinating Council for Science, Engineering,
and Technology (FCCSET) is already in place and can facilitate inter-
agency collaborations.
In performing the coordinating role for this new program, FCCSET
would approach agencies not already participating in the HPCC Pro-
gram, such as the Department of the Treasury and the Department of
Transportation. It would also be appropriate for FCCSET to ask large
commercial users of computers to indicate what CS&E research might
be relevant to their needs. Such users (and the computer industry)
might be willing to support applications-oriented research to a cer-
tain extent, especially if such support could be leveraged (or matched)
by federal dollars.
The committee recognizes a certain danger in recommending that
the HPCC Program be augmented to provide for this new program.
In particular, it is concerned that planned HPCC budgets would sim-
ply be reprogrammed to accommodate this program. Such repro-
gramming would be inconsistent with the framework of priorities laid out
above. It is the intent of this recommendation that agencies that have
not traditionally supported CS&E should also participate in the HPCC
Program; along with such participation should come additional re-
sources from those agencies. These resources would support research
that would contribute directly to the goals of those agencies by im-
proving the efficiency of computing practice in support of those goals.
Box 5.2 describes some additional implementation issues that this
effort could entail.
OCR for page 147
RECOMMENDATIONS
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147
OCR for page 148
To Universities
COMPUTING THE FUTURE
University policy will play a key role in broadening academic
CS&E. Any one of the recommendations below may suggest a specif-
ic action that has been taken in the past, but their collective strength
is that they are part of a coherent strategy to broaden the scope of
academic CS&E. Their implementation will define a leadership role
for many senior CS&E faculty, who together have (or should have)
very influential roles in defining the tone and character of unixTersi-
ties and academic CS&E departments with respect to promotion pol-
icies and the boundaries of "acceptable" research and education.
Recommendation 3. Academic CS&E should broaden its research
horizons, embracing as legitimate and cogent not just research in
core areas (where it has been and continues to be strong) but also
research in problem domains that derive from nonroutine comput-
er applications in other fields and areas or from technology-trans-
fer activities. "Nonroutine" applications are those that pose sub-
stantive and intellectually challenging problems and may be best solved
OCR for page 149
RECOMMENDATIONS
149
by research collaborations with experts in the application area; some
examples are provided in the section "A Broader Research Agenda"
in Chapter 2. Current and future CS&E faculty should be encour-
aged to undertake collaborative research both with faculty in other
disciplines and with appropriate parties in industry and commerce,6
and in government laboratories. These collaborations will benefit
both computer scientists and engineers (as a result of new intellectu-
al challenges posed) and those from other problem domains (as a
result of the more effective use of their computational resources).7
As argued in Chapter 2, the central focus of scholarship in CS&E
should be activity that results in significant new knowledge and de-
monstrable intellectual achievement, without regard for whether that
activity is related to a particular application or whether it falls into
the traditional categories of basic research, applied research, or de-
velopment.
To promote broadening, action should be taken to make the uni-
versity environment more accommodating to interdisciplinary and
applications-oriented research and to stimulate the interpersonal in-
teractions needed for the successful conduct of such research. Uni-
versity administrations and CS&E departments should:
3a. Develop and promulgate explicit policies that assure and
inform all faculty members that research in interdiscipli-
nary or applications-oriented areas or work oriented toward
technology transfers will be competitive in the tenure and
promotion evaluation process with work that is more tradi-
tionally oriented, assuming that necessary standards of quali-
ty and achievement are met. Such policies will require mech-
anisms by which interdisciplinary and applications-oriented
work can be evaluated, possibly including:
(i) evaluation committees with members familiar with the
intellectual requirements of the other (non-CS&E) problem
domains represented in the work being evaluated. Such com-
mittees will have to address the very problematic issue of
how to interpret the traditional criterion of "demonstrable
intellectual achievement" in an interdisciplinary or applica-
tions-oriented context.
(ii) ways to take into account the fact that meaningful evi-
dence of intellectually substantive work in CS&E often takes
the form of system demonstrations as well as the publication
of journal articles, and thus that many CS&E experimentalists
up for promotion or tenure may submit portfolios with fewer
published papers than their peers.9
OCR for page 150
150
COMPUTING THE FUTURE
3b. Support CS&E faculty who wish to gain expertise in other
fields so that they may more effectively pursue interdisci-
plinary or applications-oriented research. Possible mecha-
nisms for support could include:
(i) establishment of short-term academic appointments (one
to three years) that academic computer scientists and engi-
neers could use to develop familiarity with and expertise in
other areas. Such appointments would typically involve re-
duced teaching responsibilities and could be held by new Ph.D.s
and senior faculty alike.
