• President Nominates Marburger to Direct Science and Technology Office
• Tether Appointed DARPA Director
• NSF's Report on Merit Review System in FY2000
• NEA Reports Decline in Number of Tenured Faculty, Disparity of Salaries at Private and Public Institutions
• U.S. Climate Modeling Hampered by Lack of Computing Power, Centralization
• "IBM's Almaden Research Center Marks 15 Years of Innovation and Impact"
• CSIS Report Recommends More Support for IT R&D, Higher Education
• "Four Universities Agree to Teach Business Skills to Computer Students"
• Report on Women's Economic and Career Development in Silicon Valley
• Deadline Extended for Tapia Symposium Scholarships, Poster Submissions

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President Nominates Marburger to Direct Science and Technology Office

On June 25, President George W. Bush announced his intention to nominate John H. Marburger, III to be Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. He is currently the Director of the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory and President of Brookhaven Science Associates. He is presently on a leave of absence from the State University of New York at Stony Brook where he served as President and Professor from 1980 to 1994 and as a University Professor of Physics and Electrical Engineering from 1994 to 1997.

Marburger served as the Dean of the College of Letters, Arts and Sciences at the University of Southern California from 1976 to 1980. He has been a member of numerous professional, civic and philanthropic organizations including the Universities Research Association, the Advisory Committee to the New York State Senate Committee on Higher Education and the Board of Directors of the Museums at Stony Brook. He is a graduate of Princeton University and received a Ph.D. in Applied Physics from Stanford University.

The White House press release can be found at www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/06/20010625-2.html

Tether Appointed DARPA Director

The appointment of Anthony J. Tether as the director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) was announced June 18 by the secretary of DOD. As director, Tether is responsible for management of the Agency's projects for high-payoff, innovative research and development.

A graduate of Stanford University with a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering, Tether most recently was chief executive officer and president of The Sequoia Group, which he founded in 1996. He also held senior positions with Dynamics Technology Inc., Science Applications International Corporation's (SAIC) Advanced Technology Sector, and SAIC's Range Systems. Previously he served as director of DARPA's Strategic Technology Office in 1982 through 1986, and as director of the National Intelligence Office in the Office of the Secretary of Defense from 1978 to 1982.

The DOD press release with complete details can be found at www.defenselink.mil/news/Jun2001/b06182001_bt273-01.html

NSF's Report on Merit Review System in FY2000

The National Science Foundation has released data on its merit review system for fiscal year 2000. Among the highlights:

• The overall funding rate for proposals was 33%, or 9,762 awards from among the 29,407 competitive, merit reviewed research and education proposals that were submitted. The funding rate has ranged from 30-34% over the past ten years. The rate for proposals to CISE was 31%, with 921 awards from among 3,012 proposals.
  
  
• The average annualized award amount was $105,839 and the median was $78,285. CISE awards averaged the highest among the directorates at $157,247, while the median amount for CISE awards tied for first with BIO at $100,000. The high average award amount for CISE is credited in part to a very large program solicitation in Information Technology Research which had a focus on large projects.
  
  
• There is a wide disparity in the funding rates of "new PIs" and "prior PIs" (24% and 40%, respectively). One possible reason for this is that prior PIs are more likely to cite the results of previously funded projects and that the reviewers favor successful track records.
  
  
• 54% of proposals were processed within six months, falling short of NSF's goal of 70%.

Report to the National Science Board on the National Science Foundation's Merit Review System, Fiscal Year 2000, can be found at www.nsf.gov/nsb/documents/2001/nsb0136/

NEA Reports Decline in Number of Tenured Faculty, Disparity of Salaries at Private and Public Institutions

The NEA Higher Education Research Center has released a report on demographics and salaries of professors in 1998-99. Among its findings:

• The increasing use of part-time faculty members, most of whom are not tenured, is undercutting the tenure system. The share of faculty members who are tenured has declined from 35% to 32% in the six years since the last study in 1992-93. The drop is sharpest in private liberal arts colleges, private doctoral universities, and public research universities.
  
  
• Tenured professors at private research universities were paid on average over $17,000 more than tenured professors at public research institutions.
  
  
• 55-56% of the full-time faculty members had tenure, which was not a significant difference between 1992-93 and 1998-99.
  
  
• In 1992-93, 40% of the faculty was classified as part-time and in 1998-99, the share had risen to 45%. It seems that public institutions in particular may use contract or other non-tenure track faculty members as lower cost teaching labor.
  
  
• In 1992-93, 64% of the men had tenure compared with 41% of the women. In 1998-99, 62% of the men had tenure, but 45% of the women had tenure.
  
  
• Tenured faculty members published more in the most recent two-year period and served on more committees than did faculty members on tenure track or those without tenure.
  
  
• About 20% of the faculty members were on tenure track in 1998-99, which is slightly lower than in 1992-93. While the share of Asian (30.5%), Black (28%), and American Indian (38.6%) faculty members on tenure track has crept up, the share of Hispanic faculty shows a decline (25.1% compared to 32.5% in 1992-93). The share of white faculty members on tenure track is stable at around 19%.

