REPORT TO THE PRESIDENT

AND CONGRESS

DESIGNING A DIGITAL FUTURE: 

FEDER ALLY FUNDED RESEARCH 

AND DEVELOPMENT IN

NETWORKING AND INFOR MATION 

TECHNOLOGY

Executive Office of the President

President’s Council of Advisors on 

Science and Technology

JANUARY 2013

★ i ★

About the President’s Council of Advisors on 

Science and Technology

The President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) is an advisory group of the 

nation’s leading scientists and engineers, appointed by the President to augment the science and technology advice available to him from inside the White House and from cabinet departments and other 

Federal agencies. PCAST is consulted about and often makes policy recommendations concerning the 

full range of issues where understandings from the domains of science, technology, and innovation 

bear potentially on the policy choices before the President.

For more information about PCAST, see www.whitehouse.gov/ostp/pcast.

★ iii ★

The President’s Council of Advisors on 

Science and Technology

Co-Chairs

John P. Holdren

Assistant to the President for 

Science and Technology

Director, Office of Science and Technology Policy

Eric Lander

President

Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT

Vice Chairs 

William Press

Raymer Professor, Computer Science and 

Integrative Biology

University of Texas at Austin

Maxine Savitz

Vice President

National Academy of Engineering

Members

Rosina Bierbaum

Professor, Natural Resources and Environmental 

Policy

School of Natural Resources and Environment 

and School of Public Health

University of Michigan

Christine Cassel

President and CEO

American Board of Internal Medicine

Christopher Chyba

Professor, Astrophysical Sciences and 

International Affairs

Director, Program on Science and Global Security

Princeton University

S. James Gates, Jr.

John S. Toll Professor of Physics

Director, Center for String and Particle Theory

University of Maryland, College Park

Mark Gorenberg 

Managing Director

Hummer Winblad Venture Partners

Shirley Ann Jackson

President

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Richard C. Levin

President

Yale University

Chad Mirkin

Rathmann Professor, Chemistry, Materials 

Science and Engineering, Chemical and 

Biological Engineering and Medicine

Director, International Institute for 

Nanotechnology

Northwestern University
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NETWORKING AND INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

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Mario Molina

Professor, Chemistry and Biochemistry

University of California, San Diego

Professor, Center for Atmospheric Sciences at the 

Scripps Institution of Oceanography

Director, Mario Molina Center for Energy and 

Environment, Mexico City

Ernest J. Moniz

Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physics and 

Engineering Systems

Director, MIT’s Energy Initiative

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Craig Mundie

Chief Research and Strategy Officer

Microsoft Corporation

Ed Penhoet

Director, Alta Partners Professor Emeritus, 

Biochemistry and Public Health

University of California, Berkeley

Barbara Schaal

Mary-Dell Chilton Distinguished Professor of 

Biology

Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences 

Washington University, St. Louis

Vice President, National Academy of Sciences

Eric Schmidt

Executive Chairman

Google, Inc.

Daniel Schrag

Sturgis Hooper Professor of Geology

Professor, Environmental Science and 

Engineering

Director, Harvard University Center for 

Environment

Harvard University

David E. Shaw

Chief Scientist, D.E. Shaw Research

Senior Research Fellow, Center for 

Computational Biology and Bioinformatics

Columbia University

Ahmed Zewail

Linus Pauling Professor of Chemistry and Physics

Director, Physical Biology Center

California Institute of Technology

Staff

Amber Hartman Scholz

Acting Executive Director

Knatokie Ford

AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellow
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EXECUTIVE OFFICE OF THE PRESIDENT

PRESIDENT’S COUNCIL OF ADVISORS ON SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

WASHINGTON, D.C. 20502

President Barack Obama

The White House

Washington, DC 20502

Dear Mr. President,

We are pleased to send you this report, Designing a Digital Future: Federally Funded Research and Development 

in Networking and Information Technology, prepared by your President’s Council of Advisors on Science and 

Technology (PCAST). This report fulfills PCAST’s responsibilities under Executive Order 13539 and the HighPerformance Computing Act of 1991 (Public Law 102-194) as amended by the Next Generation Internet Research 

Act of 1998 (Public Law 105-305) and by the America COMPETES Act of 2007 (Public Law 110-69).

The United States leads the world in both the science of networking and information technology (NIT) and the 

myriad uses that transform lives. NIT impacts virtually every human endeavor, including scientific discovery, 

human health, education, the environment, national security, transportation, manufacturing, energy, and 

governance. The Federal Government coordinates its unclassified NIT research and development investments 

through the Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) program, which helps 

ensure that the Nation effectively leverages its strengths, avoids duplication, and increases interoperability in such 

areas as supercomputing, high-speed networking, cybersecurity, software engineering, and information 

management. 

In 2010, PCAST conducted a major review of the NITRD program, including the portfolio of investments and the 

coordinating process, and recommended that steps be taken to develop an understanding of investment levels in 

NIT R&D and to create effective collaborations across key Federal agencies. In 2012, PCAST asked a small 

Working Group to review progress since the 2010 report and also to make further recommendations in response to 

the activities and advances since 2010.

The current study finds that important NITRD investments responsive to the 2010 recommendations have been 

made, with notable progress in the multi-agency investments in “big data,” NIT-enabled interaction with the 

physical world, health IT, and cybersecurity. Furthermore, significant progress has been made in creating

infrastructure for network scaling and testbeds. Some of the areas have received less attention and investment than 

was recommended, however. Efforts in educational technology, energy and transportation, and interagency 

collaboration still appear to be lacking, and R&D levels remain inadequate. The new PCAST report calls for a 

broad, high-level advisory mechanism to help meet these continuing NIT challenges. 

NIT remains a powerful engine for economic growth, national security, and enhanced quality of life. To maintain 

America’s leadership in NIT in an ever more competitive global environment, the Federal Government must 

develop a national strategy for continued and expanded investments in a robust NIT R&D program. PCAST 

believes that implementation of the recommendations in this report will help.

Sincerely,

John P. Holdren

Co-chair, PCAST

Eric S. Lander

Co-chair, PCAST

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The President’s Council of Advisors on 

Science and Technology

Executive Summary

The impact of networking and information technology (NIT) is stunning. Virtually every human endeavor 

is affected as advances in NIT enable or improve domains such as scientific discovery, human health, 

education, the environment, national security, transportation, manufacturing, energy, governance, and 

entertainment. NIT is also a powerful engine for economic growth.

The United States leads the world in both the science of NIT and the myriad uses that transform lives. 

U.S. leadership stems from a sustained Federal investment in fundamental NIT research and development (R&D) spanning more than sixty years, and a vibrant industrial base that converts the fruits of that 

research to products. The research addresses both core NIT capabilities and the increasingly diverse 

domains in which NIT plays a crucial role. The interplay of Federally-funded university and governmentagency research, privately funded industrial research, and entrepreneurial companies, together with 

the education and training that fuels innovation and productivity, clearly strengthens the Nation’s 

prosperity, health, and security.

The role of NIT in meeting future challenges is even greater than in the recent past. NIT is now a fundamental part of U.S. infrastructure—for communication, for commerce, for defense, for education, for 

safety, and for quality-of-life. The nature of NIT continues to change rapidly, demanding continuing U.S. 

attention to the R&D that fuels that change. The challenges are far more multidisciplinary than before, 

increasing the importance of R&D that crosses agency boundaries as well as effective government 

coordination of its NIT R&D investments. More than ever, the future depends on strengthening U.S. NIT 

R&D capabilities.

The High-Performance Computing Act of 1991 established an R&D program in NIT, consisting of 

investments by multiple government agencies, a coordinating body within the government, and an 

advisory committee drawn from the academic and private sectors. The scope of the High-Performance 

Computing Act was expanded by the Next Generation Internet Research Act of 1998, and again by the 

America COMPETES Act of 2007. The term “NITRD” is now used to designate both the portfolio of government investments and the coordinating process. The National Coordinating Office (NCO) is responsible 

for managing the coordination process.1 The President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology 

(PCAST) has responsibility for the advising role.

In 2010, PCAST formed a Working Group that conducted a major review of the NITRD program, including both the portfolio of investments and the coordinating process.2

 Recommendations from the 2010 

report are summarized in Appendix A. In 2012, PCAST asked a small Working Group to review progress 

1. Earlier names for both “NITRD” and the NCO were changed as the scope of the program increased.

2. President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. (2010). “Designing a Digital Future: Federally Funded 

Research and Development in Networking and Information Technology”, Report to the President and Congress. 

www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/ostp/pcast-nitrd-report-2010.pdf.
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since the 2010 report. The primary purpose of the 2012 review, described in this document, is to assess 

progress on the recommendations made in 2010 and make further recommendations in response to 

the activities and advances since 2010. 

The 2012 Working Group found that in some areas of NIT R&D, there have been important investments 

that are responsive to the 2010 recommendations. In most of the areas that have received less attention 

and investment than was recommended, initial steps have been taken in some agencies, but interagency 

collaboration and synergy appears to be lacking. Specific analyses, findings, and recommendations 

appear in Section III of this report. In summary,

• Notable progress was identified in multi-agency investments in “big data,” NIT-enabled 

interaction with the physical world, health IT, and cybersecurity. These areas remain as critical focal points in 2012 and beyond. Continued emphasis and even greater coordination is 

recommended.

• The area of social computing augments the study of individual human-computer interaction 

with research in social collaboration and problem-solving in a networked, online environment. 

Since 2010, several NITRD agencies have established independent research programs and initiatives in social computing. Now the need for cross-agency collaborative research in this area is 

even more crucial than before. Particularly for national priorities in energy, health, governance, 

and any area that may require the mobilization of citizen involvement, the ability to harness 

the possibilities in social computing is likely to grow in importance.

• Privacy and protected disclosure was cited as a cross-cutting theme in the 2010 report—one 

that is important for every agency and mission, as huge amounts of diverse information about 

individuals become available in online electronic form. However, no agency has primary responsibility for privacy R&D. Research on privacy is needed to inform policy decisions and to enable 

appropriate use of personal data while protecting its source. The urgency of this need cannot be 

overstated. Without clear scientific and engineering principles to rely on for guidance, policies 

and legislative actions may be taken that preclude progress or the exploitation of opportunities.

• Software technology is a challenge that cuts across every agency and thus, calls for interagency 

research coordination. Overall, while progress in software R&D appears to be good, it is hard 

to discern disruptive advances emerging out of the current programs. Software technology 

instead appears to be a domain of relentlessly incremental, albeit necessary, improvements to 

the state of the art. In order to sustain the Nation’s capabilities, it is critical that such research be 

supported. At the same time, new concepts that may lead to greater advances must be sought.

• The 2010 NITRD report made two educational technology recommendations: (a) support for 

NIT R&D to discover new educational technologies applicable from pre-school settings all the 

way through life-long learning and (b) support for a long-term program to assess promising 

educational technologies and facilitate the evolution of curricula and instructional processes to 

incorporate them. There does not appear to have been progress on either of those collaborative 

activities. New educational technologies are emerging that create an opportunity to advance 

education and training. To date, the Federal Government is providing no coordination and 

inadequate R&D to take advantage of these opportunities.
T he Presi dent ’s Council of Adviso rs on Science and Tech n o lo g y 

★ ix ★

• In the 2010 NITRD report, energy and transportation were called out as areas ripe for increased 

NIT R&D. Progress in the NIT issues recommended in the 2010 NITRD report appears to be modest. Multi-agency support is needed for NIT research to enable dynamic power management, 

achieve low-power systems and devices, and improve surface and air transportation, combining 

basic research with mission specific challenges. 

• Significant progress has been made in creating infrastructure for network scaling and testbeds. 

Continuing attention has been paid to spectrum sharing and there have been some investments 

in basic research for spectrum management. Attention to other aspects of system scaling, such 

as robustness and resource management, is less evident.

