| |
Information technology's
promise
|
No longer just a provider of tools for the sciences
and engineering, information technology today is the uniquely interdisciplinary
field at the core of American innovation in every sector, from national
defense to industrial production.
IT begins with fundamental research in science and engineering and
stretches across the applied scientific and engineering knowledge
it takes to design, construct, and maintain computing and telecommunications
equipment. IT encompasses the mathematics and computer science expertise
that goes into writing the complex sets of instructions - the software
- that enable digital devices to do what people want them to do. IT
also engages the thinking and imagination of scholars, students, government
and business officials, and other computer users in virtually every
field who help figure out how to harness computing and communications
capabilities to human needs, interests, and aspirations. All these
scientific and technical skills and knowledge bases working together
produce the complex digital systems that we have come to depend on
in our day-to-day lives.
Whether we are aware of it or not, we are surrounded by the results
of this multidisciplinary R&D activity, in such applications as
precision instrumentation and visualization capabilities for medical
diagnosis and treatment; inventory-management systems for agile, just-in-time
manufacturing; the Mars rover and astronomical images from the far
reaches of the universe; monitoring and management of large-scale
financial systems; standardized transmission protocols for electronic
mail and audio, video, and sound files; international air-traffic
communication and control systems; and weather forecasts based on
collection and analysis of data from real-time observations of wind,
water, and other environmental systems.
|
| Federal role in the IT revolution |
Many of the most visible and influential of today's
computing and networking capabilities originated in Federally funded
research conducted to support key missions of Federal agencies. For
a sampling of the Federally sponsored R&D that has fueled the
Information Age and dynamic business opportunities throughout the
private sector, see pages 6-7.
|
Long-range research, interdisciplinary scope
|
These Federal research projects explored core technical
problems that had to be solved to advance the capabilities of computing
systems, networks, and information systems generally. The projects
were not designed to result in commercial products within six months.
They achieved results over years of experimentation and revisions
that spread across the research community, enabling many scientists
to join in the problem solving. It is this ongoing foundational research
process that has generated scientific, technical, and engineering
breakthroughs that benefit us all.
|
| Technology transfer |
Because the coordination of Federal IT research investments
across many agencies and private-sector partnerships leverages the
mission-related research, producing general-purpose, broadly useful,
and interoperable technologies, tools, and applications, NITRD has
been a powerful engine of technology transfer. This is a direct result
of its focus on widely applicable solutions to basic IT problems and
its mechanisms of supporting R&D in universities, research institutions,
and collaborative partnerships with industry. The large number of
Federally funded breakthroughs subsequently commercialized in the
private sector - often by graduates of U.S. research universities
whose education was supported by NITRD funding - leverage the Federal
investments even further.
|
| Addressing challenges in the national interest |
NITRD agencies address the most significant scientific
and technical challenges standing between today's networking and computing
capabilities and the affordable advanced technologies and tools that
both the Federal government and the Nation need to sustain U.S. world
leadership in such vital areas as:
|
|
- National defense and national security
- Science and engineering
- Biomedical research
- Health care
- High-speed networking (wireless as well as wired)
- Industrial modeling and pharmaceutical design
- Aerospace engineering and air-traffic control
- Reliable, secure, failure-resistant computing and networking
systems for national security as well as for communications, finance,
health care, industrial development, and e-commerce
- Standards, measures, and testing to assure worldwide IT interoperability
across multiple frames and applications
|
|
The sections that begin on page 8 describe 10 major
research challenges that the Federal NITRD agencies plan to work on
in FY 2002.
|
These Results of Federally Funded IT Research Fueled the Information
Technology Revolution
Computing systems
- The first operational, electronic stored-program computer,
the Standards Eastern Automatic Computer (SEAC), was
developed for the U.S. Air Force by the predecessor of NIST;
a similar machine, the Standards Western Automatic Computer
(SWAC), built by the agency the same year for the U.S. Navy,
was the fastest in the world at the time.
- Reduced instruction set computing (RISC) technology,
the basis for many of today's fastest microprocessors, was
advanced by DARPA-funded research in the 1970s and early
1980s.
- Parallel computing concepts explored by Federally
supported researchers for two decades laid the groundwork
for the development of commercial high-end computing platforms
in the late 1980s and 1990s.
|
Networking
- The Internet grew out of ARPANET, the network invented
by DARPA-funded researchers in the 1960s.
- High-speed optical networks. Federal networking
research has produced the world's first prototype optical
networks with end-to-end transmission speeds and carrying
capacities a thousand times those of the current Internet.
With $276 million in funding over three years, this research
has stimulated development of new private-sector companies
with a combined value in the tens of billions of dollars.
|
Human-computer interaction
- The mouse and the graphical user interface (GUI),
now standard to desktop computers, stem from DARPA-funded
research in the late 1960s.
- The first graphical Web "browser" was
developed by university-based researchers supported by NSF;
Web search engines grew out of initial research investments
by DARPA and NSF.
- Java, the programming language that supports interoperability
across networks, is based on concepts first explored by
Federally funded researchers.
- Speech and spoken dialogue technologies funded
over decades by DARPA have led to new customer call center
concepts and more efficient service for industry worldwide.
|
Information management
- The world's first and largest public medical database,
integrating research findings and medical-journal citations,
was developed and is managed by NIH's National Library of
Medicine.
- Relational databases - the industrial-strength
software systems needed to store and manage large quantities
of information, such as financial records, census data,
and business inventories - were pioneered by university
researchers funded by NSF in the 1970s.
- Machine learning research, sponsored by DOE and
NSF, was employed in decoding the human genome and also
spawned the data-mining industry.
- Numerical linear algebra libraries research sponsored
by DOE, DARPA, NIST, and a number of other Federal agencies
has produced high-performance libraries of numerical linear
algebra software that are used by thousands of researchers
worldwide. These libraries have become a critical part of
the world's scientific computing infrastructure.
|
|
|
|
|
