GLOBAL DIMENSIONS OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS IN SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

We live today in a world in which the economic health of nations and the competitiveness of firms is determined largely by the ability to develop, commercialize, and most importantly, to appropriate (or capture) the economic benefits from scientific and technological (S&T) innovations. Intellectual property rights (IPRs), such as patents and copyrights, are an important means used by firms to h…

Japan's Growing Technological Capability

The growing Japanese role in high technology raises a number of questions for the United States. Some of these questions relate to the current status of the two countries, for example, in what industries do Japanese firms hold technologies more advanced than their U.S. rivals? Are there industries in which U.S. firms still lead but are under serious challenge by Japanese firms? Are there sector…

Memorial Tributes

Edition

-

ISBN/ISSN

0-309-59790-0

Collation

1-306

Series Title

Memorial Tributes

Call Number

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Technology and Global Industry

In the last decade it has become increasingly clear that the character of the world economy—and the role of the United States in the world economy—is changing. Two characteristics of global economic change are particularly important. First, over the last 35 years there has been substantial relative growth (in pan simply postwar reconstruction) of national economies in Europe and Asia. In th…

The Internationalization of U.S. Manufacturing: Causes and Consequences

Internationalization is an increasingly pervasive force in U.S. manufacturing, creating new sources of competition and new standards for competitiveness. The growing importance of imports and exports in domestic manufacturing and the significant rise in foreign investment in the United States in recent years are the most obvious evidence of internationalization. Less obvious, but more important…

Health IT and Patient Safety: Building Safer Systems for Better Care

Health IT can improve patient safety in some areas such as medication safety; however, there are significant gaps in the literature regarding how health IT impacts patient safety overall  Safer implementation and use begins with viewing health IT as part of a larger sociotechnical system  All stakeholders need to work together to improve patient safety

RESEARCH TRAINING IN THE BIOMEDICAL, BEHAVIORAL, AND CLINICAL RESEARCH SCIENCES

This analysis of the workforce needs in the biomedical, social and behavioral, and clinical sciences began in May 2008, when the storm clouds on the financial horizon were developing. We had our second meeting in late September 2008 in the midst of the financial meltdown. This has made the business of making projections into the future a very uncertain business indeed. The attempts to do just t…

Behavioral and Social Science: 50 Years of Discovery

The pioneer spirit is still vigorous within this nation. Science offers a largely unexplored hinterland for the pioneer who has the tools. . . . [Vannevar Bush, Science, The Endless Frontier: A Report to the President, July 1945] The words of Vannevar Bush have not lost currency in the intervening four decades. But his 1945 report testifies to a further proposition: behind most scientific explo…

Defining a Decade

Information Technology in the Service Society: A Twenty-First Century Lever (1993) bemoaned the problems of productivity and the absence of productivity improvements that could be traced directly to computing advances. We are still struggling with this issue. How do we even count, much less affect? Then, in 1994, Realizing the Information Future: The Internet and Beyond revisited the first rep…

Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence

The focus of this report is on artificial intelligence (AI) and human-computer interface (HCI) technology. Observations, conclusions, and recommendations regarding AI and HCI are presented in terms of six grand challenge areas which serve to identify key scientific and engineering issues and opportunities. Chapter 1 presents the panel's definitions of these and related terms. Chapter 2 presents…

Traffic Management For High-Speed Networks

Any network has bottlenecks or congestion points, i.e., locations where more data may arrive than the network can carry. A common cause for congestion is a mismatch in speed between networks. For example, a typical high-performance local area network (LAN) environment in the next several years may have the architecture shown in Figure 1. While the servers will use new high-speed asynchronous tr…

For the Record: Protecting Electronic Health Information

Information technology promises many benefits to health care. By helping to make accurate information more readily available to providers, payers, researchers, administrators, and patients, advanced computing and communications technology can help improve the quality and lower the costs of health care. At the same time, the prospect of storing health information in electronic form raises conc…

Ada and Beyond: Software Policies for the Department of Defense

Ada was developed in the 1970s by the Department of Defense (DOD) and adopted in some DOD programs until its use was required for new software development in 1987. It has been employed as a tool for developing quality software and as a DOD policy lever to encourage DOD organizations and programs to adopt modern software engineering principles. Changes within DOD, the software engineering commun…