• The 2010 NITRD report included an extensive discussion, a number of findings, and a specific 

recommendation related to Federally-funded R&D in the area of high-performance computing 

(HPC). There is still no coordinated, interagency plan for a substantial and sustained program of 

long-term, fundamental research on architectures, algorithms, and software for future generations of HPC systems. The need for such a program has not diminished.

The NITRD coordination effort is an effective mechanism for sharing information and coordinating 

activities that benefit multiple agencies. Under the NCO’s guidance, coordination of cross-agency 

investments is managed by the NITRD Subcommittee, and by a collection of Interagency Working 

Groups (IWGs), Coordinating Groups (CGs), and Senior Steering Groups (SSGs). NITRD coordination is 

discussed in Section IV. In summary,

• The IWGs and CGs map to the Program Component Areas (PCAs) used to report NITRD elements 

of each Agency’s budget. In this fast-moving discipline, the PCAs change very slowly. The 2010 

report recommended that the structure of the IWGs/CGs be decoupled from the PCAs so that 

the coordinating function could keep up with changes in NIT, but that change was not made.

• In contrast, SSGs are not tied to budget reporting categories. Their members have higher rank 

in their organizations than IWG or CG members, and usually have some budget authority. The 

SSG mechanism allows for increased flexibility and timeliness in forming interagency groups 

addressing areas of national priority. One SSG existed at the time of the 2010 report, and four 

additional SSGs have been formed since then. SSGs are a significant and important addition 

to the NITRD coordination process; they engage in planning and coordination for important 

emerging areas that span agencies. 

• As the impact and the innovative use of NIT have broadened, its importance affects agencies 

that have not been part of NITRD. Several additional agencies have joined NITRD since 2010, 

and a few others are participating in selected NITRD Groups. However, the Department of 

Education (DoEd) and several agencies with responsibility for aspects of health and healthcare 

are still missing. 

• An area of concern in the 2010 report was the inability to fully quantify and properly categorize 

government investment in NIT R&D, so that future investment decisions could be informed by 

knowledge of current investment. A key finding of this review is that there are intrinsic barriers 

to obtaining transparent NIT R&D budget information, ranging from insufficient digitization 
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★ x ★

of budgetary information, to a wide variety of reporting styles among government agencies, 

to a reluctance to classify budgeted expenditures as NITRD-related if they would increase the 

agency’s contribution to NCO expenses. Yet, it remains crucial to understand whether the Federal 

Government’s investment is adequate to meet present and future needs and whether important 

emerging areas are receiving enough funding.

Both the 2010 report and earlier portions of this document have emphasized the U.S. and world 

dependence on NIT, and the historical U.S. expertise and leadership in advancing NIT through a vibrant 

program of basic and applied research, a strong NIT industry, and a skilled workforce. The continued 

strength of U.S. expertise and leadership is crucial. Issues of government leadership are discussed in 

Section V. In summary,

• Both discovery and use of NIT advances require an NIT-educated community of innovators, 

workers, and citizens. That education must start in childhood and continue for a lifetime. There 

are promising signs of increased attention to NIT education and training, in terms of identifying 

curricula for K-12, training teachers, and educating adults to meet particular mission agency 

needs. Yet, progress is slow, and many children and adults are not well-equipped for the digital 

age. The states have been slow to introduce concepts of computer fluency in K-12.3 Higher 

education is not keeping up with the projected increasing demand for employees in computing 

occupations.4 Broader NIT education at all levels is essential.

• The path to the future depends on continuing strategic investments in a robust NIT R&D program. A balance must be struck between emerging and potentially transformative research and 

aspects of important core areas in which continued progress is essential. Determining a national 

strategy for R&D investment requires not only the dedication of people at the highest levels of 

government, but also sustained discipline-specific advice from leading experts in academia and 

the private sector. The 2010 PCAST NITRD report recommended the establishment of a broad 

high-level standing committee to provide this guidance. Since 2010, the need has only grown. 

We, therefore, recommend that PCAST itself form a standing subcommittee dedicated to this 

purpose, with an associated working group. The new working group would engage appropriate 

expertise from the NIT community and would operate on a regular and ongoing (as opposed 

to a project-specific) basis. The working group would survey the field and propose findings 

and recommendations, which PCAST could adopt in appropriate PCAST reports (including, but 

not limited to, the biennial NITRD program review). The standing subcommittee and working 

group we recommend would function in a manner analogous, in certain respects, to that of 

the very active and effective PCAST subcommittee and working group dedicated to advanced 

manufacturing. 

3. ACM and Computer Science Teachers Association. (2010). “Running on Empty: The Failure to Teach K–12 

Computer Science in the Digital Age.” www.acm.org/runningonempty/fullreport.pdf, Fig. 8. Computer fluency is “a robust 

understanding of what is needed to use information technology effectively across a broad range of applications.” It is a 

stronger notion than computer literacy, which implies competency with computer applications such as word processing 

and e-mail. The term was introduced in “Being Fluent with Information Technology,” National Academies Press. (1999).

4. Department of Labor. (2012). Bureau of Labor Statistics 2010/2020 Employment Projections (Computing 

Occupations). www.bls.gov/emp/ep_table_102.htm, www.bls.gov/emp/ep_table_112.htm.
★ xi ★

2012 PCAST Recommendations

Initiatives and Investments in NIT R&D to Achieve America’s Priorities and 

Advance Key NIT Research Frontiers

Recommendation 1: Big data, NIT-enabled interaction with the physical world, health IT, and cybersecurity continue to be important, and while there is noticeable progress on interagency coordination since 

2010, these areas remain as critical focal points in 2012 and beyond. Continued emphasis and even greater 

coordination is recommended.

Recommendation 2: The National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) should create a multi-agency 

collaborative effort, with the National Science Foundation (NSF) and Defense Advanced Research Project 

Agency (DARPA) as lead agencies, to develop a coordinated cross-agency initiative in social computing, 

building on the research results and understanding emerging from existing programs such as NSF’s SocialComputational Systems Program (SoCS).

Recommendation 3: NSTC should create a multi-agency collaborative effort led by NSF, the Department 

of Health and Human Services (HHS), and DARPA to develop the scientific and engineering foundations of 

privacy R&D. NITRD should coordinate across government agencies to develop deployable technologies 

and inform policy decisions.

Recommendation 4: NSF, DARPA, and agencies that need software tailored to their missions must collaborate to support core research that advances design, development, modification, and maintenance 

of all varieties of software, incorporating reliability, robustness, security, and specialization for particular 

domains. Both sustained investment to achieve long-term research goals and focused research to address 

near-term challenges must be supported.

Recommendation 5: NSTC should create a multi-agency collaborative effort led by NSF and DoEd to 

define an R&D program with two major foci—to develop innovative educational technologies for learning 

from pre-school to life-long learning, and to develop assessment programs for those technologies that 

use advanced techniques from “big data” R&D and from the learning sciences. DoEd should join NITRD and 

should participate actively in this effort. 

Recommendation 6: NSF, the Department of Energy (DoE), the Department of Defense (DoD), and the 

Department of Transportation (DoT) should collaborate to support research on the use of NIT for dynamic 

power management, for achieving low-power systems and devices, and for improving surface and air 

transportation, combining the basic research sponsored by NSF with the mission specific challenges faced 

by DoE, DoD, and DoT.

Recommendation 7: System and network scaling continues to be an important research challenge. 

NSF, and in the case of spectrum, the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) and the National 

Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), should continue to invest in furthering 

these areas. 

Recommendation 8: NSTC should lead an effort by NSF, DoE, DoD, member agencies of the Intelligence 

Community, and other relevant Federal agencies to design and implement a joint initiative for long-term, 

basic research aimed at developing fundamentally new approaches to high-performance computing.
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Improved Effectiveness of NITRD Coordination

Recommendation 9: NSTC and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) should 

strengthen the flexibility and responsiveness of the NITRD coordinating structure by continuing the use of 

Senior Steering Groups, by decoupling the Interagency Working Groups and Coordinating Groups from the 

budget reporting structure, and by regularly reviewing the Group portfolio with an eye towards disbanding those Groups that have outlived their usefulness and starting others that reflect major changes in NIT 

R&D areas.

Recommendation 10: The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) should continue its effort to digitize 

funding information and to enhance capabilities to create meaningful summary reports that cross agency 

boundaries.

Recommendation 11: OSTP, with guidance from PCAST, should develop a combination of quantitative 

and qualitative methods to assess the adequacy and appropriateness of government investments in 

NIT R&D. 

Government Leadership

Recommendation 12: The NSTC must continue to lead in bringing about the education of more children and adults in NIT, both through the efforts of its Committee on Science, Technology, Engineering, 

and Mathematics (STEM) Education in multi-agency programs to provide workers with skills in topics of 

importance to national priorities and in the creation of opportunities for high-quality continuing education 

in NIT.

Recommendation 13: The Federal Government must lead in continuing to ensure that strong multiagency R&D investments are made in NIT to address important national priorities. PCAST should establish a 

high-level standing PCAST NIT subcommittee and associated high-level PCAST NIT working group, 

composed of expert academic scientists, engineers, and industry leaders who can provide sustained 

strategic advice.
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PCAST NITRD

Working Group

Co-Chairs

Susan L. Graham

Pehong Chen Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Emerita 

University of California, Berkeley

Peter Lee

Corporate Vice President

Microsoft Research, USA

David E. Shaw*

Chief Scientist, D.E. Shaw Research

Senior Research Fellow, Center for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics

Columbia University

Staff

Amber Hartman Scholz5

Acting Executive Director, PCAST

Knatokie Ford

AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellow, PCAST

*Denotes PCAST Member

5. Note: Deborah Stine, PCAST’s Executive Director, staffed this study until her departure in September 2012.

★ xv ★

Table of Contents

Executive Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii

2012 PCAST Recommendations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi

PCAST NITRD Working Group . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiii

I. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

II. The Expanding Impact of Networking and Information Technology 3

III. Progress in 2010 Recommended Initiatives and Investments in NIT R&D to 

 Achieve America’s Priorities and Advance Key NIT Research Frontiers . . . . . . . . . . . .7

IV. Progress in 2010 Recommendations for Improved Effectiveness of NITRD Coordination . . . 19

V. Progress in 2010 Recommendations for Government Leadership . . . . . . . . . . . . 23

Appendix A. 2010 PCAST Recommendations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27

Appendix B. Additional Experts Providing Input . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33

Appendix C. Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37

Appendix D. Acronyms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39

★ 1 ★

I. Introduction

The breadth of impact of networking and information technology (NIT) is stunning. NIT affects health, 

national security, economic well-being, education, past, present, and future knowledge of the world, 

our transportation, uses of energy, and entertainment. Changes continue at a rapid pace. Recent years 

have seen the rise of massive open online courses (MOOCs), driverless cars, social networking, and the 

Curiosity robot that is currently exploring Mars. Because of talented people, the freedom to innovate, 

and the wise Federal investments that have been made in research and development in NIT, the United 

States has led the world in the science of NIT and in its myriad uses.

This report assesses the status and direction of the Federal Networking and Information Technology 

Research and Development (NITRD) Program. Responsibility for assessment of the NITRD program, 

originally assigned to the President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC) was transferred to the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) in 2005. A thorough 

review was last conducted in 2010.6 This report provides an update to the 2010 review, assessing the 

responses to the 2010 recommendations, the changes in the NITRD program since 2010, and the newly 

emerging areas within NIT.

The phrase “NITRD Program” is used in two ways in practice and in this report. 

1. As a description of the mechanism by which the Federal Government coordinates its unclassified 

research and development (R&D) investments in Networking and Information Technology (NIT).

2. As the name for the unclassified Federal NIT R&D portfolio itself.

The Federal Government’s investment in NIT R&D dates from the birth of the field more than 60 years 

ago. As a coordination effort, though, NITRD had its genesis in the High-Performance Computing Act 

of 1991—“An Act to provide for a coordinated Federal program to ensure continued U.S. leadership in 

high-performance computing.”7 Its scope was broadened by the Next Generation Internet Research Act 

of 1998, and again by the America COMPETES Act of 2007. 

