DARPA Director Dr. Regina Dugan

On November 15, seven University of Washington faculty members from Biology, Bioengineering, and Computer Science & Engineering were privileged to share a 2-hour breakfast in Seattle with DARPA Director Regina Dugan, Deputy Director Ken Gabriel, IIO Office Director Dan Kaufman, IIO Program Manager Ben Cutler, and U.S. Marines Operational Liaison Col. Robert Durkin.

One message that came through loud and clear:  DARPA leadership is intently focused on understanding how well DARPA is working in the eyes of the academic research community.  There were many probing questions exploring the details of interactions and relationships.

Talk to your DARPA Program Manager was emphasized repeatedly.  For example, in order to allow headquarters staff to focus on technical matters, many DARPA contracts are administered by other organizations.  Some of these organizations may not have gotten the memo about DARPA’s current approach to reporting requirements – less frequent than in the past, and structured to help advance the research.  It’s the Program Manager who ultimately calls the shots – but s/he may not be aware of reporting requirements imposed by intermediate parties.

We have reported here several times on changes at DARPA under the new Director – see, for example, DARPA a year later.  It’s real.

We’ve talked about the notion of hypercriticality in computer science in this space before (see here and here), and now Jeannette M. Wing – the former National Science Foundation (NSF) Assistant Director for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) and current Department Head of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University — has written about it with some hard numbers over on the Communications of the ACM Blog:

Are computer scientists hypercritical? Are we more critical than scientists and engineers in other disciplines? Bertrand Meyer’s August 22, 2011 The Nastiness Problem in Computer Science blog post partially makes the argument referring to secondhand information from the [NSF]. Here are some NSF numbers to back the claim that we are hypercritical.

 

This graph plots average reviewer ratings of all proposals submitted from 2005 to 2010 to NSF overall (red line), just Computer & Information Science & Engineering (CISE) (green line), and NSF minus CISE (blue line). Proposal ratings are based on a scale of 1 (poor) to 5 (excellent). For instance, in 2010, the average reviewer rating across all CISE programs is 2.96; all NSF directorates including CISE, 3.24; all NSF directorates excluding CISE, 3.30.

 

 

The bottom-line is clear: CISE reviewers rate CISE proposals on average .41 points below the ratings by reviewers of other directorates’ proposals. The difference is a little better (.29 points) for awards and a little worse (.42 points) for declines.

 

» Read more: “Yes, Computer Scientists Are Hypercritical”

The NSF’s CISE Directorate today announced the appointment of Cynthia Dion-Schwarz as the Deputy Assistant Director, effective Sept. 12:

Dr. Dion-Schwarz will be joining us from the Department of Defense (DoD), where she served as the Director of Information Systems & Cyber Security Research in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering. In this position, she was responsible for the strategic oversight of the science and technology research in Information Technologies and for serving as the program executive for research programs in tactical networked communications, software initiatives, cyber security, and high performance computing. She also served as the DoD representative to the Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) Subcommittee of the National Science and Technology Council Committee on Technology. Dr. Dion-Schwarz was previously the Associate Director for Network Technologies in the Office of the Director of Information Systems. Her time at the Pentagon began when she was detailed as a Technical Advisor in the Office of Secretary of Defense, working to develop programs in communications networking and intelligence, from the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA).

 

Dr. Dion-Schwarz joined IDA in 1998 as a researcher into wireless communications networks and sensor systems. From 2004-2006, she was Assistant Director in the Science and Technology Division at IDA, where she built vigorous research programs in communications networking, data analysis and bio-informatics, exploiting her diverse background in experimental physics, engineering, and theoretical mathematics to advance cutting edge projects for Defense and the Intelligence Communities. During her early academic career, she conducted research at Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Naval Research Laboratory.

» Read more: CISE Names Deputy Assistant Director