To prepare its report, the PITAC conducted an extensive review of Federal R&D in high performance computing, communications, and information technology, assessing current Federal research investments in light of growing demands for ever faster, more capable, and more robust technologies, and many more workers with the skills to develop and manage them. One indication of the need for significant R&D advances, the report observed, is the fact that the Federally-funded technologies underlying the Internet were designed to network a relatively small number of computers (2,000 as of 1985) but now connect some 70 million devices, with traffic doubling every 100 days.

Despite our manifest success in such advanced technologies-for example, production of semiconductors, computers, communications equipment, and software has accounted for a third of U.S. economic growth since 1992-the PITAC concluded that today Federal support for IT research is seriously inadequate. The report noted that investments in research programs are funding a fraction of what is needed and increasingly focus on short term mission goals rather than long-term, high-risk activities. The PITAC report credited past Federal support of high-risk IT research for yielding "a spectacular return" in today's vibrant IT marketplace. But in a letter contained in the report, the PITAC's corporate leaders warned that this unprecedented engine of economic growth "could slow or disappear" without continued Federal support for innovation. "The government must increase its investment in the pipeline that generates ideas and the researchers to work on them," the industry officials wrote.

In view of these findings, the PITAC called for a visionary expansion of the Federal investment in IT research to restore and reinvigorate the flow of advanced innovations needed to fuel the information economy in the new century. Just as Federal research partnerships with academia and industry pioneered the concepts of digital computing machines and computer networking that have grown into today's worldwide communications infrastructure, the PITAC stated, national leadership again is necessary to drive "significant new research on computing and communication systems" ensuring that the cutting-edge hardware, software, and connectivity advances of the last quarter of the 20th century produce the next generation breakthroughs of the 21st.

The PITAC report recommended that revitalized Federal support for information technology R&D begin with planned incremental increases in research funding in five areas of strategic importance to both Government and the private sector. The committee proposed raising the overall Federal commitment to IT research by $1.4 billion annually by FY 2004 in software, scalable information infrastructure, high end computing, human computer interface and information management, socioeconomic research and policy, and management of the Federal IT R&D enterprise.

The PITAC's key findings and recommendations are listed below.

Findings and recommendations of the PITAC report to the President "Information Technology Research: Investing in our Future"

Key findings

• Total Federal information technology R&D investment is inadequate.
• Federal information technology R&D is excessively focused on near-term problems.
• The Federal information technology R&D funding profile is incomplete.
  

Key research recommendations

• Create a strategic initiative in long-term information technology R&D
• Increase the investment for research in software, scalable information infrastructure, high end computing, and socioeconomic issues
• Software. The science and methods for efficiently creating and maintaining high quality software of all kinds, for ensuring the reliability of the complex software systems that now provide the infrastructure for much of our economy, for improving the interaction between people and computer-based systems and devices, and for managing and using information
• Scalable information infrastructure. Techniques for ensuring that the national information infrastructure-communications systems, the Internet, large data repositories, and other emerging systems-is reliable and secure, and can grow gracefully to accommodate the massive numbers of new users and applications expected over the coming two decades
• High end computing. Continued invention and innovation in the development of fast, powerful computing systems and the accompanying communication systems needed to implement high end applications ranging from aircraft design to weather and climate modeling
• Socioeconomic issues. Research on understanding the effects of information technology on our society, its economy, and the workforce should be funded. Furthermore, research should be focused on strategies for ameliorating information technology's potentially harmful effects and amplifying the benefits

Key management recommendations

• Fund projects of larger scope and duration
• Expand support for research carried out by teams of two to five researchers, possibly at different institutions, to address a single research project
• Fund large centers for "Expeditions to the 21st Century," which would involve large teams of researchers in explorations of future information technologies and their societal effects
• Establish "Enabling Technology centers" to conduct research on the application of information technology to particular problems of national importance

• Implementation of network performance measurements. The new measurement systems found that between FY 1999 and FY 2000 NGI agencies had boosted maximum end-to-end performance on the NGI testbed networks from 80 Mbps to 900 Mbps.
• Increased high-performance connectivity. The number of operational NGI sites grew from 154 to 177.
• Increased emphasis on developing end-user applications. The number of NGI applications rose from about 35 in the first PITAC review to more than 100.
• Expanded network reach. From the PITAC's first review, the number of NSF Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) awards grew from 33 to 40, including two sites in Puerto Rico. Minority-serving institutions participating grew from one black and two Hispanic universities to two black and five Hispanic universities.

The PITAC noted that the agencies had implemented programmatic changes recommended in the first NGI review and had made "excellent progress," collaborating together and with academe and industry, toward NGI goals. The review found that about a dozen private-sector startup companies, capitalized at nearly $30 billion, had been launched from these NGI collaborations.

The review concluded with two recommendations:

• Funding for NGI should be extended through FY 2002 at the proposed funding levels, with planning for follow-on activities beginning immediately. More applications demonstrating the utility to end users of NGI's gigabit bandwidth, increased security, and enhanced quality of service should be funded.
• Since the NGI effort is not designed to address the reach issue, Congress should consider funding a separate infrastructure program in which NGI research institutions could serve as infrastructure mentors to nearby smaller or disadvantaged institutions.