To assist in this assessment, PCAST appointed an expert three-person Working Group, which consulted 

with more than 38 individuals and drew upon a number of recent studies and reports.

6. See footnote 2.

7. High-Performance Computing Act of 1991 [As Amended Through P.L. 110-69, Enacted August 9, 2007]. 

www.house.gov/legcoun/Comps/computin.pdf.
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The Organization of this Report

Section II of this report briefly reviews the comprehensive and deep impact of NIT R&D on nearly all 

aspects of discovery, well-being, and economic prosperity today, providing additional data that builds 

on the more extensive discussion in the 2010 report. As a field of science and engineering, NIT is arguably unique in the breadth and rapidity of its increasing role in affecting lives, achieving priorities, and 

addressing challenges as a Nation. With this backdrop, Section III reviews the progress that has been 

made in responding to the 2010 recommended initiatives and investments in NIT R&D to achieve 

America’s priorities and to advance key NIT research frontiers. This review has resulted in new findings, 

and in some cases, has led the committee to make new recommendations. 

Looking to the future, effective coordination of the Nation’s investments in NIT R&D is even more 

important than in the past. Section IV reviews the key role of the NITRD coordination process and 

the progress made in responding to the 2010 recommendations for improved effectiveness of NITRD 

coordination. Section V revisits the 2010 recommendations for government leadership in NIT R&D. The 

report concludes with a summary of where the NITRD program is now and where it needs to go in order 

to sustain America’s leadership in NIT.
★ 3 ★

II. The Expanding Impact of 

Networking and Information Technology

A study recently published by the National Academies’ Computer Science and Telecommunications 

Board (CSTB) asks the reader to imagine spending a day without NIT: 8

This would be a day without the Internet and all that it enables. A day without diagnostic medical 

imaging. A day during which automobiles lacked electronic ignition, antilock brakes, and electronic stability control. A day without digital media—without wireless telephones, high-definition 

televisions, MP3 audio, cable- or Internet-delivered video, computer animation, and video games. 

A day during which aircraft could not fly, travelers had to navigate without benefit of the Global 

Positioning System (GPS), weather forecasters had no models, banks and merchants could not 

transfer funds electronically, and factory automation ceased to function. It would be a day in 

which the U.S. military lacked precision munitions, did not have the capabilities for networkcentric warfare, and did not enjoy technological supremacy. It would be, for most people in the 

United States and the rest of the developed world, a “day the Earth stood still.”

The breadth of impact of NIT is simply stunning. Virtually every human endeavor today is affected, as 

NIT enables or improves pursuits in domains as diverse as scientific discovery, human health, education, 

the environment, energy, national security, transportation, manufacturing, governance, and entertainment. In every case, discoveries and developments in NIT have enabled the United States to make major 

improvements and achieve progress towards national and global priorities. In the future many, if not 

most, of the new opportunities will be dependent on further advances in NIT.

The indispensable nature of NIT has made it the key technological driver for economic growth, and 

today, the economic impact of NIT continues unabated. According to a 2011 study by the McKinsey 

Global Institute, Internet-related activities alone contributed 3.8 percent to the U.S. gross domestic 

product (GDP) in 2009.9 The Bureau of Economic Analysis estimates that “information-communicationstechnology-producing” industries contributed nearly 5 percent to overall U.S. GDP in 2010, an increase 

of over 16 percent from the previous year.10

The intellectual agenda of NIT research continues to expand, making possible new scientific discoveries 

and taking the research community into a multitude of new directions of scholarly inquiry. This culture 

of discovery has nourished a vibrant capacity for invention and innovation, which in turn has resulted 

in new business opportunities and a relentless growth in NIT-related industries. The study by the CSTB 

depicted this connection between intellectual vitality and economic impact in NIT industries through 

the use of a diagram, shown in Figure 1. This so-called “Tire Tracks” shows the rich interplay between 

8. National Academies Press. (2012). Continuing Innovation in Information Technology. 1.

9. Matthieu Pélissié du Rausas, James Manyika, Eric Hazan, Jacques Bughin, Michael Chui, and Rémi Said. (2011). 

“Internet Matters: The Net’s Sweeping Impact on Growth, Jobs, and Prosperity.” McKinsey Global Institute, May, 

www.mckinsey.com/Insights/MGI/Research/Technology_and_Innovation/Internet_matters. The authors define 

“Internet-related activities” as the “totality of Internet activities (e.g., e-commerce) and . . . a portion of the information 

and communication technologies sector delineated by such activities, technologies, and services linked to the Web.”

10. Bureau of Economic Analysis. (April 26, 2011). “2010 Recovery Widespread across Industries.” www.bea. gov/

newsreleases/industry/gdpindustry/2011/pdf/gdpind10_adv_fax.pdf. See also “Interactive Access to Industry Economic 

Accounts Data,” www.bea.gov/iTable/iTable.cfm?ReqID=5&step=1.
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★ 4 ★

Federally-funded research in both universities and industry. Each “track” starts at the bottom with 

Federally-funded basic NIT research. As time progresses, an ecosystem involving academia, industry, 

and government interacts in complex ways to create technological innovations that lead to entirely new 

product categories and, ultimately, to the creation of whole new industries. These NIT industries, each 

one sustaining annual revenues of over $10 billion (B), are arrayed along the tops of the tire tracks, along 

with a tiny sample of well-known companies and products as representatives of major economic impact. 

The links between government support, university research, and industrial R&D that are depicted in the 

figure reflect a remarkable and complex research ecosystem, on which future well-being will depend.

Figure 1. Tire Tracks Diagram
II. The Expanding Impact of Networking and Information Tech n o lo g y 

★ 5 ★

Even in just the two short years since the 2010 PCAST report on NITRD, advances in the understanding 

of the technical foundations of several key technical areas, such as “big data” and social computing have 

already enabled significant growth in emerging industry sectors, such as cloud computing and social 

networking. But this is just scratching the surface of the true opportunities. 

Today, many of the grand challenges in NIT R&D are increasingly aligned with the Nation’s priorities. 

Can robotics and other automated systems be created to reinvent core aspects of manufacturing and 

transportation systems, dramatically improving quality, safety, and energy efficiency? Can a secure, 

more robust, and more private Internet be created? Can more effective, personalized, and collaborative educational tools for universally available tutoring and just-in-time learning be created? Can more 

personalized and continuous health monitoring be developed? Can systems that enable people to 

engage with their governments and their communities more effectively be created? And can tools that 

accelerate discovery and innovation by enabling new forms of data-driven science and engineering be 

developed?

These and many other grand challenges are representative of a sea change in the thinking of the research 

community. To be sure, there is still a focus on the core research in basic understanding of the nature of 

computation and methods for harnessing it; but whole new vistas for real-world impact are opening, 

and both the research community and Federal agencies are showing eagerness to explore them.

While such opportunities are exciting, major obstacles loom. The classical distinction between “basic” 

and “applied” research hardly applies in NIT R&D. For example, initiatives in areas such as robotics or 

“big data” are cutting-edge fundamental research topics at universities and industry labs, while at the 

same time, they are the focus of real-world deployment missions for large corporations, the military, 

and government agencies. Whereas the intellectual challenges in NIT of the previous era were primarily 

in the development of NIT itself, the problems emerging today have a fundamentally different flavor, 

one that is far more multidisciplinary than before. Addressing the emerging challenges calls for a more 

collaborative approach, and in particular, collaborations that span the traditional domains of various 

Federal agencies. Achieving progress towards the national priorities in health, energy, manufacturing, 

education, and privacy will almost certainly depend on finding and exploiting synergies across multiple 

Federal agencies. 

To this end, the 2010 PCAST report on NITRD recommended that steps be taken to develop an understanding of investment levels in NIT R&D, and then to create effective collaborations across key Federal 

agencies. As a result, much of the current review of the NITRD programs has centered on these dual 

issues of investment level and effective collaboration. To address those issues, a third area of focus 

for this review pertains to the advisory mechanism for meeting these NIT challenges. We address the 

question of whether an adequate high-level advisory mechanism exists, in light of the 2010 PCAST 

report’s recommendation for a new standing committee, and propose revised recommendations 

based on our findings.

★ 7 ★

III. Progress in 2010 Recommended Initiatives 

in NIT R&D to Achieve America’s Priorities 

and Advance Key NIT Research Frontiers

The primary focus of this review is the progress in responding to the recommendations made in the 

2010 PCAST NITRD report. The 2010 report made a large number of recommendations for initiatives and 

investments in NIT R&D, both in the executive summary and, additionally, in the body of the report. The 

report recommended new initiatives in three areas, NIT for health, NIT for energy and transportation, and 

NIT for assuring both the security and the robustness of cyber-infrastructure. It recommended increased 

investment in fundamental NIT research frontiers and in key core technologies, including privacy and 

protected disclosure; social computing (including both the dynamics of online social systems and 

methods for harnessing large numbers of networked people and machines); data collection, storage, 

management, and automated large-scale analysis; and NIT and the physical world. It recommended sustained investment in research infrastructure and in important core NIT technologies, especially software 

creation, maintenance, and modification; scalable systems; and architectures, algorithms, and software 

for next-generation high-performance computing (HPC) systems. It recommended fundamental R&D 

to support educational technologies; infrastructure and tools for digital democracy; and a national 

infrastructure for spectrum management. Finally, it highlighted five major cross-cutting themes that 

impact virtually all Federal agencies—“big data,” secure and trustworthy software systems, privacy and 

protected disclosure, interoperable and open interfaces, and supply chain vulnerability. The 2010 report 

advised that an investment of at least $1B annually would be needed for new, potentially transformative 

NIT research. The lack of clarity about current expenditures made it impossible to estimate how much 

of that would have to be new funding and how much could be obtained by reprioritization. 

We first summarize those areas in which the response to the recommendations has been the strongest, 

and then discuss those areas in which progress has been slower. 

Notable Areas of Progress in Responding to Recommendations

Big Data

Enormous volumes of data are now being generated from observational mechanisms (sensors, satellites, 

accelerators, telescopes, etc.), from computing simulations, and from social media (audio, visual, internetbased). Traditional textual documents (books, journals, newspapers, historical records) are increasingly 

available in digital form. With this rapid increase in data volume, new opportunities have arisen from 

fundamental NIT research, producing deep and sophisticated capabilities to analyze multi-faceted 

data, using modeling, data mining, and machine learning capabilities, and to glean a wide variety of 

information from that data. The topic that has come to be called “big data” augments those capabilities 

with fundamental research in data collection, storage, management, automated large-scale analysis of 

heterogeneous data, and widespread uses of the outcomes of that research. Data collection, storage, 

and management have been concerns for many years and have become increasingly challenging as 

the volume of data and diversity of data sources grows.
DE SIGNING A DIGITAL FU TURE: FEDERALLY FUNDED RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT IN

NETWORKING AND INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

★ 8 ★

Virtually every government agency has growing needs for managing data and for the fruits of analysis. 

Recognizing that, the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) unveiled a “Big Data Initiative” in 

March 2012,11 with $200 million (M) in new R&D investments. The new programs included a joint research 

solicitation from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), 

several basic research programs within NSF, a set of “Data to Decisions” programs from the Department 

of Defense (DoD), the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) XDATA project, NIH sharing 

of data from the 1000 Genomes Project, the Department of Energy (DoE) Scalable Data Management, 

Analysis and Visualization (SDAV) Institute, and a U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) program for “Big Data 

for Earth System Science.” Several other agencies are contributing data sets to Data.gov. The NITRD 

coordination process introduced the Big Data Senior Steering Group (SSG) that will enable sharing of 

research projects and results that contribute to the missions of multiple agencies. All of these efforts 

strengthen the Nation’s ability to address problems of national importance.

NIT-Enabled Interaction with the Physical World 

Computer interaction with the physical world has a long history. Examples include industrial robots, 

robotic space explorers, and controllers embedded in appliances, automobiles, aircraft, and people. With 

the advent of wireless communication, device miniaturization, and better methods for computer vision, 

domain-specific sensor networks, wearable devices, new kinds of robotics, and a diversity of embedded smart devices have been advanced. Uses include healthcare, defense, basic research in physical 

and biological sciences, sustainability, public safety, manufacturing, and consumer goods and services.