(ii) sponsorship of seminar series that describe challenging
CS&E problems that arise in other disciplines.
3c. Invite qualified individuals from industry and commerce to
serve on university and academic departmental advisory and
review committees for CS&E programs. This is a common
practice among some leading research universities, but the
practice should be more widespread.
3d. Eliminate or reduce practices that impede intellectual con-
tacts with industry. In particular, universities should con-
sider greater use of more open arrangements with respect to
the protection of intellectual property, such as cross-licensing
for university-developed technology, rather than insisting on
exclusive rights for themselves. Such practices conflict with
norms in the computer industry and set up roadblocks to
collaboration.
3e. Encourage CS&E research faculty to seek out nontraditional
sources of funding to pursue interdisciplinary or applica-
tions-oriented research. Nontraditional sources would in-
clude the program described under Recommendation 2; fed-
eral agencies other than DARPA, NSF, NASA, and the Department
of Energy; large commercial users of computers; and state
governments. As noted in Chapter 2, federal agencies with-
out a tradition of supporting CS&E research may still control
substantial research budgets.
Recommendation 4. Universities should support CS&E as a labo-
ratory discipline (i.e., one with both theoretical and experimental
components). With respect to its need for equipment, many parts of
CS&E are more like physics or engineering than like mathematics.
CS&E departments need adequate research and teaching laboratory
space; staff support (e.g., technicians, programmers, staff scientists);
funding for hardware and software acquisition, maintenance, and
OCR for page 151
RECOMMENDATIONS
151
upgrade (especially important on systems that retain their cutting
edge for just a few years); and network connections. New faculty
should be capitalized at levels comparable to those in other scientific
. . . . ..
Or englneermg c .lsclpl~nes.
RECOMMENDATIONS REGARDING EDUCATION
To Federal Policy Makers
The federal government has a history, dating to the days of Sput-
nik, of taking strong and decisive action to improve science and math-
ematics education in times of great national need. The committee
believes that undergraduate CS&E education would benefit tremen-
dously from such action today and that the benefits of such action
will echo throughout all sectors of society.
Recommendation 5. The basic research and human resources com-
ponent of the High Performance Computing and Communications
Program should be expanded to address educational needs of cer-
tain faculty. In particular, college and university CS&E faculty who
are not themselves involved in CS&E research and researchers from
other scientific and engineering disciplines that depend on computa-
tion need to become familiar with recent developments in CS&E.
The program described below to address these needs is estimated to
cost $40 million over a four-year period.
As argued in Chapter 4, the lack of current knowledge about the
approaches and intellectual themes of modern CS&E is an impedi-
ment to the full exploitation of computing. This is true for those who
teach undergraduate CS&E without the benefit of sustained contact
with cutting-edge research as well as for many scientists and engi-
neers whose education in computing was received many years ago.
For these individuals, programs of continuing education to bring them
up to date on recent developments in CS&E would have significant
value. Such programs would enable them to develop their own ap-
proaches to the subject material, informed on the one hand by expo-
sure to the current state of the art and on the other by knowledge of
local institutional needs, and they could have a major impact on the
quality of undergraduate CS&E education in the United States, as
well as on its ability to use computing in support of other science
. . .
anct engineering.
As major players in pushing back the frontiers of CS&E through
their research and in educating students through their teaching, aca-
demic researchers are best equipped to take responsibility for dis
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seminating their knowledge to parties that could benefit from it. More
specifically, it is their broad knowledge about important develop-
ments in the field in the last ten years that is most important to
disseminate to these parties, rather than their detailed knowledge
about their own particular research specialties generated in the last
couple of years.
A continuing education program to meet the needs described above
could first sponsor intensive month-long workshops to promote dis-
cussion among the top researchers from academia. These workshops
would focus on the problems of undergraduate CS&E education (e.g.,
content, scope, style, broadening, recruitment and retention of wom-
en and minorities). Neither course development nor consensus among
the individuals participating would be necessary outcomes of these
workshops; instead, the object would be for participants to become
acquainted with the various approaches to teaching undergraduate
CS&E in order to provide a basic platform of understanding from
which would emerge different ways to integrate various paradigms.
