The US Office of Science and Technology has released the PITAC (President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee) report that focuses on computational technology. This new report, aptly titled Computational Science: Ensuring America’s Competitiveness, calls for an overhaul of the existing models for computational collaboration and funding within industry, academia, and government.

Citing the lack of clear vision for computational science in the US and increased globalization in computational technology production, the report examines where the US is going with respect to computational capability. Mentioning complacency, lack of organization, and the lack of understanding of what computational science is all about, the committee

believes that the Nation’s failure to embrace computational science is symptomatic of a larger failure to recognize that many 21st-century research challenges are themselves profoundly multidisciplinary, requiring teams of highly skilled people from diverse areas of science, engineering, public policy, and the social sciences.

In addition, the report provides some disturbing statistics about the decline in intellectual resources. Among them,

The 849 doctoral degrees in computer science and computer engineering awarded in 2002 by U.S. institutions was the lowest number since 1989, according to an annual Computing Research Association survey [NRC,2005].

So what is the report asking government to do? In a nutshell, provide a stronger commitment, better long term support (aka funding), and better coordination (aka leadership) within the computational science ecosystem.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 21st, 2005 at 5:10 pm and is filed under Policy, Publications. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.