The 2010 report viewed robotics and embedded systems as two related aspects of NIT interaction with 

the physical world, but in the government context they have remained largely separate. However, both 

aspects have made progress.

In June 2011, the President launched a National Robotics Initiative, to contribute to strengthening 

American manufacturing. This initiative focuses on developing robots that work with or beside people 

to extend or augment human capabilities, taking advantage of the different strengths of humans and 

robots. In addition to investing in the core technology needed for next-generation robotics, the initiative 

supports important applications of robotics. As part of that initiative, NSF, NIH, the National Aeronautics 

and Space Administration (NASA), and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced a joint 

research solicitation, with anticipated funding of $40-50M per year. DoD introduced a $40M Defense 

University Research Instrumentation Program. The National Robotics Initiative represents a response 

to emerging opportunities identified by the research community, effectively coordinating the activities 

and programs across multiple Federal agencies.

11. Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) Press Release. (March 29, 2012). “Obama Administration 

Unveils ‘Big Data’ Initiative: Announces $200 Million in New R&D Investments.” www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/

microsites/ostp/big_data_press_release.pdf.

Finding: Federal agencies have made significant progress in supporting R&D for data collection, storage, 

management, and automated large-scale analysis (“big data”).
★ 9 ★

I I I . P RO G R E S S I N 2010 R E CO M M EN D ED I N I T I AT I V E S I N N I T R & D TO AC H I EV E A M ER I C A’ S P R I O R I T I E S 

A N D A DVA N C E K EY N I T RE S E A RC H F RO N T I ER S

Research in embedded systems has been coordinated through the High Confidence Software and 

Systems (HCSS) CG. More recently, that area has expanded to a new subfield of NIT called “cyber-physical 

systems” which incorporates sensors and sensor networks. The Cyber-Physical Systems Senior Steering 

Group (SSG) was formed in 2012. NSF, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), NASA, 

DoD, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the Environmental Protection 

Agency (EPA), DARPA, and the USGS have programs in aspects of cyber-physical systems. In this regard, 

the introduction and coordination of research initiatives across a large number of relevant agencies 

has been strong, likely creating the conditions for synergy as new funding programs are established.

Health IT

NIT is playing an increasingly important role in all aspects of health and healthcare. There is tremendous 

potential in the use of NIT to accelerate progress in the fundamental technologies and delivery mechanisms for health and well-being. The possibilities include new capabilities in medical devices, data-driven 

development and discovery of new drug therapies, secure and robustly available health records, and 

personal responsibility for health maintenance. The potential to use data mining and machine learning 

on health and healthcare information about millions or even billions of people while protecting their 

privacy holds out the promise of applying collective experience and deep analysis for highly personalized health monitoring and treatment. 

Although there has not been an overall government initiative on NIT for health, there has been a considerable amount of progress by multiple government agencies in response to both the 2010 PCAST 

NITRD report and the 2010 PCAST report on Health IT.12 

The HHS Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC), with multi-agency 

participation, funded four highly collaborative research projects under the Strategic Health IT Advanced 

Research Projects (SHARP) program. (Unfortunately, that program is ending and has no successor). NSF 

initiated the Smart Health and Wellbeing Program. Several institutes within NIH have NIT programs that 

go beyond electronic health records. There are also health IT projects within the Big Data Initiative for 

both data collection and data analytics and within the National Robotics Initiative for both surgery and 

prosthesis.

There are encouraging signs of progress in interagency collaboration. In response to the American 

Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, the NCO established the Health Information Technology 

Research and Development (HITRD) SSG and the Health Information Technology Innovation and 

Development Environments (HITIDE) Subgroup to coordinate agency activities. The SSG has developed a 

report, “Federal Health IT R&D Recommendations,” which is under review by OSTP. The HITIDE Subgroup is 

12. President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. (2010). “Realizing the Full Potential of Health 

Information Technology to Improve Healthcare for Americans: The Path Forward.” Report to the President and Congress. 

www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/ostp/pcast-health-it-report.pdf.

Finding: Federal agencies have made significant progress in supporting R&D for robotics and are continuing to create a coordinated response while also establishing new programs to fund advances in cyberphysical systems.
D E S I G N I N G A D I G I TA L F U T U RE: F ED ERA LLY F U N D ED RE S E A RC H A N D D EV ELO P M EN T I N 

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★ 10 ★

working on plans for federated national testbeds for developing interoperable health records and health 

systems. The Veterans Health Administration (VHA) is participating in that Subgroup. It is anticipated 

that NSF and NIH will announce a joint research solicitation later this year.

Much research remains to be done. Many innovative ideas for personal health (approaches to empower 

individuals to sustain their own health and that of their families) are being explored, but research is 

needed to understand which are most effective and how they might evolve. There is a continuing need 

for testbeds, data sets, and platforms for strengthening research prototypes so they can be evaluated 

and improved at scale. Shared and open standards are needed for information exchange, so that multiple 

capabilities can be combined to solve complex problems.

Cybersecurity 

The 2010 NITRD report identified cybersecurity as an area of great and growing importance. The report 

drew special attention to its implications for protecting the Nation’s critical infrastructure, including civil 

and governmental communications networks, electrical power generation and distribution systems, 

financial systems, logistics, fuels, water, and emergency services. The report found that effectively 

defending cyber-infrastructure against potential adversaries, whose offensive capabilities are likely to 

grow significantly over time, will require the adoption of entirely new approaches, and will require a 

significant and ongoing investment in long-term, fundamental research in various areas of computer 

science.

There is now an increased awareness of the Nation’s dependence on cyber-infrastructure and applications, and of the importance of improving the security of that infrastructure. NITRD has long had a Cyber 

Security and Information Assurance (CSIA) Interagency Working Group (IWG), and in 2008 created a 

higher-level CSIA R&D SSG. These two groups, along with the Special Cyber Operations Research and 

Engineering (SCORE) IWG (which addresses classified cybersecurity issues and R&D), provide coordination of Federal cybersecurity R&D. 

The coordination structure is regarded as particularly effective. The CSIA IWG and SSG produced a report, 

Trustworthy Cyberspace: Strategic Plan for the Federal Cybersecurity Research and Development Program, 

which is very well regarded. Some of the people interviewed for this report, however, believe that the 

research itself is not well enough coordinated. It has been suggested that DoD, the National Security 

Agency (NSA), and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) should pose unclassified challenges 

whose solutions advance the state of the art in ways that might help the U.S. intelligence community 

to address classified problems.

Investment in cybersecurity R&D has increased in recent years. NSF, DoE, DoD, and DHS all fund R&D 

programs on various aspects of cybersecurity, although there appear to be no joint programs. Supply 

chain risk management for NIT is being addressed by NIST in partnership with DHS. DoD is also concerned with supply chain risk; DoD and NSA have supported the Trusted Foundry Program since 2004. 

Finding: Federal agencies have made significant progress in supporting R&D for health IT and in increasing 

interagency collaboration.
★ 11 ★

I I I . P RO G R E S S I N 2010 R E CO M M EN D ED I N I T I AT I V E S I N N I T R & D TO AC H I EV E A M ER I C A’ S P R I O R I T I E S 

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One area deserving of more attention relates to the recommendation in the 2010 report for fundamental 

research in NIT-related areas relevant to the implementation of what was referred to in the report as a 

“survivable core” of essential cyber-infrastructure. The term “survivable core” was used in that context 

to refer to a small, rigorously isolated set of very basic capabilities that could be relied upon with a high 

degree of confidence to provide truly essential NIT-based services on a temporary basis in the event that, 

for example, a catastrophically damaging cyber-attack cannot be prevented. From a technical viewpoint, 

this is quite different from the problem of defending the highly complex systems used under nonemergent conditions, and its solutions are likely to require advances in different areas of NIT research.

Areas in Which Response to Recommendations Has Lagged

Social Computing

Use of the Internet by means of the World Wide Web has become universal and commonplace. Most 

of the content available to search engines is provided by users. Users collaborate informally by using 

services, such as Facebook and Twitter (both social media), and more intentionally, through enterprises, 

such as Wikipedia (an example of peer production). There is a growing phenomenon of “social computing,” incorporating not only social media and peer production, but also crowdsourcing and collective 

distributed tasks. Recent examples include the DARPA Network Challenge, which demonstrated the 

ability of social networks to mobilize large numbers of people rapidly for the purpose of finding hidden 

red weather balloons, and the ReCaptcha system for human computation, to obtain accurate character 

recognition of scanned texts.

The 2010 NITRD report recommended that NSF, DARPA, and HHS create a collaborative research program 

that augments the study of individual human-computer interaction with research in social collaboration and problem-solving in a networked, online environment. Collective human-NIT interaction is a 

reality, with many examples of novel ways in which the problem-solving power of large numbers of 

network-connected people and machines can be used to great effectiveness. It is important that both 

the productive uses of this phenomenon and the problems it raises be understood.

All three agencies have expressed strong interest in this area. NIH is beginning to look at the use of social 

networking for health, and DARPA has identified social computing systems as one of the core areas for 

future programs. Social computing systems may enable disruptive advances in what kinds of problems 

can be solved, as well as provide a tool for mass mobilization and information dissemination in times of 

crisis. At NSF, the program in Social-Computational Systems (SoCS) seeks to develop greater coherence 

and “understanding about the properties that systems of people and computers together possess,” 

Finding: Federal agencies have made substantial progress in supporting R&D for reducing the risks associated with various forms of cyber-attack, although much remains to be done. 

Recommendation 1: Big data, NIT-enabled interaction with the physical world, health IT, and cybersecurity continue to be important, and while there is noticeable progress on interagency coordination since 

2010, these areas remain as critical focal points in 2012 and beyond. Continued emphasis and even greater 

coordination is recommended.
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★ 12 ★

leading to a concept of “socially intelligent computing.” There are also some nascent studies of the use 

of social interaction for education, and NSF’s Interface between Computer Science and Economics & 

Social Sciences (ICES) program is a multidisciplinary effort spanning three directorates. 

While the above are important and useful starts on this emerging area, there still appears to be no 

focused effort spanning the three agencies to understand the technical effects on specific areas, such 

as security, privacy, health, and scientific discovery, from the emerging social phenomena that are 

empowered by ubiquitous online services. 

Privacy

Privacy and protected disclosure was cited as a cross-cutting theme in the 2010 report—one that is 

important for every agency and mission—as huge amounts of diverse information about individuals 

become available in online electronic form. The report said: 

“Privacy challenges do not and must not require us to forgo the benefits of NIT in addressing 

national priorities. Rather, we need a practical science of privacy protection, based on fundamental advances in NIT, to provide us with tools we can use to reconcile privacy with progress.”13

Even ahead of the development and adoption of tools, science principles of privacy protection could 

do much to guide the development of more effective policies in this area.

There continues to be no focused coordinated R&D effort in privacy. Important issues to be addressed 

include how to realize the benefits of collective personal information without compromising the 

privacy of individuals, how to achieve cybersecurity and security more broadly without unnecessary 

disclosure of individual information, how to design systems to avoid unintended personal disclosure, 

how to empower individuals to assert their identity and also make informed decisions about voluntary 

disclosure, and how to use the science of privacy protection to inform policy decisions.

No mission agency has primary responsibility for privacy and protected disclosure—the issue arises as 

a byproduct of missions, such as health, defense, energy conservation, education, economic prosperity, 

13. See footnote 2. 

Finding: Several NITRD agencies and departments, including NSF, DARPA, and HHS, have established 

largely independent research programs and initiatives in social computing and areas directly relevant to 

social computing. These programs have started to identify the key research challenges and to develop 

a coherent taxonomy of this subfield of NIT R&D. Two years later, need for cross-agency collaborative 

research in this area is even more crucial. Particularly for national priorities in energy, health, governance, 

and any area that may require large-scale citizen involvement, the ability to harness the possibilities in 

social computing is likely to grow in importance.

