In December 2010, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) conducted an extensive review of the Federal Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) Program – the $4B coordinated multi-agency IT R&D program.

PCAST has just released a 2012 follow-up to that review, conducted by Susan Graham, Peter Lee, and David Shaw.  The goals were to assess the responses to the 2010 recommendations, propose additional recommendations, and identify emerging research challenges.  Key findings:

• Research areas from the 2010 report where Federal agencies have made significant progress in sponsoring R&D:
  • Big Data
  • NIT interaction with the physical world
  • Health IT
  • Cybersecurity (although much remains to be done)
• Areas where responsiveness is harder to find:
  • Social computing
  • Privacy
  • Software
• Additional important application areas where responsiveness to the 2010 report lags:
  • Educational technology
  • Energy and transportation
• Additional important enabling areas where responsiveness lags:
  • Scalable systems and networking
  • High-performance computing
• Organizational observations where responsiveness to the 2010 report lags:
  • NITRD Senior Steering Groups have been effective and should be expanded
  • Budgetary reporting is still opaque and must be improved
  • The NSTC must provide leadership in K-12 and higher education related to computing
  • A sustained high-level standing advisory committee should be established

See the slides from the public presentation here.

Archived webcast of the event here.