Innovation in Information Technology (2003) / Chapter Skim
Currently Skimming:
2. Excerpts From Earlier CSTB Reports
2. Excerpts From Earlier CSTB Reports
Pages 30-70
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From page 30... ...
, and · Evolving the High Performance Computing and Communications Initiative to Support the Nation's Information Infrastructure (1995~. While this synthesis report is based on all the CSTB reports listed in Box 1 in the "Summary and Recommendations," the excerpts from these three reports are the most general and broad.
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From page 31... ...
Some IT research lays out principles or constraints that apply to all computing and communications systems; examples include theorems that show the limitations of computation (what can and cannot be computed by a digital computer within a reasonable time) or the fundamental limits on capacities of communications channels.
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From page 32... ...
Progress in IT can come from research in many different disciplines. For example, work on the physics of silicon can be considered IT research if it is driven by problems related to computer chips; the work of electrical engineers is considered IT research if it focuses on communications or semiconductor devices; anthropologists and other social scientists studying the uses of new technology can be doing IT research if their work informs the development and deployment of new IT applications; and computer scientists and computer engineers address a widening range of issues, from generating fundamental principles for the behavior of information in systems to developing new concepts for systems.
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From page 33... ...
Vendors of equipment and software have neither the requisite experience and expertise nor the financial incentives to invest heavily in research on the challenges facing end-user organizations, especially the challenges associated with the social applications of IT. Of course, they listen to their customers as they refine their products and strategies, but those interactions are superficial compared with the demands of the new systems and applications.
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From page 34... ...
Universities can play an important role in establishing new research programs for large-scale systems and social applications, assuming that they can overcome long-standing institutional and cultural barriers to the needed cross-disciplinary research. Preserving the university as a base for research and the education that goes with it would ensure a workforce capable of designing, developing, and operating increasingly sophisticated IT systems.
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From page 35... ...
Research on large-scale systems and the social applications of IT will require new modes of funding and performing research that can bring together a broad set of IT researchers, end users, system integrators, and social scientists to enhance the understanding of operational systems. Research in these areas demands that researchers have access to operational large-scale systems or to testbeds that can mimic the performance of much larger systems.
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From page 36... ...
. Social applications present an even greater opportunity and have the potential to leverage research in human-computer interaction, using it to better understand how IT can support the work of individuals, groups, and organizations.
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From page 37... ...
As the computer revolution continues and private companies increasingly fund innovative activities, the federal government continues to play a major role, especially by funding research. Given the successful history of federal involvement, several questions arise: Are there lessons to be drawn from past successes that can inform future policy making in this area?
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From page 38... ...
Federally funded programs have been successful in supporting longterm research into fundamental aspects of computing, such as computer graphics and artificial intelligence, whose practical benefits often take years to demonstrate. Work on speech recognition, for example, which was begun in the early 1970s (some started even earlier)
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From page 39... ...
Involving researchers from MIT, IBM, and other research laboratories, the SAGE project sparked innovations ranging from real-time computing to core memories that found widespread acceptance throughout the computer industry. Many of the pioneers in computing learned through hands-on experimentation with SAGE in the 1950s and early 1960s.
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From page 40... ...
NSF has also been active in supporting educational and research needs more broadly, awarding graduate student fellowships and providing funding for research equipment and infrastructure. Each of these organizations employs a different set of mechanisms to support research,
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From page 41... ...
Few expected that the Navy's attempt to build a programmable aircraft simulator in the late 1940s would result in the development of the first real-time digital computer (the Whirlwind) ; nor could DARPA program managers have anticipated that their early experiments on packet switching would evolve into the Internet and later the World Wide Web.
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From page 42... ...
This funding style resulted in great advances in areas as diverse as computer graphics, artificial intelligence, networking, and computer architectures. Although mechanisms are clearly needed to ensure accountability and oversight in government-sponsored research, history demonstrates the benefits of instilling these values in program managers and providing them adequate support to pursue promising research directions.
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From page 43... ...
All of the areas described in this report's case studies relational databases, the Internet, theoretical computer science, artificial intelligence, and virtual reality involved university and industry participants. Other projects examined, such as SAGE, Project MAC, and very large scale integrated circuits, demonstrate the same phenomenon.
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From page 44... ...
International competitiveness served as a driver of government funding of computing and communications during the late 1980s and early 1990s. With the end of the Cold War and the globalization of industry, the U.S.
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From page 45... ...
New companies, such as Engineering Research Associates, Datamatic, and Eckert-Mauchly, as well as established companies in the data processing field, such as IBM and Sperry Rand, saw an opportunity for new products and new markets. The combination of new companies and established ones was a powerful force.
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From page 46... ...
This definition recognizes the value of exploratory research into basic technological phenomena that can be used in a variety of products. Examples include research on the blue laser, exploration of biosensors, and much of the fundamental work in computer engineering.
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From page 47... ...
Their motives for this range from developing a capability to monitor progress at the frontiers of science, to identifying ideas for potential lines of innovation that may be emerging from the research of others, to being better positioned to penetrate the secrets of their rivals' technological practices. Nevertheless, funding research is a long-term strategy, and therefore sensitive to commercial pressures to shift research resources toward advancing existing product development and improving existing processes,
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From page 48... ...
In electrical engineering, federal funding has declined from its peak of 75 percent of total university research support in the early 1970s, but still represented 65 percent of such funding in 1995. Additional support has come in the form of research equipment.
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From page 49... ...
Although it would be difficult to determine how much university research contributes directly to industrial innovation, it is telling that each of the case studies and other major examples examined in [the source] report relational databases, the Internet, theoretical computer science, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, SAGE, computer time-sharing, very large scale integrated circuits, and the personal computer involved the participation of university researchers.