Recommendation 2: The National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) should create a multi-agency 

collaborative effort, with NSF and DARPA as lead agencies, to develop a coordinated cross-agency initiative 

in social computing, building on the research results and understanding emerging from existing programs, 

such as NSF’s Social-Computational Systems Program (SoCS). 
★ 13 ★

I I I . P RO G R E S S I N 2010 R E CO M M EN D ED I N I T I AT I V E S I N N I T R & D TO AC H I EV E A M ER I C A’ S P R I O R I T I E S 

A N D A DVA N C E K EY N I T RE S E A RC H F RO N T I ER S

and others. Consequently, it appears that a coordinated NITRD effort driven in a non-partisan manner 

by the highest levels of government is needed to make progress on this topic.

The R&D challenge posed to the NITRD program by privacy is daunting. The technical foundations 

of privacy technologies and policies are likely to be technically complex, requiring results from deep 

research and a comprehensive, end-to-end view of the engineering and deployment issues. It is unlikely 

that any individual agency, on its own, can reach practical deployable solutions; effective collaboration 

will be essential. At the same time, it may be important for one agency to take the primary responsibility 

for privacy R&D, and then drive the necessary collaboration from there.

The urgency of this need cannot be overstated. Without clear scientific and engineering principles to rely 

on for guidance, policies and legislative actions may be taken that preclude progress or the exploitation 

of opportunities in the mission areas mentioned above.

Software

The problem of predictable development of software that has the intended functionality and is reliable, secure, and efficient remains as one of the most important problems in NIT. Software technology 

is a challenge that cuts across every agency and thus, calls for interagency research coordination. At 

the same time, the approaches to software development can vary significantly for emerging areas like 

“big data,” robotics and physical systems, embedded systems, high-performance computing, and so 

on, expanding the challenges substantially. Furthermore, the evolution of computing infrastructure is 

creating new challenges, ranging from energy-aware software development to software for massively 

parallel and distributed systems.

Overall, while progress in software R&D appears to be good, it is hard to discern disruptive advances 

emerging out of the current programs. Software technology, instead, appears to be a domain of relentlessly incremental, albeit necessary, improvements to the state-of-the-art. In order to sustain the Nation’s 

capabilities, it is critical that such research be supported. At the same time, new concepts that may lead 

to fundamental advances must be sought. 

Sustained efforts must be supported for foundational advances in a full range of software technologies, including new languages for new domains, such as “big data” and embedded applications, tools 

for large-scale analysis and verification, and new approaches for easier development of software that 

exploit parallelism and heterogeneity. 

Finding: No agency has primary responsibility for privacy R&D, although many agencies need a better 

understanding of the science of privacy and protected disclosure in an online digital world. Research on 

privacy is needed to inform policy decisions and to enable appropriate use of personal data while protecting its source.

Recommendation 3: NSTC should create a multi-agency collaborative effort led by NSF, HHS, and DARPA 

to develop the scientific and engineering foundations of privacy R&D. NITRD should coordinate across 

government agencies to develop deployable technologies and inform policy decisions.
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★ 14 ★

Educational Technology

The 2010 NITRD report made two recommendations concerning educational technology. The first was 

that the DoEd and NSF should support NIT R&D to discover new educational technologies applicable 

from pre-school settings all the way through life-long learning. The second was that the same two agencies should have a long-term program to assess promising educational technologies, and to facilitate 

the evolution of curricula and instructional processes to incorporate proven educational technologies. 

Neither of those collaborations appears to have made progress.

There has been a significantly increased deployment of educational technologies in the last two years. 

For example, the private sector has introduced a multiplicity of tablet based “apps” for education. 

College-level MOOCs have taken off, enabled by new technologies, such as auto-grading and online 

social collaboration, and new instructional approaches, such as small modular lessons and frequent 

automated quizzes to assess comprehension. There is an increasing interest in the use of electronic 

games to motivate and engage learners. The popularity of these technologies is apparent, but their 

efficacy is not well understood. 

Assessment of the use of technology for education at all levels still needs research; there is still a preponderance of polling over objective analysis. The availability of digital data about the learning activities of 

users of educational technologies provides a new opportunity to create a more grounded assessment 

capability. That, in turn, would inform a more scientific basis for the creation of new personalized learning 

technologies. Although DoEd bears primary responsibility for K-12 education, other mission agencies, 

such as DoD, have a need for continuing education of their adult personnel. The Nation needs advances 

in education and training at all levels.

There are some scattered but promising activities in educational technologies. DoEd has an Office of 

Educational Technology that has ongoing programs using technology for children and adults with disabilities. DARPA sponsors the ENGAGE program to develop game-based programs for education. The 

Advanced Research Projects Agency for Education (ARPA-ED) program proposed in the 2010 PCAST 

education report would also fulfill some of these needs but to date it has not been established.

Finding: Software technology remains one of the most critical areas in NIT R&D, and while progress has 

been good on current foundations, the needed disruptive advances do not appear imminent.

Recommendation 4: NSF, DARPA, and agencies that need software tailored to their missions must collaborate to support core research that advances design, development, modification, and maintenance 

of all varieties of software, incorporating reliability, robustness, security, and specialization for particular 

domains. Both sustained investment to achieve long-term research goals and focused research to address 

near-term challenges must be supported.
★ 15 ★

I I I . P RO G R E S S I N 2010 R E CO M M EN D ED I N I T I AT I V E S I N N I T R & D TO AC H I EV E A M ER I C A’ S P R I O R I T I E S 

A N D A DVA N C E K EY N I T RE S E A RC H F RO N T I ER S

Energy and Transportation

In the 2010 NITRD report, energy and transportation were identified as areas ripe for progress by the 

introduction of NIT R&D. The 2010 recommendation stated:

“The Federal Government should invest in a national, long-term, multi-agency, multi-faceted 

research initiative on NIT for energy and transportation. As part of that initiative: 

• DoE and NSF should be major sponsors of research for achieving dynamic power management in applications ranging from single devices to buildings to the power grid.

• NIST should organize the multi-stakeholder formulation of interoperable standards for 

real-time control. Interoperability facilitates repeated cycles of innovation by multiple 

vendors, promoting the development of versatile and robust NIT. 

• DoD should continue to be a major sponsor of research on using NIT to achieve low-power 

systems and devices. 

• The Department of Transportation (DoT) should sponsor ambitious NIT research relevant 

to surface and air transportation.”14

Since the 2010 report, DoT has joined the NITRD program. NSF funds some aspects of energy research 

through its Science, Engineering, and Education for Sustainability (SEES) program. However, no initiative 

of the kind recommended has been created, and we have not found evidence of increased attention to 

NIT research in energy and transportation.

14. See footnote 2.

Finding: New educational technologies are emerging that provide an opportunity to advance education 

and training. To date, the government is providing no coordination and inadequate R&D to take advantage 

of these opportunities.

Recommendation 5: NSTC should create a multi-agency collaborative effort led by NSF and DoEd to 

define an R&D program with two major foci—to develop innovative educational technologies for learning 

from pre-school to life-long learning, and to develop assessment programs for those technologies that 

use advanced techniques from “big data” R&D and from the learning sciences. DoEd should join NITRD and 

should participate actively in this effort. 

Finding: Progress in addressing the NIT issues recommended in the 2010 NITRD report appears to be 

modest.

Recommendation 6: NSF, DoE, DoD, and DoT should collaborate to support research on the use of NIT for 

dynamic power management, for achieving low-power systems and devices, and for improving surface 

and air transportation, combining the basic research sponsored by NSF with the mission specific challenges faced by DoE, DoD, and DoT.
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Scalable Systems and Networking

As the 2010 NITRD report recommended, there has been continuing progress in scalable systems 

and networking. NSF has supported two networking infrastructure and scaling efforts, the Global 

Environment for Network Innovations (GENI), a virtual laboratory for at-scale networking experimentation, and US Ignite, a national-state, public-private partnership to foster the creation of novel applications and digital experiences that will transform healthcare, education and job skills training, public 

safety, energy, and advanced manufacturing. DoE continues to fund the Energy Sciences Network (ESnet) 

infrastructure to connect DoE laboratories and other research institutions. DoD continues to fund the 

Defense Research and Engineering Network (DREN) infrastructure to connect DoD laboratories and 

other research institutions for high-performance applications. 

The 2010 NITRD report recommended that NSF, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), and 

the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) partner to create, sustain, and 

promote the use of a nationwide infrastructure for spectrum monitoring that cuts across commercial, 

public safety, and DoD applications. That recommendation was followed by a July 2012 PCAST report, 

“Realizing the Full Potential of Government-Held Spectrum to Spur Economic Growth,” 15 that explores 

the topic in considerably more depth. NTIA has set up a Spectrum Sharing Innovation Test-Bed Pilot 

Program to examine the feasibility of increased sharing between Federal and non-Federal users. NSF 

issued the “Enhancing Access to Radio Spectrum (EARS)” solicitation in FY12 “to identify bold new concepts with the potential to contribute to significant improvements in the efficiency of radio spectrum 

utilization, and in the ability for traditionally underserved Americans to benefit from current and future 

wireless-enabled goods and services.”16 The solicitation will be funded at $11M in FY12 and $50M in FY13. 

High-Performance Computing

The 2010 NITRD report included an extensive discussion, a number of findings, and a specific recommendation related to Federally-funded research and development in the area of HPC.17 Because the 

HPC-related recommendation was not highlighted within the executive summary, however, some 

readers failed to find it, and others inferred that PCAST believed HPC R&D was no longer important. In 

reality, the report placed a high priority on ambitious, long-term basic research aimed at developing 

15. President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. (2012). “Realizing the Full Potential of GovernmentHeld Spectrum to Spur Economic Growth.” Report to the President and Congress. www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/

files/microsites/ostp/pcast_spectrum_report_final_july_20_2012.pdf.

16. National Science Foundation. (2012). Enhancing Access to the Radio Spectrum (EARS). www.nsf.gov/funding/

pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=503480&org=AST&from=home.

17. See footnote 2. xiii–xiv, Sections 6.7 and 7.

Finding: There has been significant progress in creating infrastructure for network scaling and testbeds 

and continuing attention to spectrum sharing. There have been some investments in basic research for 

spectrum management. Attention to other kinds of system scaling, such as robustness and resource 

management, is less evident.

Recommendation 7: System and network scaling continues to be an important research challenge. NSF, 

and in the case of spectrum, FCC and NTIA, should continue to invest in furthering these areas. 
★ 17 ★

I I I . P RO G R E S S I N 2010 R E CO M M EN D ED I N I T I AT I V E S I N N I T R & D TO AC H I EV E A M ER I C A’ S P R I O R I T I E S 

A N D A DVA N C E K EY N I T RE S E A RC H F RO N T I ER S

“truly transformational next-generation HPC systems,” and called for a highly aggressive, coordinated 

program of “fundamental research on hardware, architectures, algorithms, and software with the 

potential for enabling game-changing advances in high-performance computing.” 

HPC differs from many other areas of NIT in that the government not only supports basic R&D in HPC, 

but is also the main consumer of the most powerful and expensive HPC systems. Various missionoriented agencies within the DoE, the DoD, and the U.S. Intelligence Community rely on such systems 

to support their respective missions, as do a number of other Federal agencies. While HPC technologies 

have had a significant impact within the private sector as well, advanced HPC infrastructure is critical 

to national security, scientific discovery, and technological innovation, and substantial Federal funding 

must continue to be provided for its acquisition.

As noted in the 2010 report, however, it is important that the United States balances investments in 

present and future requirements for high-performance computing, and that procurement of currentgeneration machines does not “crowd out” the fundamental research in computer science and engineering that will be required to develop next-generation HPC technologies. To lay the groundwork 

for such next-generation systems, it will be necessary to pursue entirely new approaches, conducting 

groundbreaking research (including high-risk, high-return exploratory efforts) in a number of areas.

