The shape of things to come

"The frontiers of science are defined by our technologies," said John Marburger, the chief science adviser for the Bush administration, during a Washington science writers meeting Jan. 7. "You push the frontiers back when the technology to study complexity improves."Marburger was explaining the philosophy used to allot money for scientific research in President Bush's fiscal 2003 budget proposal: The disciplines with the potential for the greatest advances would get the greatest boost in funding for basic research.This year, the National Institutes of Health received the largest proposed funding boost of any agency that oversees research, said Marburger, who is director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy within the Executive Office of the President. The administration has requested that NIH receive $27 billion in 2003, a 15 percent proposed increase from $23 billion estimated for 2002. The administration is putting financial weight behind NIH because of exciting gains in molecular biology, which have been spawned, in part, by gains in information technology. Processor power and data storage, along with improvements in instrumentation, have allowed researchers to take on complex projects, such as studying the physical shapes of proteins. "Computation power has opened new doors for discoveries that weren't possible" even 10 years ago, Marburger said. The administration is banking that NIH-sponsored research will eventually help develop vaccines, fight diseases and develop deterrents to bioterrorism threats.In contrast to NIH's large funding increase, the National Science Foundation has been allotted just a 5 percent increase, from $4.8 billion in 2002 to a little more than $5 billion in 2003. Of that amount, the NSF Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering is slated to receive $527 million in fiscal 2003 budget, an increase from the $515 million planned for 2002.This 2 percent increase in computer and IT research represents a growth rate that is nearly flat after inflation is figured in. But this figure does not accurately reflect the large amount of IT research that may be occurring throughout the government, said Peter Harsher, director of government affairs for the Computing Research Association, a trade organization for computer science academic departments, government and corporate laboratories.Growth in other fields may be driven by IT, and research in IT may occur indirectly as a result of scientific pursuit in these other fields. One particular area is nanotechnology, or the science of manipulating matter atom by atom, another high priority for the administration, Harsher said."The benefits nanotechnology will have for information technology will be enormous," said Harsher.Marburger said it is now possible, for example, to take a silicon microstructure and embed it with a laser, which could make for tiny devices that communicate information into homes from nearby telephone poles."It doesn't happen in nature, but it can be made," Marburger said. Of the $221 million slated for nanotechnology research at the NSF, about $10 million may be specifically allocated for computer and information science engineering technologies, which include projects on quantum computing, nanoelectronics and biological-based computational systems. According to NSF director Rita Colwell, who spoke during a Feb. 11 press briefing on the NSF proposed budget, these new forms of computing will eventually tackle tasks that are considered beyond today's computers, such as full-scale modeling of the Earth's biosphere."Both [nanotechnology] and [IT] can only achieve their full potential hand-in-hand," said Colwell. Many other areas of research funded by NSF have an IT component to them. About $20 million has been allocated for four multidisciplinary, multi-institutional learning centers that will look for ways to use IT to facilitate the learning process.Under NSF's education initiative are programs to increase science and engineering graduate research fellowships to $25,000 from the $18,000 now granted, in an attempt to increase the U.S. work force in these disciplines. According to Harsher, such hikes will help alleviate the IT industry's problem of finding engineers and programmers Under the IT directorate, the priority areas for research include large-scale networking, high-end computation, safer and more reliable communications systems, integration of IT into classrooms and creating digital library collections. Within these areas, a topic receiving particular attention will be cybersecurity, which, in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, has received $17 million in additional funding for fiscal 2003 above the $6 million already slated, said George Strawn, NSF's executive officer of the IT directorate.In addition to the president's budget proposal, the House of Representatives passed the Cyber Security R&D Act, H.R. 3394, to grant $377 million over five years, starting in fiscal 2003, to the NSF for computer and network security research. Another area of interest will include middleware that will help networks "behave as computers do today," Strawn said. "In the same way you don't worry about which sector on your computer's hard drive that your data is being written on, you shouldn't have to worry about the network that you use," Strawn said.Data mining will be another key area of interest. Strawn said the government and private industry will soon be facing "massive data sets" for which tools will be needed to sift and find useful information. Although commercial work is being done in middleware, cybersecurity and data mining, Strawn said development work is not being completed for the scale in which such tools will be needed in the future.