Network and Information Technology R&D is a priority

The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy has just issued a report with recommendations for federal funding of research and development on networking and information technology.

Recent technological and societal trends place the further advancement and application of NIT squarely at the center of our Nation’s ability to achieve essentially all of our priorities and to address essentially all of our challenges:
• Advances in NIT are a key driver of economic competitiveness. They create new markets and increase productivity. For example, an investment in the National Science Foundation’s Digital Library Initiative in the 1990’s led to Google, a company with a market capitalization of nearly $200 billion that has transformed how we access information.
• Advances in NIT are crucial to achieving our major national and global priorities in
energy and transportation, education and life-long learning, healthcare, and national
and homeland security. NIT will be an indispensable element in buildings that manage their own energy usage; attention-gripping, personalized methods that reinforce classroom lessons;
continuous unobtrusive assistance for people with physical and mental disabilities; and strong
resilience to cyber warfare.
• Advances in NIT accelerate the pace of discovery in nearly all other fields. The latest NIT tools are helping scientists and engineers to illuminate the progression of Alzheimer’s disease, elucidate the nature of combustion, and predict the size of the ozone hole, to cite just a few examples.
• Advances in NIT are essential to achieving the goals of open government. Those advances will allow better access to government records, better and more accessible government services, and the ability both to learn from and communicate with the American public more effectively.......

the transformative NIT research that fuels innovation and achievement and strengthens our Nation needs to come from Government investment, yet it is currently difficult to ascertain the magnitude of that investment. Furthermore, going forward, the participating agencies in the NITRD Program must more aggressively embrace the expanding role that advances in NIT play in America’s future. A broad spectrum of Federal agencies – those currently participating in NITRD and some which are not yet doing so – must recognize that their abilities to accomplish their missions are inextricably linked to advances in NIT, and must invest in NIT R&D to catalyze the advances that are critical to their missions. Strategic leadership must come from the top – from those within the Federal Government with the authority to implement new strategies.