While the metric that has most commonly been used over the years as a proxy for high-end supercomputer performance is the number of floating point operations per second (FLOPS) executed on a 

specific numerical benchmark application, the sort of research program envisioned in the 2010 report 

would have a broader set of goals. In the context of an expanding and evolving set of national priorities, the report concluded that the notion of “high performance” must now assume a broader meaning, 

encompassing not only FLOPS, but also the ability, for example, to efficiently manipulate vast and rapidly 

increasing quantities of both numerical and non-numerical data, to handle problems requiring real-time 

response, and to accelerate many applications that were either non-existent or far less important at the 

time of NITRD’s creation. With the advent of inexpensive multicore processor chips, powerful graphics 

processing units, cloud-based computational resources based on enormous numbers of processors, 

and other technological and commercial innovations, the report also recommended that the Nation’s 

high-performance computing goals be coordinated with a qualitatively new and rapidly evolving 

“computational ecology.”

The specific recommendation in the 2010 report was that a coordinated program be initiated to conduct 

basic research on architectures, algorithms, and software for next-generation HPC systems. As noted 

in the 2010 report, such a program could ultimately allow the United States to “leapfrog” other nations, 

maintaining the leadership position that America has historically enjoyed in high performance computing. So far as we have been able to determine, however, little progress has been made since the 2010 

report on the implementation of such a program.
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Large-Scale NIT Infrastructure for Research and Development

Although the last two letters of the NITRD acronym might suggest otherwise, the NITRD program 

encompasses both NIT R&D and large-scale NIT-based research infrastructure investments. Large scale 

shared infrastructure includes not only HPC systems, but also networks used for experimentation, shared 

data bases, and shared open platforms that enable experimental replacement of components. Both 

research and the infrastructure to conduct research are important, and a balance in investment must 

be achieved. That balance can be challenging in times of flat budgets.

The manner in which investments are aggregated and reported in the Federal Government in some 

cases tends to obscure the distinction between (a) R&D in NIT disciplines, and (b) the acquisition of NIT 

infrastructure used to conduct R&D in other areas. The investment in NIT-based infrastructure for nonNIT research is more properly attributed to the domain in which it is used. Misclassifying infrastructure 

expenditures as R&D expenditures may lead policymakers to believe that the government is investing 

far more in the latter than is actually the case. This may lead to a systematic underinvestment in fundamental NIT research of the sort that will be required to preserve the Nation’s historical leadership in 

NIT over future years. 

Finding: There is still no coordinated, interagency plan for a substantial and sustained program of longterm, fundamental research on architectures, algorithms, and software for future generations of HPC 

systems. 

Recommendation 8: NSTC should lead an effort by NSF, DoE, DoD, member agencies of the Intelligence 

Community, and other relevant Federal agencies to design and implement a joint initiative for long-term, 

basic research aimed at developing fundamentally new approaches to high-performance computing.
★ 19 ★

IV. Progress in 2010 Recommendations 

for Improved Effectiveness of 

NITRD Coordination

Many Federal employees volunteer their time and energy to provide sustained leadership for the NITRD 

Program through its Subcommittee, its Interagency Working Groups (IWGs), its Coordinating Groups 

(CGs), and, more recently, its Senior Steering Groups (SSGs). This effort is recognized across the executive and legislative branches of the government as an effective mechanism for sharing information and 

coordinating activities of benefit to multiple agencies.

The recommendations in the 2010 report for improvements to NITRD effectiveness had two major 

thrusts—improving the effectiveness of NITRD coordination by varying its coordination structure and 

by increasing the membership of Federal agencies in NITRD and NITRD coordination, and improving 

the transparency of budgetary reporting. In both thrusts, there have been significant areas of progress, 

although in some aspects, progress has been less apparent.

Interagency Working Groups, Coordinating Groups, and Senior Steering 

Groups 

The NITRD IWGs and CGs map to the Program Component Areas (PCAs) used to report NITRD elements 

of each agency’s budget. In 2001, six of the seven IWGs/CGs were created and the High End Computing 

(HEC) PCA was divided into two: HEC-I&A (infrastructure and applications), and HEC-R&D. In 2005, the 

Cyber Security and Information Assurance (CSIA) PCA and an associated IWG were created. Thus, despite 

the many changes to NIT in the last decade or more, the structure of the PCA budget categories and 

the IWGs/ CGs has not changed very much. The NCO has argued that it is desirable to keep the PCAs 

unchanged in order to be able to do multi-year funding comparisons. The 2010 PCAST report recommended that the structure of the IWGs/CGs be decoupled from the PCAs, but that change was not made.

However, in 2008 the first SSG was created. SSGs are not tied to budget reporting categories. Their 

members are at a higher level in their organizations than IWG and CG members, and usually have 

some budget authority. The SSG mechanism allows for increased flexibility and timeliness in forming 

interagency groups addressing areas of national priority. 

The first SSG, also named CSIA, was formed in response to the 2008 Presidential Comprehensive National 

Cybersecurity Initiative (CNCI). It was joined in 2011 by the SSG for Health Information Technology 

R&D, chartered at the time that HHS ONC was developing a national strategy for health IT. The Wireless 

Spectrum Research and Development (WSRD) SSG was formed to advance the goals of the June 28, 

2010 Presidential Memorandum: “Unleashing the Wireless Broadband Revolution.”18 The Big Data SSG 

18. “Presidential Memorandum: Unleashing the Wireless Broadband Revolution.” (June 28, 2010). The White House, 

Office of the Press Secretary. www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/presidential-memorandum-unleashing-wirelessbroadband-revolution.
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was formed in 2011 as OSTP was developing a National Big Data Initiative. An SSG for Cyber Physical 

Systems (CPS) was created in 2012.

SSGs are a significant and important addition to the NITRD coordination process—they engage in planning and coordination for important large emerging areas that span agencies. They are influential and 

visible as forums for agency discussion and as contact points for industry and academic engagement, 

and they have attracted new agency interest in NITRD.

Agency Membership and Participation

As recommended, the number of NITRD agencies has increased. DHS, the Department of Energy Office 

of Electricity Delivery and Energy Reliability (DoE-EERE), DoT, the National Reconnaissance Office, and 

the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (HHS-ONC) have joined; the 

Office of Nuclear Energy (DoE-ONE) has dropped out. Neither VHA nor the Centers for Disease Control 

(CDC) nor the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) have joined, despite their potentially 

important roles in health IT; no part of DoEd has joined despite the growing interest in novel uses of IT 

for education at all levels. However, VHA is participating in the NITRD SSG on health IT, and the Office 

of Financial Research (OFR), a new agency in Treasury, participates in the Big Data SSG. Some agency 

personnel have suggested that the expected contribution to NCO funding is an inhibitor if advancing 

NIT is not central to the agency’s mission.

Budget Matters

There were three recommendations in the 2010 report that were intended to create greater budget 

transparency, that is, to provide a better understanding of the government investment in NIT R&D, so 

that trends could be discerned, and so that future investment decisions could be informed by knowledge 

of current investment. 

The first recommendation was that the joint Office of Management and Budget (OMB)/OSTP annual 

Science and Technology Budget Priority Memorandum reflect NITRD priorities. The NCO has been responsive to the recommendation that they keep OSTP informed of NITRD priorities, and the Memorandum 

for the 2014 Budget, although it is brief, does indeed state some of those priorities. 

Finding: The SSGs introduced in recent years have strengthened the NITRD coordination function. The 

lower-level CGs have a more rigid structure that inhibits coordination of topics that cross PCA boundaries.

Recommendation 9: NSTC and OSTP should strengthen the flexibility and responsiveness of the NITRD 

coordinating structure by continuing the use of SSGs, by decoupling the IWGs and CGs from the budget 

reporting structure, and by regularly reviewing the Group portfolio with an eye towards disbanding those 

Groups that have outlived their usefulness and starting others that reflect major changes in NIT R&D areas.

Finding: Agency membership in NITRD has increased, but there are still agencies missing whose participation would be valuable in advancing important national priorities.
IV. Progress in 2010 Recommen dations for Improved Effecti veness of NITRD Coordination

★ 21 ★

The second recommendation was that the NCO create a publicly available database of governmentfunded NIT research. The third recommendation was that the NCO and OMB redefine the budget 

reporting categories to separate NIT infrastructure for R&D in other fields from NIT R&D, and that they 

ensure more accurate reporting of both NIT infrastructure investment and NIT R&D investment. For a 

variety of reasons, those recommendations have proven to be more challenging. 

Recall that there is no NITRD budget, per se. There is only a summary of NITRD-related portions of agency 

budgets (so-called cross-cuts), as categorized by the PCAs. The difficulty in providing a transparent 

summary of NITRD funding stems from the following issues:

1. Different agencies organize their budgets in different ways. In particular, many mission agencies 

structure their budgets in terms of tasks to satisfy their mission, not according to the disciplines 

and activities that contribute to mission goals. Since the agencies deal with different congressional authorization and appropriation committees, there are few reasons for uniform budget 

structuring across agencies, and little incentive to factor out NIT R&D.

2. In some agencies, the budgets of whole sub-organizations are classified as NITRD-related. For 

instance, the entire NSF Directorate for Computing and Information Science and Engineering 

(CISE) budget falls within NITRD, as does the entire DoE Advanced Scientific Computing 

Research (ASCR) budget. In other agencies, such as NIH or parts of DoD, there is an annual 

request to offices within an agency to report which budget components fall under NITRD PCAs. 

Inconsistencies arise among agencies or even from one year to the next in a given agency, 

because of differences in judgments of those doing the reporting.

3. High-end computing is the only NITRD area in which there is a distinction in the PCAs between 

infrastructure (HEC-I&A) and R&D (HEC-R&D). Representatives of other agencies assert that they 

are unable to separate infrastructure funding from funding for R&D.

4. In some instances, budget expenditures are not available in electronic form in a way that would 

facilitate the reporting of actual (as opposed to appropriated) investment in NIT R&D.

5. In cases where individual judgment determines inclusion in NITRD cross-cuts, there is an incentive to under-report NITRD funding, i.e. to interpret the PCAs narrowly. In contrast, it is in the 

NCO’s interest to define reporting categories as broadly as possible, to increase the funding for 

their work.

As NIT R&D has both grown and broadened, it has been harder to assess the government investment 

in R&D that advances NIT because it is (inconsistently) conflated with investments in NIT infrastructure 

for uses other than NIT R&D. Infrastructure investments are important, and HPC infrastructure investments have been part of the coordination effort since 1991, but they are a distinct kind of investment. 

Distinguishing NIT R&D expenditures from infrastructure expenditures is not intended to diminish the 

importance of creating and supporting research infrastructure, which plays an essential role in R&D. 

Indeed, the 2010 PCAST report recommends increased infrastructure investment, particularly for testbeds that can be used for experimentation and evaluation of novel approaches to solving important 

problems. There are praiseworthy new projects to meet that need in areas such as networking and 

mobile health. However, infrastructure that uses conventional NIT to facilitate research in other disciplines is more a contributor to those disciplines than to furthering NIT. That distinction is not reflected 

in current NITRD budget reporting.
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Finding: Transparent quantitative reporting of government investment in areas of NIT R&D is inhibited by 

longstanding agency reporting practices and by structuring of digital data that is inadequate for this task. 

Other means of evaluating the government’s investment are needed.

Recommendation 10: OMB should continue its effort to digitize funding information and to enhance 

capabilities to create meaningful summary reports that cross agency boundaries.

Recommendation 11: OSTP, with guidance from PCAST, should develop a combination of quantitative 

and qualitative methods to assess the adequacy and appropriateness of government investments in 

NIT R&D. 
★ 23 ★

V. Progress in 2010 Recommendations 

for Government Leadership

The 2010 report explains the profound importance of networking and information technology to the 

Nation’s prosperity, its well-being, and its quality of life.19 Maintaining the essential contributions of NIT 

to the Nation going forward depends on sustained advances in NIT R&D, and on the productive use of 

those advances for the national good. Achieving those advances and their uses depends on government 

leadership, both to ensure a skilled workforce and to ensure a sustained, healthy, and vibrant program 

of NIT R&D.