Following these workshops, the participants would give a series
of short courses for individuals who are not current with recent de-
velopments in the field, including CS&E faculty at non-Ph.D.-grant-
ing institutions, scientists and engineers from other disciplines, and
appropriately qualified high school teachers. (The program would
provide course leaders with financial support for the development of
materials text materials, exercises, software, and so on. It would
also provide some financial assistance for the workshop attendees.)
The active participation of senior academic CS&E researchers is
critical to the success of this program; indeed, participation could be
seen as an active demonstration by these individuals of leadership
for the field as a whole. Since senior academic researchers have, by
definition, made their careers by performing research of extraordi-
nary quality, it will take more than mere exhortation to persuade
them to become substantially involved in educational matters. One
mechanism to encourage their attention to such matters would be to
couple research funding to participation in these workshops. For
example, an augmentation fund for research grants could be set aside,
for which only researchers taking part in these workshops would be
eligible. Research proposals would be submitted and awarded through
the ordinary review process; researchers whose proposals were suc-
cessful and who had participated in these education workshops would
be eligible to receive an additional amount from the augmentation
fund to support their research as they saw fit. Alternatively, grant-
awarding agencies might give some degree of preferential treatment
to proposals received from participants in this program.
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The estimate of $40 million for the total cost of this program is
based on an assumed 100 researchers leading 400 short courses for
6000 other individuals.~° These funds should be an addition to the
very important elements already covered by the basic research and
human resources (BRHR) component of the HPCC Program. Like the
original BRHR component, it is appropriate that the proposed con-
tinuing education program be funded by most if not all agencies
participating in the HPCC Program, although such a program could
be administered within the NSF.
To Universities
Universities are the front line of educational delivery. If CS&E is
to broaden, university policy and departmental programs must sup-
port and encourage such change. Graduate CS&E education should
reflect and be supportive of a broader research agenda. Only in this
way can CS&E graduates understand the applicability of current and
rapidly emerging future CS&E developments to the increasing num-
ber of business, commercial, scientific, and engineering problems that
have (or ought to haired a significant computing component.
Recommendation 6. So that their educational programs will re-
flect a broader concept of the field, CS&E departments should take
the following actions:
6a. Require Ph.D. students either to take a graduate minor in a
non-CS&E field or to enter the Ph.D. program with an under-
graduate degree in some other science or engineering or math-
ematical field. Those in the latter category may lack some of
the skills and knowledge possessed by incoming graduate stu-
dents with undergraduate CS&E degrees, but they can use the
time that others would use for a non-CS&E minor to strengthen
their CS&E background. The choice of graduate minor should
be broad enough to allow the student a high degree of discre-
tion to select the minor, but constrained enough that the stu-
dent cannot evade the spirit of the requirement by selecting a
minor in a field that is too closely related to his or her major
interest. The committee recognizes that a recommendation of
this scope may well generate considerable resistance in the
affected departments, but it nevertheless believes that attempts
to overcome this resistance will ultimately benefit the field.
6b. Encourage Ph.D. students in CS&E to perform dissertation
research in nontraditional areas, as described in Chapter 2.
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In addition, expose Ph.D. students to a variety of projects and
intellectual issues in their predissertation work.
6c. Offer undergraduate students not majoring in CS&E a wide
range of CS&E courses and programs. By teaching other
courses less frequently, CS&E departments might:
(i) offer undergraduate minors in CS&E and/or general ed-
ucation courses in computing.
(ii) collaborate with other departments in teaching courses
that familiarize non-CS&E undergraduate students with ad-
vanced computational tools in the context of their own fields
of interest. Such courses might have appeal to CS&E majors,
thereby contributing to their broadening as well.
6d. Provide mechanisms to recognize and reward faculty for de-
veloping innovative and challenging new curricula that keep
up with technological change and make substantive contact
with applications in other domains. In particular, find ways
to give credit for the professional effort involved in develop-
ing the following:
(i) Laboratories. In both software and hardware engineering
education, laboratories are essential if students are to obtain
first-hand experience with the nontheoretical side of CS&E.
In the fast-changing CS&E environment, laboratories must be
completely revised frequently, i.e., every several years.
(ii) Textbooks. Textbooks that are both good and current are
important to CS&E and are difficult to produce as well. The
commitment of effort and time needed to write a quality text-
book is far greater than that needed to produce multiple re-
search papers, and in the case of a fast-changing field such as
CS&E the amount of professional competence and talent re-
quired is often at least as great.
(iii) Interdisciplinary courses. Given the requirements for a
minimal level of applications-specific competence in teaching
applications-oriented CS&E, the development of interdisci-
plinary courses should be expected to take longer and be more
difficult than teaching core CS&E courses, even if faculty from
other disciplines are involved.