The June 2001 NEA Update can be found at www.nea.org/he/heupdate/vol7no3.pdf (PDF)

U.S. Climate Modeling Hampered by Lack of Computing Power, Centralization

Recent government reports and articles (1, 2) by Andrew Revkin argue that the U.S. is losing its edge in climate modeling due to a lack of supercomputing power and of centralized resources. Revkin quotes Larry Smarr, founder and former director of NCSA, as saying, "Twelve or 13 years ago we took it for granted that the U.S. was in the lead on everything from weather prediction to climate modeling. Europe is leading in long-term and day-to-day forecasting. I've watched over the last decade in horror. It's almost like benign neglect." 

Needs are greatest at the high-end of computing power. Edward Sarachik, professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Washington commented that in terms of computing power, "our top two centers together don't amount to one-fifth of the European effort." A typical computer array used for climate modeling in the U.S. can process about 20 gigaflops. European centers are routinely running beyond 100 gigaflops and Japan is constructing an array of supercomputers that will achieve teraflop performance.

Revkin points out that the recent and well-publicized report on global warming was based mostly on European models.

"IBM's Almaden Research Center Marks 15 Years of Innovation and Impact"

IBM's Almaden Research Center has celebrated its 15th anniversary and is highlighted in a June 18th article from SiliconValley.com. Almaden is IBM's primary lab for storage technologies and information management, as well as for work in a broad range of computer science, physical science and materials science. The article celebrates the history of the lab and its achievements, including the recent announcement that its "Pixie Dust" (antiferromagnetically-coupled media) is expected to quadruple the data density of current hard disk drive products by 2003.

CSIS Report Recommends More Support for IT R&D, Higher Education

In addition to its central recommendation, the reform of export controls on information technology, a report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies also stressed the importance of maintaining U.S. superiority in IT research and education. It recommended:

• DOD and Congress should consider using a scholarship model where the U.S. would pay for higher education in computer sciences in exchange for a commitment to service for a number of years.
  
  
• DOD, the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy, the NSC, and other relevant agencies should develop broad legislative proposals to expand education programs for information technology and create long-term programs for funding long-range R&D program for information technologies.

The executive summary of Computer Exports and National Security in a Global Era can be found at www.csis.org/tech/computer_execsum.pdf (PDF)

"Four Universities Agree to Teach Business Skills to Computer Students"

A June 27 article in the Chronicle for Higher Education reported that seven Philadelphia-area corporations have established ties with La Salle, Temple, Villanova, and West Chester Universities in order to include professional and interpersonal skills in their CS and IS curriculums. The methods for doing this will vary at each of the schools but will include adding business-course requirements, industry advisory boards, and student internships. Success will be measured by yearly, written assessments.

Report on Women's Economic and Career Development in Silicon Valley

The Women of Silicon Valley, a consortium of 50 business, civic and philanthropic leaders in the northern California region, this month released a report, Unfinished Business Women in the Silicon Valley Economy, that examines the status of women in the area economy. The report compiles the results of a phone survey of a random sample of 826 women ages 21 to 61 who live in the Silicon valley region.

The report describes the changing economy of Silicon Valley and the progress that has been made in women's economic participation as well as the pressures area women experience to meet significant work, family and community responsibilities.

Some of the findings show that 52% of women in the region work in technology areas, including software, computing, Internet, semiconductors, or other high-tech R&D, manufacturing, sales, or service. According to the report, women in technology are nearly twice as likely as women in other lines of work to believe that gender has been a significant barrier to advancement in their careers and some 60% of college educated women reported that advancement opportunities were better for men than for women. The report also found that while 80% of women in Silicon Valley were employed full-time, of the 12 fastest-growing occupations, women hold 61% of low-income jobs (average pay $22,000) and only 29% of high-income jobs (average pay $72,000) in the region. In addition, they report that women's share of engineering degrees from local institutions has stalled at 20% since 1990 with the share of computer science degrees awarded to women declining to 29% in 1997.

An electronic version of the report is available at www.womenofsv.org/publications.html. In addition, the Community Foundation Silicon Valley and the Northern California Grantmakers will be hosting a forum to discuss the findings of the report on Friday, July 13 at Hewlett-Packard in Palo Alto. Information on the forum is also available at the website.

Deadline Extended for Tapia Symposium Scholarships, Poster Submissions

The Tapia 2001 Symposium scholarship program provides means for students and faculty to attend the ACM Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing, October 18-20, 2001 in Houston Texas. Scholarship applications will now be accepted until July 15, 2001 (www.sdsc.edu/Tapia2001/scholarships.html)

According to Richard Alo of the University of Houston-Downtown and co-chair of the Coalition to Diversify Computing (CDC), there is significant support for students to attend the conference. Students are also encouraged to submit posters. There will be awards for the best overall poster of the symposium, and the best poster with a student as the primary author. Poster presentations should describe research results and experiences related to computational science, computer engineering, and computer science. Poster submissions will be accepted through July 15, 2001 (www.sdsc.edu/Tapia2001/posters.html).

Tapia 2001 honors the significant contributions of Dr. Richard A. Tapia, a mathematician and professor in Computational and Applied Mathematics at Rice University in Houston, Texas. Tapia is internationally known for his research in computational and mathematical sciences. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the first recipient of the A. Nico Habermann Award from the Computing Research Association, and a member of the National Science Board.

The ACM Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing is being planned by the Coalition to Diversify Computing (www.npaci.edu/Outreach/CDC), whose mission is to increase the visibility of people of color in computing research and to provide networking opportunities for minority researchers, faculty, and students. CDC is a joint committee of the Association of Computing Machinery, the Computing Research Association, and the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineering Computer Society.