Education and Training

Both discovery and use of NIT advances requires an NIT-educated community of innovators, workers, 

and citizens. That education must start in childhood and continue for a lifetime. There are promising 

signs of increased attention to this need. The NSTC’s Committee on STEM Education, which was created 

in response to the 2010 PCAST report on Education,20 is off to a good start. NSF introduced a program 

in Computing Education for the 21st Century. Many of the mission agencies have created programs to 

educate more people in NIT topics essential to their missions. The CG for Social Economic and Workforce 

Implications of IT has created a subgroup on education. Yet, the states have been slow to introduce 

concepts of computer fluency in K-1221 and higher education is not keeping up with the increasing 

demand for employees in computing occupations, as projected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. 22

19. See footnote 2. Section 2.

20. President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. (2010). “Prepare and Inspire: K-12 Science, 

Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) Education for America’s Future.” Report to the President and Congress. 

www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/ostp/pcast-stem-ed-final.pdf.

21. ACM and Computer Science Teachers Association. (2010). “Running on Empty: The Failure to Teach K–12 

Computer Science in the Digital Age.” www.acm.org/runningonempty/fullreport.pdf, Fig. 8. Computer fluency is “a robust 

understanding of what is needed to use information technology effectively across a broad range of applications.” It is a 

stronger notion than computer literacy, which implies competency with computer applications such as word processing 

and e-mail. The term was introduced in “Being Fluent with Information Technology.” National Academies Press. (1999).

22. Bureau of Labor Statistics 2010/2020 Employment Projections (Computing Occupations). Department of Labor. 

www.bls.gov/emp/ep_table_102.htm, http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_table_112.htm.

Finding: Both discovery and use of NIT advances requires an NIT-education community of innovators, 

workers, and citizens. The states have been slow to introduce concepts of computer fluency in K-12; higher 

education is not keeping up with the increasing demand for employees in computing occupations.

Recommendation 12: The NSTC must continue to lead in bringing about the education of more children 

and adults in NIT, through the efforts of its Committee on STEM Education, in multi-agency programs to 

provide workers with skills in topics of importance to national priorities, and in the creation of opportunities for high-quality continuing education in NIT.
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Expert Strategic Guidance and Advice

The 2010 report also documents the essential role that Federal investment plays in NIT research and 

development, drawing on the conclusions of multiple well-respected studies.23 The Federal Government 

must lead in ensuring that strong and sustained multi-agency R&D investments are made in NIT to 

address important national priorities. Among those priorities are the prosperity, health, and security of 

the Nation and its citizens.

The estimated $4B annual NIT R&D investments made by the Federal Government must be made wisely. 

As this report has documented, the Nation has in place a robust human infrastructure to coordinate 

the investments made by different agencies, limiting overlap, leveraging synergistic advances made in 

support of differing mission needs, and fueling the private sector. 

But to continue to lead the world in the increasingly broad and rapidly changing domains of NIT, the 

Federal Government must also invest strategically, striking a balance between emerging and potentially 

transformative research and aspects of important core areas in which continued progress is essential. 

Insufficient attention to either new disruptive directions or the NIT base on which advances rest would 

weaken U.S. strength and leadership in NIT.

The challenges are daunting. The Nation’s priorities in a range of areas, spanning transportation to 

health to national security, are sparking the need for NIT solutions of unprecedented technical ambition. 

At no time prior to the current era are we aware of such broad-based plans to implement “bleedingedge” technologies, often at scales approaching that of the World-Wide Web. More often than not, the 

technologies being called for in real-world deployments are not “off the shelf,” but must be invented as 

new technologies and then put immediately into practice. The potential benefits to quality of life are 

significant and transformational. But with such high technical ambition, often the design spaces that 

must be worked in are vast and consequently, the technical risks are enormous.

In this light, the problem of determining a national strategy for R&D investment requires the dedication 

of people at the highest levels of government, with the wisdom to appreciate new strategies and the 

ability to implement them in a sustained fashion. Their decisions must be informed by discipline-specific 

advice from the most knowledgeable experts in academia and the private sector. 

The 2010 PCAST NITRD report recommended the establishment of a broad high-level standing committee of academic scientists, engineers, and industry leaders dedicated to providing sustained strategic 

advice in NIT. The reason PCAST cited for recommending that a new committee be formed was that no 

existing body had a combination of several characteristics that PCAST felt to be essential for this purpose. 

The rationale for a committee dedicated to NIT was the need for focus, so that important issues get timely 

and in-depth attention that combines scientific and technical considerations, policy considerations, 

and economic considerations. The motivation for a standing committee was the need for continuous 

attention so that advice would be proactive rather than reactive, allowing the committee to identify 

emerging issues early and incorporate them in a sustained strategic vision for the Nation’s strength 

in NIT. PCAST also recommended that the standing committee be sufficiently large that its members 

23. See footnote 2. Section 12.
V. Progress in 2010 Recommen dations for Government Leadersh ip

★ 25 ★

have appropriate breadth and depth of knowledge and experience to provide a continuously evolving 

strategic vision. To date, such a standing committee has not been established, and there is still no other 

body with the above characteristics that meets the needs PCAST identified. 

Since 2010, the need has only grown. We therefore recommend that PCAST itself form a standing 

subcommittee dedicated to this purpose, with an associated working group. The new working group 

would engage appropriate expertise from the NIT community and would operate on a regular and 

ongoing (as opposed to a project-specific) basis. The working group would survey the field and propose 

findings and recommendations, which PCAST could adopt in appropriate PCAST reports (including, but 

not limited to, the biennial NITRD program review). The standing subcommittee and working group we 

recommend would function in a manner analogous, in certain respects, to that of the very active and 

effective PCAST subcommittee and working group dedicated to advanced manufacturing.  

Finding: In light of the broad impact of NIT and of its profound importance for the United States, the 

2010 NITRD report recommended the creation of a sustained high-level standing committee to advise the 

Federal Government on both long-term and shorter-term strategy for NIT. There is still a pressing need for 

such a group.

Recommendation 13: The Federal Government must lead in continuing to ensure that strong multiagency R&D investments are made in NIT to address important national priorities. PCAST should establish 

a high-level standing PCAST NIT subcommittee and associated high-level PCAST NIT working group, composed of expert academic scientists, engineers, and industry leaders who can provide sustained strategic 

advice.

★ 27 ★

Appendix A. 

2010 PCAST Recommendations

INITIATIVES IN NIT R&D TO ACHIEVE AMERICA’S PRIORITIES

Recommendation 5-1: NIT for Health

The Federal Government, under the leadership of NSF and HHS, with participation from ONC, CMS, the 

Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), NIST, VHA, DoD, and other interested agencies, 

should invest in a national, long-term, multi-agency research initiative on NIT for health that goes well 

beyond the current national program to adopt electronic health records. The initiative should include 

sponsorship of multi-disciplinary research on three themes:

• to make possible comprehensive lifelong multi-source health records for individuals;

• to enable both professionals and the public to obtain and act on health knowledge from diverse 

and varied sources as part of an interoperable health IT ecosystem; and

• to provide appropriate information, tools, and assistive technologies that empower individuals 

to take charge of their own health and healthcare and to reduce its cost.

Recommendation 5-2: NIT for Energy and Transportation

The Federal Government should invest in a national, long-term, multi-agency, multi-faceted research 

initiative on NIT for energy and transportation. As part of that initiative:

• DoE and NSF should be major sponsors of research for achieving dynamic power management 

in applications ranging from single devices to buildings to the power grid.

• NIST should organize the multi-stakeholder formulation of interoperable standards for real-time 

control. Interoperability facilitates repeated cycles of innovation by multiple vendors, promoting 

the development of versatile and robust NIT.

• DoD should continue to be a major sponsor of research on using NIT to achieve low-power 

systems and devices.

• DoT should sponsor ambitious NIT research relevant to surface and air transportation.

Recommendation 5-3: NIT for National and Homeland Security

The Federal Government should invest in a national, long-term, multi-agency research initiative on NIT 

that assures both the security and the robustness of cyber-infrastructure. NSF and DoD, in collaboration 

DHS, should aggressively accelerate funding and coordination of fundamental research:

• to discover more effective ways to build trustworthy computing and communications systems;
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• to continue to develop new NIT defense mechanisms for today’s infrastructure, and most 

importantly; 

• to develop fundamentally new approaches for the design of the underlying architecture of our 

cyber-infrastructure so that it can be made truly resilient to cyber-attack, natural disaster, and 

inadvertent failure.

Recommendation 5-4: NIT for Education—NIT R&D on Educational Technologies

DoEd, in collaboration with NSF, should provide robust and diversified support for fundamental NIT R&D 

that will lay the foundation for educational technologies such as personalized electronic tutors, serious 

games and interactive environments for education, and mobile and social education technologies. The 

support for NIT-based education should extend from pre-school settings to lifelong learning.

Recommendation 5-5: NIT for Education—Evaluation of Educational Technologies

DoEd, in collaboration with NSF, should have a long-term program to evaluate promising technology 

coming out of the research community in trials that include large numbers of sites and participants. 

Technology that proves its worth should be transferred into the schools. This program will require evolution of curricula and school processes and procedures.

Recommendation 5-6: NIT for Digital Democracy

NSTC should lead a multi-agency effort to define infrastructure, tools, and best practices that will increase 

the opportunities for digital democracy at all levels of government. Both the NIT research community 

and representatives of the public at large should participate in the planning process. The plan should 

have an emphasize on using the results of fundamental research in NIT to enable more efficient government and to improve the quantity and quality of information and ideas flowing into, out of, and within 

government. It should create pathways for fundamental research to be explored and evaluated on 

national testbeds, and for high impact approaches to be translated into practice.

INVESTMENTS IN THE NIT RESEARCH FRONTIERS

The Federal Government must increase investment in those fundamental NIT research frontiers that will 

accelerate progress across a broad range of priorities. Among such investments:

Recommendation 7-1: Privacy and Confidentiality

NSF and DARPA, with the participation of other relevant agencies, should invest in a broad, multi-agency 

research program on the fundamentals of privacy protection and protected disclosure of confidential 

data. Privacy and confidentiality concerns arise in virtually all uses of NIT.

Recommendation 7-2: NIT and People

NSF, DARPA, and HHS should create a collaborative research program that augments the study of individual human-computer interaction with a comprehensive investigation to understand and advance 

human-machine and social collaboration and problem-solving in a networked, on-line environment 
Appendix A. 2010 PCAST Recommen dations

★ 29 ★

where large numbers of people participate in common activities. Understanding such collective humanNIT interactions is increasingly important for defense, for health, and for the activities of daily life.

Recommendation 7-3: Large-Scale Data Management and Analysis

NSF should expand its support for fundamental research in data collection, storage, management, 

and automated large-scale analysis based on modeling and machine learning. The ever-increasing use 

of computers, sensors, and other digital devices is generating huge amounts of digital data, making 

it a pervasive NIT-enabled asset. In collaboration with NIT researchers, every agency should support 

research, to apply the best known methods and to develop new approaches and new techniques to 

address data-rich problems that arise in its mission domain. Agencies should ensure access to and 

retention of critical community research data collections.

Recommendation 7-4: NIT and the Physical World

NSF and DARPA, in collaboration with those agencies tackling problems whose solution entails instrumenting the physical world—including the EPA, DoE, DoT, other parts of DoD, NIH, USDA, and NOAA—

should increase research in advanced domain-specific sensors, integration of NIT into physical systems, 

and innovative robotics in order to enhance NIT-enabled interaction with the physical world.

Recommendation 7-5: Continued Investment in NIT R&D Core Areas and Sustainment of 

Research Infrastructure

New investments must not supplant continued investment in important core areas in which government-funded research is advancing. Continued attention must also be given to sustained high-quality 

shared research infrastructure, including new forms of infrastructure to support new research areas 

and paradigms.