Recommendation 7. The academic CS&E community must reach
out to women and to minorities that are underrepresented in the
field (particularly as incoming undergraduates) to broaden and en-
rich the talent pool.
As noted in Chapter 8, CS&E attracts women and minorities at all
levels at about the same rate as the physical sciences. However,
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CS&E is also significantly younger than the physical sciences, and to
the extent that a younger field should be expected to be more inclu-
sive of women and minorities, the field has an opportunity for out-
reach that it is not fully exploiting. Moreover, the underrepresenta-
tion of women and minorities in CS&E is particularly unfortunate
given the impact of CS&E on society; their exclusion from CS&E will
mean that their voices and values will not be heard as society is
transformed by the information revolution.
A secondary benefit of outreach is that such outreach might well
contribute to achievement of a broader agenda. This report has ar-
gued that the field will be enriched by interactions with those from
other disciplines and fields. Recommendation 6c recognizes the need
for these individuals to learn about CS&E. To the extent that women
and minorities constitute a larger fraction of these fields than they do
of CS&E, outreach programs for these groups should focus their at-
tention on CS&E, thereby increasing the likelihood of coupling be-
tween their "home disciplines" and CS&E. Computing practice as
well as CS&E can only benefit from the greater inclusion of individu-
als with a more varied set of perspectives and experiences.
Outreach programs need to take into account the special needs
and backgrounds of individuals from underrepresented groups so
that more are retained within and attracted to the field. Although
these programs are useful at all levels of CS&E education, under-
graduate CS&E education is the point of highest leverage for the
academic computer scientist or engineer. Thus outreach is an essen-
tial element of improving undergraduate CS&E education.
Additional Studies
In the course of its deliberations, the committee identified several
areas of special concern that should be addressed in future reports.
These areas include:
· The computer infrastructure for undergraduate CS&E educa-
tion in all CS&E departments. While important parts of the under-
graduate CS&E curriculum are technology-independent, other aspects
are strongly dependent on the technological state of the art. Without
suitable, up-to-date equipment and software, it is impossible to ex-
pose students to concepts and environments that will affect all as-
pects of future practice. For example, very fast computers with large
amounts of storage are necessary to support three-dimensional real-
time graphics and certain new and important programming languages
and systems. Keeping the educational computer infrastructure ap-
proximately current with the cutting edge of technology will be an
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COMPUTING THE FUTURE
ongoing enterprise. The committee hoped to be able to make recom-
mendations about the cost of a program that would keep educational
institutions current technologically, but was unable to locate firm
and relevant data on the subject.
A study on this subject would address issues such as the mag-
nitude of the need for new machines, current university policies re-
garding replacement of educational computer equipment and soft-
ware, community views on how current the educational computer
infrastructure must be to support a good undergraduate CS&E edu-
cation, and ways to fulfill the need in the most inexpensive manner
possible.
· Continuing education for CS&E. In considering the views of
the computer industry and large commercial users of computers, the
committee concluded that the needs for continuing education in CS&E,
especially among those responsible for designing, programming, test-
ing, and maintaining the software systems on which the information
age depends, are enormous, especially given the speed with which
the field changes. These needs are often recognized by all potential
participants in the continuing education endeavor, but for various
reasons not fully understood by the committee, continuing education
is often relegated to the backwaters of universities and neglected by
industry and commerce.
A study on this subject would document the magnitude of the
need for continuing education and explore mechanisms to encourage
industry and academia to pay more attention to continuing educa-
tion. Such a study would also focus on the needs of industry and
commerce for the continuing education of those already in their work
forces, and would speak to a continuing education issue different
from the one underlying Recommendation 5.
· Precollege CS&E education. In considering the state of un-
dergraduate CS&E education, the committee was struck by the large
extent to which incoming students have some computer experience.
Acquired in high school classes or in avocational pursuits, such fa-
miliarity has both a positive and a negative impact. The positive
impact is that these individuals arrive with some of the basic vocabu-
lary for and a certain intimacy with computer hardware. The nega-
tive impact is that these individuals often have misconceptions about
the nature of the intellectual discipline, imagining, for example, that
programming (all too often, even bad programming) is identical to
computer science. Moreover, these individuals tend to be overwhelm-
ingly white and male, a fact that works against the recruitment of
women and minorities into the field.
