News Feature

IT Research Requires Government Investment

By Matt Villano

July 01, 2001 — CIO — DAN REED CAN’T TELL YOU exactly what Globus means to you. But Reed, head of a Champaign, Ill.-based research lab called the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, and his colleagues are spending about $10 million in tax money on this project, a computer network for studying the stars.

The project is one facet of a $70 million effort by the National Science Foundation to develop new networking technologies?a jewel in NSF’s $640 million budget for basic IT research. Its immediate aim is to help researchers port huge amounts of cosmological data to colleagues who aren’t lucky enough to live near high-end

telescopes like the Keck in Hawaii. While Reed can’t say when the concepts behind Globus (advances in real-time, multilocation collaboration) will bear commercial fruit, he has little doubt that someday?maybe in five years, maybe 10?its findings could spark product innovations that return taxpayers’ investment in ways that are incalculable today.

Academic researchers such as Reed say the federal government needs to fund more long-term, infrastructure-oriented IT research projects like Globus that simply ask whether a thing is possible, without worrying whether it’s profitable. "We don’t know what the next killer technology will be, but if we don’t look for it in every way possible, we won’t ever find it," says Neal Lane, science adviser to former President Clinton and now a university professor of physics and astronomy at Rice University in Houston.

Following nearly three decades of neglect, Uncle Sam started betting significant money in the past two years on long-term IT research, making projects like Globus national, bipartisan priorities. But proponents of basic IT research fear this support will be short-lived. In the wake of a 2002 budget that does not earmark much money for basic research, computer scientists who keep track of the government’s spending worry that the Bush administration and Congress won’t put the same priority on long-term IT research?projects taking five years or more?as policymakers in both parties were advocating only a year ago. Commercially oriented research is popular with corporations and, by extension, with politicians. Meanwhile, the administration and lawmakers are putting greater emphasis on other popular research areas, such as medicine and energy.

The end of the Cold War freed funds from the defense budget, where most IT research spending was allocated through the 1980s. But funding choices are also linked to changes in the business cycle, say research budget experts. As the economy slows, there’s less support for research that doesn’t offer a marketable return. This, says Ruzena Bajcsy, assistant director of the National Science Foundation’s Computer Information Science and Engineering (CISE) directorate, means that without a deliberate emphasis on funding long-term research, it might not get done.