An Assessment of the National Institute of Standards and Technology Information Technology Laboratory Fiscal Year 2009 (2009) / Chapter Skim
Currently Skimming:
3 Assessment of the Laboratory Divisions
3 Assessment of the Laboratory Divisions
Pages 12-24
The Chapter Skim interface presents what we've algorithmically identified as the most significant single chunk of text within every page in the chapter.
Select key terms on the right to highlight them within pages of the chapter.
From page 12... ...
In particular, the teams understand the importance of simulation-based engineering and how to deliver their technology to scientists and practitioners, inside and outside NIST, who are the ultimate users." During the 2007 review, staff and management expressed a desire for more postdoctoral positions and had plans to actively recruit applicants in order to increase the likelihood of attracting excellent postdoctoral candidates. This tactic appears to have paid off, as the MCSD is now in line for four postdoc positions.
|
From page 13... ...
Projects within the ESD program typically use state-of-theart tools that result in simulations with more accurate physics. The VMS program recognizes that failures of some of our major simulation tools have been implicated in major engineering failures.
|
From page 14... ...
Researchers publish regularly in international metrology journals and are among the leaders in international metrology efforts. However, the group has drastically reduced its participation in national and international meetings owing to budget choices that are not consistent with the long-term SED mission.
|
From page 15... ...
. HAVA directs NIST to assist the Election Assistance Commission in the development of voluntary voting system guidelines, and HAVA directs NIST to chair the Technical Guidelines Development Committee.
|
From page 16... ...
The SSD should increase the stringency of its voluntary standards, perform and coordinate more active evaluations of voting machines and systems, and work with election commissions to improve assurance of all voting systems immediately. Software Assurance Metrics and Tool Evaluation The SSD Software Assurance Metrics and Tool Evaluation (SAMATE)
|
From page 17... ...
The SSD has made modest but impactful, insightful, and highly leveraged investments in this area. Unfortunately, the pace of change in computing devices and associated infrastructure, combined with the need for computer forensics support for law enforcement in the face of the increasing threat, is entirely unmatched from an SSD investment perspective.
|
From page 18... ...
COMPUTER SECURITY DIVISION Progress at the Computer Security Division since the panel's 2007 review has been impressive. The CSD now exhibits a stronger research program, a stronger and better-established division management team, and more focus on programs of national importance.
|
From page 19... ...
The initiation of FISMA Quick Start Guides and the intent to collaborate or integrate efforts with the national security community and the Consensus Audit Guidelines are impressive efforts. The division is also taking a fresh look at the effectiveness of its cryptography module accreditation program and of FISMA; NIST needs this kind of leadership to balance its scientific perspective with federal requirements.
|
From page 20... ...
The picture that emerges is of research projects in areas of national importance that are having significant impact. The project on Measurement Science for Complex Information Systems leverages methods from the mathematical sciences, especially statistics, to achieve state-space reduction by several orders of magnitude.
|
From page 21... ...
INFORMATION ACCESS DIVISION If a single theme can be said to characterize the work of the Information Access Division, it is that of developing standards, metrics, and evaluations for automated understanding of digital media, such as text retrieval, automated recognition of humans from images and voice, language recognition, and human activity classification from video. Organizationally, the IAD is divided into five groups with significant overlap of activities: Multimodal Information; Retrieval; Image; Visualization and Usability; and Digital Media.
|
From page 22... ...
The IAD establishes the data requirements to meet the sponsors' technology development needs, then either gathers the data itself or works with a third party (such as the Linguistics Data Consortium of the University of Pennsylvania in the case of speaker and language identification) , to create a data set characterizing the problem of interest.
|
From page 23... ...
of $11.4 million in OA funding. Achieving Objectives and Desired Impact The existing IAD programs have a strong international impact and are contributing to the ITL mission and objectives.
|
From page 24... ...
applications. The IAD work, particularly that of human recognition and personal information retrieval and the supporting data collection efforts, carries significant potential privacy impact that needs to be methodologically considered.
|
Key Terms
This material may be derived from roughly machine-read images, and so is provided only to facilitate research.
More
information on Chapter Skim is available.