A study on the subject of precollege CS&E education would ad
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dress both pedagogical issues (e.g., what are the essentials of CS&E
that should be presented at the precollege level?), teacher training
issues (e.g., how are those who teach CS&E at the precollege level to
be prepared to make appropriate presentations?), and recruitment
issues (e.g., how can more interest in computing be generated among
women and minorities at the precollege level?. Meshing precollege
education with undergraduate CS&E education would be an impor-
tant task of such a study.
CONCLUSIONS
Over the past 50 years, CS&E has blossomed into a new intellec-
tual discipline with broad principles and substantial technical depth.
By embracing the computing challenges that arise in many specific
problem domains, computer scientists and engineers can build on
this legacy, guiding arid shaping the course of the information resro-
lution. This expansive view of CS&E will require a commensurately
broader educational agenda for academic CS&E, as well as under-
graduate education of higher quality. Adequate funding from the
federal government and greater interactions between academia and
industry arid commerce will help immeasurably to promote the broad-
enir~g and strengthening of the discipline. (Table 5.1 recapitulates
TABLE 5.1 Relating Recommendations to Priorities Established in
This Report
Priority
1. Sustain 2. Broaden 3. Improve
the CS&E the Field Undergraduate
Recommendation Core Education
1. Support full funding for HPCC Program
2. Augment HPCC to include more
interdisciplinary and applications-
oriented CS&E research
3. Academia to embrace interdisciplinary
and applications-oriented CS&E research
4. Support CS&E as laboratory discipline
5. Expand HPCC to provide continuing
CS&E education for certain faculty and
thus improve undergraduate education
6. Academic CS&E to change graduate
education to accommodate interdisciplinary
and applications-oriented CS&E research
7. Reach out to groups underrepresented in
CS&E education
X X
X
X
X
~X
X
X X
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the relationship of these recommendations to the overall priorities
discussed at the beginning of this section.) If the major thrusts of
this report sustaining the CS&E core at currently planned levels,
broadening the CS&E discipline, and upgrading undergraduate CS&E
education to reflect the best of current knowledge- are widely ac-
cepted in the academic CS&E community, the community-as well as
government, industry, and commerce will be well positioned to meet
the intellectual challenges of the future and to make substantial and
identifiable contributions to the national well-being and interest.
NOTES
1 The reader will notice that the committee has not laid out a set of topical re-
search priorities. As noted in Chapters 1 and 6, CS&E changes with extraordinary
speed; moreover, its subdisciplines are highly synergistic, as progress in one subdisci-
pline may have profound effects on another. Thus recommendations that favor one
subdiscipline over another could divert the field and funding agencies from opportu-
nities that could well emerge in the future. The recommendations of the committee
are structured to emphasize flexibility and to hedge against developments that are not
now foreseen.
A historical precedent is worth some mention. In 1966, the Automatic Language
Processing Advisory Committee of the National Research Council issued a report,
Languages and Machines: Computers in Translations and Linguistics, that was widely
viewed as a highly influential study in the machine translation of foreign languages.
By concluding that the basic technology for machine translation had not been devel-
oped at that time (and by implication that work on machine translation was not likely
to be immediately fruitful), the report contributed to a subsequent and substantial
decline in funding for such research. Supporters of machine translation argue that
such a decline was inappropriate and that the current state of the art would otherwise
be much more advanced, as it is in Japan, where support in the last two decades has
been greater. For more discussion, see Office of Japan Affairs and Computer Science
and Technology Board, National Research Council, Japanese to English Machine Transla-
tion: Report of a Symposium, National Academy Press, Washington, D.C., 1990, pp. 3-4.
2. This percentage is calculated on the basis of $14.3 billion in basic research and
$59.3 billion in applied research proposed in the president's budget request for FY
1993. These levels in the budget request represent a growth in basic research of 8
percent and in applied research of 3 percent over the FY 1992 levels. If these growth
rates are maintained, a total of some $312 billion will be allocated to research. (For
this calculation, then-year dollars were used. The $3.7 billion is the total projected
"new moneys' for FY 1993 to FY 1996 from Table 1.2 in Chapter 1 plus the baseline
funding from FY 1991 of $489 million in each of these four years.)