Recommendation 7-6: Scalable Systems and Networking—Core Research

NSF, DARPA, and other organizations should continue their leadership and funding of core research 

into scalable systems in order to ensure that networked systems will adapt to the ever-changing needs 

of applications, to the capabilities engendered by new technology, and to evolving needs for security 

and privacy.

Recommendation 7-7: Scalable Systems and Networking—Open Systems

To foster an innovative ecosystem in NIT, government agencies concerned with networked systems 

operations, including DoD, NSF, and FCC, must continue to encourage and invest in open systems development. They must coordinate with standards organizations (IETF, W3C) and the NIT industry to ensure 

that standards pertaining to the different interfaces within and among the layers of the networked 

systems environment are defined and kept up to date.

Recommendation 7-8: Scalable Systems and Networking—Wireless Systems

In the area of wireless systems, NSF, FCC, and NTIA should partner to create, sustain, and promote the 

use of a nationwide infrastructure for spectrum monitoring that cuts across commercial, public safety 
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and DoD applications. NSF, DHS, and NTIA should partner to create programs that promote innovative 

use of public safety frequencies. NSF, DHS, and DARPA should jointly articulate the synergies among 

their individual needs and programs in wireless spectrum management.

Recommendation 7-9: Software Creation and Evolution

NSF, DARPA, and other organizations that need software tailored to their mission requirements should 

continue their leadership and funding of core research in methods to improve the design, development, 

modification, and maintenance of all varieties of software. That research should address language 

design, tools, analysis methods, methods for collaborative design and development, and techniques 

that provide security and robustness. Attention must be given to system design and programming 

for scalability, paradigms for parallelism at multiple levels of granularity, software for heterogeneous 

systems involving interaction with the physical world, and software for systems that incorporate human 

interaction. Long term evaluative research is required to determine which tools and techniques yield 

sustainable improvement in software creation.

Recommendation 7-10: High-Performance Computing

NSF, DARPA, and DoE should invest in a coordinated program of basic research on architectures, 

algorithms, and software for next-generation HPC systems. Such research should not be limited to the 

acceleration of traditional applications, but should include work on systems capable of (a) efficiently 

analyzing vast quantities of both numerical and non-numerical data, (b) handling problems requiring 

real-time response, and (c) accelerating new applications. Specific areas of investigation should include:

• Novel system architectures for massively parallel computing

• High-bandwidth, low-latency processor interconnection networks

• Reliability and fault-tolerance in massively parallel computer systems

• Hardware and software design techniques for the dramatic reduction of power consumption

• Data-intensive computing, including non-numerical applications

• Programming models and languages for massively parallel machines

• Systems software for massively parallel systems

• Improved approaches for system management

In addition to designing next-generation systems, significant effort must be devoted to R&D focused 

on extracting the greatest possible scientific benefit from current leading-edge systems.

TECHNOLOGICAL AND HUMAN RESOURCES

Recommendation 9-1: Education and Human Resources

The NSTC’s Committee on STEM Education proposed in a recent PCAST report must exercise strong 

leadership to bring about fundamental changes in K-12 STEM education in the United States, among 

them the incorporation of computer science as an essential component.
Appendix A. 2010 PCAST Recommen dations

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NITRD COORDINATION PROCESS AND STRUCTURE

Recommendation 11-1: Government Coordination of NIT R&D

The effectiveness of government coordination of NIT R&D should be enhanced:

• The number of NITRD member agencies should be increased. The duration, management 

levels, and topic areas of the NITRD coordinating groups should be flexible. Budget reporting 

categories should be decoupled from the coordinating structure.

• The NCO for NITRD should create a publicly available database of government-funded NIT 

research, and should provide regular detailed reporting to the Director of OSTP.

• OMB and OSTP should reflect NITRD priorities in their annual Budget Priority Memorandum.

Recommendation 11-2: Budget Reporting Categories

The NCO and OMB should redefine the budget reporting categories to separate NIT infrastructure for 

R&D in other fields from NIT R&D, and should ensure more accurate reporting of both NIT infrastructure 

investment and NIT R&D investment.

Recommendation 11-3: Federal Government Leadership

The Federal Government must lead in ensuring that strong multi-agency R&D investments are made in 

NIT to address important national priorities.

• OSTP should establish a broad, high-level standing committee of academic scientists, engineers, 

and industry leaders dedicated to providing sustained strategic advice in NIT.

The NSTC should lead in defining and promoting the major NIT research initiatives that are required to 

achieve the most important existing and emerging national priorities.

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Appendix B. 

Additional Experts Providing Input

Byron Barker

Chief, Strategic Planning Division

Office of Spectrum Management

National Telecommunications and Information 

Administration

Francine Berman 

Professor of Computer Science

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute 

Brian Biegel

Acting Deputy Chief of the NASA Advanced 

Supercomputing Division

National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Alan Blatecky

Director

Office of Cyberinfrastructure

National Science Foundation

Robert Bohn

Cloud Computing Program Manager

National Institute of Standards and Technology

Steven Brobst 

Chief Technology Officer

Teradata

Randal Bryant 

Dean

School of Computer Science

Carnegie Mellon University

Andrew Clegg

Program Director

Directorate for Mathematical and Physical 

Sciences (MPS)

National Science Foundation

Mark Dean 

Chief Technology Office

IBM Middle East and Africa

IBM Research

Deborah Estrin 

Professor of Computer Science

Professor of Electrical Engineering

University of California, Los Angeles

Edward Felten 

Director, Center for Information Technology 

Policy; Professor of Computer Science and Public 

Affairs

Princeton University

Chief Technologist

Federal Trade Commission

Douglas Fridsma

Director

Office of Standards and Interoperability

Department of Health and Human Services

Deborah Frincke

Deputy Director

Research Directorate

National Security Agency

Robert Gold 

Director, Information Systems and Cyber Security

Office of the Assistant Secretary for Defense

Department of Defense

William Gropp 

Paul and Cynthia Saylor Professor of Computer 

Science University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
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Daniel Hitchcock

Associate Director

Office of Advanced Scientific Computing 

Research

Office of Science

Department of Energy 

Suzanne Iacono 

Senior Science Advisor

Directorate for Computer and Information 

Science & Engineering

National Science Foundation

Farnam Jahanian

Assistant Director

Computer and Information Science & 

Engineering 

National Science Foundation

David Jakubek 

Deputy Director

Information Systems

Office of the Secretary of Defense

Department of Defense

Anita Jones 

Professor Emerita

University of Virginia

Dan Kaufman 

Director

Information Innovation Office

Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency

Department of Defense

Dai H. Kim 

Associate Director for Advanced Computing

Information Systems and Cyber Security

Office of the Assistant Secretary for Defense 

Department of Defense

Ed Lazowska 

Bill & Melinda Gates Chair in Computer 

Science and Engineering 

University of Washington 

Herbert Lin 

Chief Scientist

Computer Science and Telecommunications 

Board

National Research Council

Mark Luker

Associate Director

National Coordination Office for Networking 

and Information Technology Research and 

Development

Peter Lyster

Program Director

Division of Biomedical Technology, 

Bioinformatics, and Computational Biology

National Institutes of Health

Douglas Maughan

Division Director

Cyber Security R&D Branch, Science and 

Technology Directorate

Department of Homeland Security

Michael May 

Associate Director for Software Technologies 

Assistant Secretary for Defense

Department of Defense

Ernest McDuffie

Lead of the National Initiative for Cybersecurity 

Education

National Institute of Standards and Technology

Andrea Norris

Director of Center for Information Technology 

(CIT) and the Chief Information Officer (CIO) 

National Institutes of Health

Todd Park

U.S. Chief Technology Officer and Assistant to the 

President

Chief Technology Officer

Office of Science and Technology Policy
Appendix B. Additional Experts Providing Inpu t

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Kamie Roberts 

Associate Director for Federal & Industrial 

Relations

National Institute of Standards and Technology

Charles Romine 

Director, Information Technology Laboratory

National Institute of Standards and Technology

Douglas Rosendale

Senior Physician Advisor/Clinical Informatics/

Office of Health Information 

Department of Veterans Affairs

Fred Schneider 

Samuel B. Eckert Professor of Computer Science. 

Department of Computer Science 

Cornell University

Robert Sproull 

Vice President and Fellow

Sun Microsystems

George Strawn

Director, National Coordination Office for 

Networking and Information Technology 

Research and Development

Steven VanRoekel

Federal Chief Information Officer and 

Administrator

Office of Electronic Government 

Office of Management and Budget

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Appendix C. Acknowledgments

Jonathan Agre

Research Staff Member

Institute for Defense Analyses

Kaitlin Bernell

Student Volunteer

Office of Science and Technology Policy

Genevieve Croft

Student Volunteer

Office of Science and Technology Policy

Pat Falcone

Associate Director for National Security and 

International Affairs

Office of Science and Technology Policy

Karen Gordon

Research Staff Member

Institute for Defense Analyses

Nayanee Gupta

Research Staff Member

IDA Science and Technology Policy Institute

Tom Kalil

Deputy Director for Policy

Office of Science and Technology Policy

Bhavya Lal

Research Staff Member

IDA Science and Technology Policy Institute

Sarah Nash

Research Staff Member

IDA Science and Technology Policy Institute

Deborah Stine

Professor of Practice

Carnegie Mellon University

Past Executive Director, PCAST

Richmond Wong

Student Volunteer

Office of Science and Technology Policy 

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ARPA-ED Advanced Research Projects Agency for Education 

ASCR Advanced Scientific Computing Research 

CDC Centers for Disease Control 

CMS Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services 

CNCI Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative

CISE Computing and Information Science and Engineering 

CG Coordinating Group 

CPS Cyber Physical Systems 

CSIA Cyber Security and Information Assurance 

DARPA Defense Advanced Research Project Agency 

DREN Defense Research and Engineering Network 

DoD Department of Defense 

DoE Department of Energy 

DoE-EERE Department of Energy Office of Electricity Delivery and Energy Reliability 

DHS Department of Homeland Security 

DoT Department of Transportation 

ESnet Energy Sciences Network 

EARS Enhancing Access to Radio Spectrum 

EPA Environmental Protection Agency 

FCC Federal Communication Commission 

FLOPS Floating point operations per second 

GENI Global Environment for Network Innovations 

GDP Gross domestic product 

HCSS High Confidence Software and Systems

HITIDE Health Information Technology Innovation and Development Environments 

HITRD Health Information Technology Research and Development 

HEC High End Computing 

HPC High-performance computing 

IWG Interagency Working Group 

ICES Interface between Computer Science and Economics & Social Sciences 

MOOC Massive open online course 

NASA National Aeronautics and Space Administration 

ONC Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology 

NIST National Institute of Standards and Technology 

Appendix D. Acronyms
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NIH National Institutes of Health 

NOAA National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration 

NSF National Science Foundation 

NSA National Security Agency 

NTIA National Telecommunications and Information Administration 

NIT Networking and Information Technology 

NITRD Networking and Information Technology Research and Development 

OFR Office of Financial Research 

OMB Office of Management and Budget 

DoE-ONE Office of Nuclear Energy 

OSTP Office of Science and Technology Policy 

PITAC President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee 

PCA Program Component Area 

R&D Research and Development 

SDAV Scalable Data Management, Analysis and Visualization 

SEES Science, Engineering, and Education for Sustainability 

STEM Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics 

SSG Senior Steering Group

SoCS Social-Computational Systems 

SCORE Special Cyber Operations Research and Engineering 

SHARP Strategic Health IT Advanced Research Projects 

NCO National Coordinating Office 

NSTC National Science and Technology Council 

VHA Veterans Health Administration 

USDA U.S. Department of Agriculture 

HHS U.S. Department of Health and Human Services 

USGS U.S. Geological Survey 

WSRD Wireless Spectrum Research and Development 

President’s Council of Advisors on Science and 

Technology (PCAST)

www.whitehouse.gov/ostp/pcast