Information Technology Frontiers for a New Millenium President's Information Technology Advisory Committee

	Introduction PITAC FY 1998-FY 1999 activities PITAC report Obtaining the report Committee membership
Introduction	President Clinton established the PITAC in February 1997 to provide guidance and advice to the Administration on high performance computing, communications, information technology, and the Next Generation Internet (NGI), with particular emphasis on strengthening future IT R&D. The PITAC reports to the President through the President's Science Advisor.     PITAC members at their February, 1999 meeting held at NSF in Arlington, Virginia.
PITAC FY 1998-FY 1999 activities	On July 24, 1998, President Clinton amended Executive Order 13035, which established the Advisory Committee on High Performance Computing and Communications, Information Technology, and the Next Generation Internet, renaming it the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC) and enlarging its membership.   In August 1998, the PITAC issued an Interim Report to the President that set out a bold agenda for ensuring America's leadership in the Information Age by expanding Federal investments in long term R&D in technologies such as computers, networks, and software.   The Committee held a public meeting on November 4, 1998, and a Town Hall meeting at the SC98 conference in Orlando, Florida to review recommendations from the Interim Report and to solicit feedback from the general public.
PITAC report	On February 24, 1999, the PITAC issued its report, "Information Technology Research: Investing in Our Future," to President Clinton. The committee stated that the economic and strategic importance of information technology to our society help make a persuasive case for increasing Federal support for information technology R&D. The committee emphasized that a Federal role is critical due to industry's focus on the near term in today's competitive environment. Therefore, the Government is better suited to invest in solving problems of long term importance to society as a whole.   The PITAC concluded that Federal support for research in information technology is seriously inadequate at present and recommended that the Federal government create a strategic initiative and increase the total funding base for long term, basic information technology R&D by approximately $1.4 billion per year by FY 2004. The report stated that the following areas of the overall research agenda particularly need attention and should be a major part of such a long term R&D initiative:
Software	The PITAC stated that demand for software has grown far faster than our ability to produce it. Furthermore, the Nation needs software that is far more usable, reliable, and powerful than what is being produced today. The PITAC noted that the U.S. has become dangerously dependent on large software systems whose behavior is not well understood and that often fail in unpredicted ways. Therefore, increases in research on software should be given a high priority, including software for managing large amounts of information, for making computers easier to use, for making software easier to create and maintain, and for improving the ways humans interact with computers.
Scalable information infrastructure	The PITAC noted that our Nation's dependence on the Internet is growing well beyond the intent of its original designers. Furthermore, our ability to extend its use has created enormous challenges. As the size, capability, and complexity of the Internet grows, it is imperative that U.S. researchers and scientists conduct the necessary research to learn how to build and use large, complex, highly-reliable, and secure systems.
High end computing	The PITAC observed that extremely fast computing systems that employ rapid calculation and rapid data movement are essential to provide accurate weather and climate forecasting, support advanced manufacturing design, design new pharmaceuticals, conduct scientific research in a variety of areas, and support critical national interests. To ensure that U.S. scientists continue to have access to computers of the highest possible power, the PITAC recommended that funding be focused on innovative architectures, hardware technologies, and software strategies that overcome the limitations of today's systems.
Socioeconomic impact	Information technology will significantly improve the flow of information to all people and institutions in the U.S., whose well-being depends on understanding the potential socioeconomic benefits and risks of ongoing advances in information technology. To realize the promise of new technologies, the PITAC thinks that the U.S. must invest in research to identify, understand, anticipate, and address these technologies and develop objectives and metrics to assess the ongoing transformations brought about by the integration of information technology into the lives of all citizens. The Nation must conduct research on the impact of the transformations against these objectives and develop appropriate policies to deal with the knowledge gained from this research.
Management and implementation of Federal information technology research	According to the PITAC, building a Federal IT program suited to the needs of the U.S. in the 21st century will require new management strategies, new modes of research support, and new implementation strategies, due to a combination of Federal budget requirements, the need for more long term cross-disciplinary team research, and the need to maintain a small, efficient, and coordinated research management process. It is essential that the Federal organizations responsible for managing and implementing a new IT program be positioned to review the entire Federal information technology research budget in order to restore the balance between fundamental and applied research, to encourage long term and high risk collaborative research projects, and to employ a systematic review by participating Federal agencies and the private sector.
Obtaining the report	The PITAC's report to the President is available at:   http://www.ccic.gov/.
Committee membership	Committee Co-Chairs Bill Joy is co-founder and Vice President of Research at Sun Microsystems. Ken Kennedy is Director of the Center for Research on Parallel Computation and is Ann and John Doerr Professor of Computer Science at Rice University. Committee Members Eric A. Benhamou is President, Chairman, and CEO of 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 Vice Chairman of Hughes Electronics Corporation, Chairman of Hughes Telecommunications and Space Company, and a member of Hughes Electronics Office of the Chairman. David W. Dorman is President and CEO of AT&T-British Telecom Global Venture. Robert Ewald is President and CEO of E-Stamp Corporation. David J. Farber is the Alfred Fitler Moore Professor of Telecommunications at the University of Pennsylvania. Sherrilynne S. Fuller is Head, Division of Biomedical Informatics, School of Medicine, and Director, Health Sciences Libraries and Information Center at the University of Washington. 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 a Vice President and Disney Fellow at Walt Disney Imagineering, Research and Development, Inc. Robert E. Kahn* is Chairman, CEO, and President of the Corporation for National Research Initiatives. John P. Miller is Director of the Center for Computational Biology at Montana State University, Bozeman. David C. Nagel is President of AT&T Labs and Chief Technology Officer of AT&T. 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 Associate Dean for Information Resources and Technology, Professor of Medicine, and Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University School of Medicine. Larry Smarr is Director of the National Computational Science Alliance and Professor of Physics and Astrophysics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. 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 and Director of Corporate Business Development at Intel Corporation. Andrew J. Viterbi is a co-founder of QUALCOMM Incorporated and Vice Chairman of its Board of Directors. Steven J. Wallach is an Advisor to CenterPoint Ventures. Irving Wladawsky-Berger is General Manager, IBM Internet Division at IBM Corporation. * New member effective July 1998.