3. The size of the proposed effort ($100 million) was estimated on the following
basis. According to data provided by the NRC's Office of Scientific and Engineering
Personnel, there were 3860 academic CS&E researchers in 1989. This figure suggests
that in 1991, there would have been about 4500 researchers (assuming that one-third of
the Ph.D. production since 1989 went into academic research). The CISE Directorate at
the National Science Foundation received about 1200 proposals in FY 1990, of which
about 300 received funding. NSF program officials state informally that about half of
all proposals deemed scientifically meritorious do not receive funding due to budget
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limitations. Thus it appears reasonable to suggest that perhaps 500 CS&E researchers
might be available as co-principal investigators for interdisciplinary or applications-
oriented work. Of these, the committee assumed that about half would be both will-
ing and able to pursue such work. Thus 250 awards per year could be made to teams
consisting of two principal investigators, one from CS&E and the other from outside
CS&E. Assuming $200,000 per award per year in direct costs, and a total cost (includ-
ing overhead) of perhaps $400,000, an additional $100 million would be needed. This
sum might pay for a modest equipment purchase, summer research salaries for- the
principal investigators, a couple of graduate students, and a computer scientist or
engineer investigating some applications-oriented problem or a researcher from the
applications domain investigating potentially relevant CS&E.
4. U.S. Department of Commerce, National Computer Systems Laboratory: Annual
Report 1990, NISTR 4492, National Institute of Standards and Technology, Washington,
D.C., 1990, p. 21.
5. In this context, note that the federal government explicitly acknowledges a re-
sponsibility to "participate with the private sector in pre-competitive research on ge-
neric, enabling technologies that have the potential to contribute to a broad range of
government and commercial applications. In many cases, . . . technical uncertainties
are not sufficiently reduced to permit assessment of full commercial potential." (Pre-
competitive research is defined as research that "occurs prior to the development of
application-specific commercial prototypes.") See Office of Science and Technology
Policy, U.S. Technology Policy, Executive Office of the President, Washington, D.C.,
September 26, 1990, p. 5.
6. For purposes of this discussion, the term "industry" refers to the computer
industry. The term "commerce" refers to commercial (or nonspecialized governmen-
tal) users of computers, especially those with information-processing needs in large
volume.
7. This recommendation is consistent with an ACM recommendation that "institu-
tions should encourage more faculty in the discipline of computing to engage with
business people in the design of commercial applications, especially those that will
give contact with industry thinking on long-term issues. Institutions should encour-
age more computing researchers to embrace computational science by joining in projects
with physical scientists, bringing their expertise in algorithms and architectures." See
Association for Computing Machinery, "The Scope and Directions of Computer Sci-
ence: Computing, Applications, and Computational Science," Communications of the
ACM, Volume 34(10), October 1991, p. 131. (This paper uses the term "computing" as
this report uses "computer science and engineering.")
8. Work on technology transfer is not envisioned as consulting activities that con-
sist primarily of giving advice. Rather, this work should usually involve sustained
and intimate interaction between academic computer scientists and engineers and those
in working in nonresearch activities in industry and commerce. While it would be
most desirable if the computing aspects of the problem were novel, such activity would
in any event enhance the social and economic impact of CS&E research.
9. A forthcoming CSTB report will address in detail the issues faced by experimen-
tal computer scientists and engineers in academia. Among these issues are the long
time that system building requires relative to publishing papers (and thus the lower
volume of papers), the tendency for many system builders to present their work in
conferences rather than in archival journals, and the evaluation of systems in an aca-
demic context.
10. Course leaders (i.e., participating researchers) are assumed to spend one full-
time month in intensive discussion workshops on undergraduate education, one month
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preparing a short course, and four months teaching four short courses over a four-year
period. Assuming that about $100,000 would be needed per person per full-time year
in summer salary, travel, lodging, and so on, the efforts of course leaders would cost
about $5 million in direct costs over four years, or about $8 million including a 66
percent overhead rate. Grant augmentation is calculated on the basis of 25 researchers
every year receiving an additional $70,000 in research funding (not including over-
head), or $12 million over four years. Over a four-year period, a program for 6000
individuals (including a large fraction of the 5000 or so CS&E faculty in the nation)
attending a four-week short course might cost $2000 per attendee (likely not to cover
the entire cost of the course), for direct costs of $12 million and an additional $8
million in overhead.
11. This sentiment was expressed at the recent CSTB Workshop on Human Resourc-
es in CS&E, on which a report will be forthcoming in the summer of 1992.
12. Inadequate laboratory infrastructure for CS&E was noted as a problem in 1989
by the National Science Foundation. See National Science Foundation, Report on the
NSF Disciplinary Workshops in Undergraduate Education, NSF, Washington, D.C., April
1989, p. 39.
Representative terms from entire chapter:
continuing education