At the President's request, the PITAC last year reviewed the Administration's FY 2000 Information Technology for the Twenty-First Century, or IT2, Initiative, and this year is reviewing the Administration's IT R&D budget proposal for FY 2002, which incorporates IT2. The IT2 Initiative, the FY 2000 review found, embodied the PITAC report's recommendations for more intensive research in software, scalable information infrastructure, and some aspects of high end computing. The review recommended increased emphasis on long-term research in advanced applications and middleware. It reiterated the PITAC report's call for increased funding for the IT R&D program as a whole and pointed to the special need for more high end facilities for the academic community.

In communications with the President and members of Congress, the PITAC urged continued bipartisan support for overall increases in IT R&D funding that "begin to refill the pipeline with ideas and human capital."

In the 21st century, the PITAC report contended, it is essential that all Americans have access to the information infrastructure, along with the relevant tools and skills necessary to fully participate in the information age. IT tools and applications can provide opportunities that transcend barriers of race, gender, disability, age, income, and location. To pursue these ideas, the PITAC held an October 19, 1999, conference to explore the important issue of the "digital divide." "Resolving the Digital Divide: Information, Access, and Opportunity," hosted in association with the Joint center for Political and Economic Studies and the Woodrow Wilson International center for Scholars, focused on information technology access for racial and ethnic groups in the U.S. The report on this conference, published in February 2000, makes the following recommendations:

• Resolving the digital divide demands a National initiative.
• Community relevance and community involvement are essential for solving the divide.
• Rethink educational approaches.
• Continue and expand Government programs and provide additional funding to resolve the digital divide.
• Rethink market approaches.
• More research, data collection, and evaluation are necessary to solve the digital divide.
• Better technology and more minority-owned businesses are necessary.

In the fall of 1999, the PITAC established a group of panels to examine technological challenges to achieving the broad cultural transformations that the PITAC report called the critical opportunities of the information revolution. The report had identified 10 "National Challenge Transformations" in which information technology's promise can most benefit the Nation: the way we communicate, the way we deal with information, the way we learn, the practice of health care, the nature of commerce, the nature of work, the way we design and build things, the conduct of research, our understanding of the environment, and the activities of government. The panels, which include PITAC members and invited participants from academia and industry, will each develop a focused document detailing key IT research needs in a specific challenge area.

The PITAC panels are:

• Digital Divide Issues, chaired by Ching-chih Chen and John P. Miller
• Digital Libraries, chaired by David C. Nagel
• International Issues, chaired by Ching-chih Chen and David W. Dorman
• Open Source Software, chaired by Larry Smarr
• Transforming Government, chaired by David M. Cooper and Robert H. Ewald
• Transforming Health Care, chaired by Sherrilynne S. Fuller and Edward H. Shortliffe
• Transforming Learning, chaired by Susan Graham and Andrew J. Viterbi
  

Committee Co-Chairs

• Raj Reddy is Herbert A. Simon University Professor of Computer Science and Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University.
  
  
• Irving Wladawsky-Berger is Vice President for Technology and Strategy of the Enterprise Systems Group at IBM Corporation.

• Eric A. Benhamou is CEO and Chairman of the 3Com Corporation.
  
  
• Vinton Cerf is Senior Vice President of Internet Architecture and Engineering at MCI WorldCom.
  
  
• Ching-chih Chen is a Professor in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at Simmons College.
  
  
• David Cooper is Associate Director of Computation at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
  
  
• Steven D. Dorfman is retired Vice Chairman of Hughes Electronics Corporation.
  
  
• David W. Dorman is CEO of Concert.
  
  
• Robert Ewald is President and CEO of E-Stamp Corporation.
  
  
• Sherrilynne S. Fuller is Head, Division of Biomedical Informatics, Department of Medical Education at the University of Washington School of Medicine.
  
  
• Hector Garcia-Molina is Leonard Bosack and Sandra Lerner Professor in the Departments of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University.
  
  
• Susan Graham is Chancellor's Professor of Computer Science in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley.
  
  
• James N. Gray is a senior researcher in Microsoft's Scalable Servers Research Group and Manager of Microsoft's Bay Area Research center.
  
  
• W. Daniel Hillis is is with Applied Minds, Inc.
  
  
• Bill Joy is Founder and Vice President of Research at Sun Microsystems.
  
  
• Robert E. Kahn is President of the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI).
  
  
• Ken Kennedy is Director of the center for Research on parallel Computation and Ann and John Doerr Professor of Computer Science at Rice University.
  
  
• John P. Miller is Director of the center for Computational Biology at Montana State University.
  
  
• David C. Nagel is President of AT&T Labs.
  
  
• Raj Reddy is Dean of the School of Computer Science and Herbert A. Simon University Professor of Computer Science and Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University.
  
  
• Edward H. Shortliffe is Professor and Chair of the Department of Medical Informatics at Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons.
  
  
• Larry Smarr is Strategic Advisor to the National Computational Science Alliance and Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of california-San Diego.
  
  
• Joe F. Thompson is William L. Giles Distinguished Professor of Aerospace Engineering in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at Mississippi State University.
  
  
• Leslie Vadasz is Senior Vice President, Intel Corporation, and President, Intel Capital.
  
  
• Andrew J. Viterbi is Vice Chairman and a co-founder of QUALCOMM Incorporated.
  
  
• Steven J. Wallach is Vice President of Chiaro networks.