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From page 50... ...
Development of the Internet demonstrates the benefits of this approach: by funding groups of researchers in an open environment, DARPA created an entire community of users who had a common understanding of the technology, adopted a common set of standards, and encouraged their use broadly. Early users of the ARPANET created a critical mass of people who helped to disseminate the technology, giving the Internet Protocol an important early lead over competing approaches to packet switching.
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From page 51... ...
In fulfilling this charge, [the following text] reviews a number of prominent federal research programs that exerted profound influence on the evolving computing industry.
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From page 52... ...
and Remington Rand (later Sperry Rand) , which purchased EckertMauchly Computer Corporation in 1950 and Engineering Research Associates in 1952.
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From page 53... ...
88-95~: The successful development projects of World War II, particularly radar and the atomic bomb, left policymakers asking how to maintain the technological momentum in peacetime. Numerous new government organizations arose, attempting to sustain the creative atmosphere of the famous wartime research projects and to enhance national leadership in science and technology.
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From page 54... ...
ONR supported Whirlwind, MIT's first digital computer and progenitor of real-time command-and-control systems. John von Neumann built a machine with support from ONR and other agencies at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, known as the IAS computer.
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From page 55... ...
The first atomic bombs were designed only with desktop calculators and punched-card equipment, but continued work on nuclear weapons provided some of the earliest applications for the new electronic machines as they evolved. The first computation job run on the ENIAC in 1945 was an early calculation for the hydrogen bomb project "Super." In the late 1940s, the Los Alamos National Laboratory built its own computer, MANIAC, based on von Neumann's design for the Institute for Advanced Study computer at Princeton, and the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC)
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From page 56... ...
In addition to stimulating R&D in industry, the AEC laboratories also developed a large talent pool on which the computer industry and academia could draw. In fact, the head of IBM's Applied Science Department, Cuthbert Hurd, came directly to IBM in 1949 from the AEC's Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
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From page 57... ...
"' ERA built a community of engineering skill, which became the foundation of the Minnesota computer industry. In 1951, for example, the company hired Seymour Cray for his first job out of the University of Minnesota.
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From page 58... ...
96-97~: Perhaps most important, the early 1960s can be defined as the time when the commercial computer industry became significant on its own, independent of government funding and procurement. Computerized reservation systems began to proliferate, particularly the IBM/American Airlines SABRE system, based in part on prior experience with military command-and-control systems (such as SAGE)
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From page 59... ...
In 1963, the first Stored Program Control electronic switching system was placed into service, inaugurating the use of digital computer technology for mainstream switching. The 1960s also saw the emergence of the field called computer science, and several important university departments were founded during the decade, at Stanford and Carnegie Mellon in 1965 and at MIT in 1968.
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From page 60... ...
ARPA's independent status not only insulated it from established service interests but also tended to foster radical ideas and keep the agency tuned to basic research questions: when the agency-supported work became too much like systems development, it ran the risk of treading on the territory of a specific service. ARPA's status as the DOD space agency did not last long.
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From page 61... ...
Licklider formed IPTO in this image, working largely independently of any direction from Ruina, who spent the majority of his time on higher-profile and higher-funded missile defense issues. Licklider's timing was opportune: the 1950s had produced a stable technology of digital computer hardware, and the big systems
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From page 62... ...
The last IPTO director of the 1960s, Lawrence Roberts, came, like Sutherland, from MIT and Lincoln Laboratory, where he had worked on the early transistorized computers and had conducted ARPA research in both graphics and communications. During the 1960s, ARPA and IPTO had more effect on the science and technology of computing than any other single government agency, sometimes raising concern that the research agenda for computing was being directed by military needs.
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From page 63... ...
ARPA's Management Style. To evaluate research proposals, IPTO did not employ the peer-review process like NSF, but rather relied on internal reviews and the discretion of program managers as did ONR.
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From page 64... ...
Typical DOD research contracts involved close monitoring and careful adherence to requirements and specifications. ARPA avoided this approach by hiring technically educated program managers who had continuing research interests in the fields they were managing.
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From page 65... ...
For example, NSF poured millions of dollars into university computing centers so that researchers in other disciplines, such as physics and chemistry, could have access to computing power. NSF noted that little computing power was available to researchers at American universities who were not involved in defense-related research and that "many scientists feel strongly that further progress in their field will be seriously affected by lack of access to the techniques and facilities of electronic computation." As a result, NSF began supporting computing centers at universities in 1956 and, in 1959, allocated a budget specifically for computer equipment purchases.
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From page 66... ...
Although the majority of the OCA's funding was spent on infrastructure and education, the office also supported a broad range of basic computer science research programs. These included compiler and language development, theoretical computer science, computation theory, numerical analysis, and algorithms.
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From page 67... ...
New computing capabilities, including the World Wide Web, have enabled the National Library of Medicine to expand access to medical information and have provided tools for researchers who are sequencing the human genome.
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From page 68... ...
1995. Evolving the High Performance Computing and Communications Initiative to Support the Nation's Information Infrastructure.
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From page 69... ...
The large-scale systems problems presented both by massive parallelism and by massive information infrastructure are additional distinguishing characteristics of information systems R&D, because they imply a need for scale in the research effort itself. In principle, collaborative efforts might help to overcome the problem of attaining critical mass and scale, yet history suggests that there are relatively few collaborations in basic research within any industry, and purely industrial (and increasingly industry-university or industry-government)
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From page 70... ...
It is harder to achieve the kind of consensus needed to sustain federal research programs associated with these goals than it was under the national security aegis. Nevertheless, the fundamental rationale for federal programs remains: That R&D can enhance the nation's economic welfare is not, by itself, sufficient reason to justify a prominent role for the federal government in financing it.
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