Computing and Communications in the Extreme: Research for Crisis Management a…

Crises are extreme events. They cause significant disruption and put lives and property at risk. Some crises arise from natural disasters such as earthquakes, hurricanes, fires, and floods. Man-made crises can be accidental, such as oil spills or the release of toxic substances, or they may be intentional, such as bombings by terrorists. Crises require an immediate response and a coordinated ap…

Technology Transfer Systems in the United States and Germany: Lessons and Per…

Part I of this report presents an overview of the structure, operation, and performance of major sectors of the national technology transfer systems in Ger- many and the United States and identifies opportunities for the two national systems to learn from each other. It draws substantially on the two country reports prepared by the German and U.S. delegations to the binational panel on “Tech…

Cryptography's Role in Securing the Information Society

For most of history, cryptography—the art and science of secret writing—has belonged to governments concerned about protecting their own secrets and about asserting their prerogatives for access to information relevant to national security and public safety. In the United States, cryp- tography policy has reflected the U.S. government’s needs for effective cryptographic protection of cla…

The Unpredictable Certainty: Information Infrastructure Through 2000

Are there any dominant trends in the evolution of a global or national information infrastructure (NII) for which there is no specification, no overall plan, and no institutional mechanism for reaching consensus about what it is or what it should be? That question motivated the NII 2000 project, which sought to characterize the technology deployment, market expectations, and proposed activities…

Allocating Federal Funds for Science and Technology

Currently, the federal research and development budget is typically defined as the sum of the research and development funds obligated or proposed by federal departments and agencies for programs and facilities classified as R&D. The re- search and development budget is never considered as an integrated whole during the development of the President’s budget or given an overall review by Cong…

Evolving the High Performance Computing and Communications Initiative to Supp…

Information technology drives many of today's innovations and offers still greater potential for further innovation in the next decade. It is also the basis for a domestic industry of about $500 billion,1 an industry that is critical to our nation's international competitiveness. Our domestic information technology industry is thriving now, based to a large extent on an extraordinary 50-year tr…

Forces Shaping the U.S. Academic Engineering Research Enterprise

The way in which academic engineering research is financed is chang- ing at an unprecedented rate. So, too, are public expectations for the out- comes of such research. One can relate these changes to the overlap of two unrelated occurrences: the end of the Cold War—expected to cause a drop in support for defense-related research in universities and an immediate loss of appetite for highly…

Computer-Aided Materials Selection During Structural Design

The selection of the proper materials for a structural component is critical to engineering design. Existing design procedures may currently be sufficient, especially where experience exists, but fierce industrial competition is spurring the search for improved methods and tools. The main drivers are quality, life-cycle cost, and time-to-market. Improved design efficiency and accuracy may have …

Isotopes for Medicine and the Life Sciences

Both radioisotopes and enriched stable isotopes are essential to a wide variety of applications in medicine, where they are used in the diagnosis and treatment of illnesses. In addition, extensive application of isotopes in biomedical research finds wide parallel uses in research in chemistry, physics, biology, and geosciences, with additional needs existing in the commercial sector. Isotopes p…

Information Technology for Manufacturing

In a manufacturing environment that is perhaps changing more rapidly now than during the Industrial Revolution, competing successfully will require that U.S. manufacturers increasingly provide customers with shorter times between order and delivery and between product conceptualization and realization, greater product customization, and higher product quality and performance, while meet- ing mo…

Research Recommendations to Facilitate Distributed Work

The term ''distributed work" describes the practice of working without regard to location by using a combination of modern communications and computing technologies. It includes: • Working while truly mobile—in activities ranging from sales and on- site customer support or equipment repair to composing and submitting a product design while traveling; • Working as part of a geographic…

Major Award Decisionmaking at the National Science Foundation

During the past decade, NSF has established Engineering Research Centers, Supercomputer Centers, Science and Technology Centers, and other large research centers and facilities. A few awards were controversial, and called into question NSF policies and procedures for making large award decisions. Some of those involving the location of one-of-a-kind national facilities have generated the sharpe…

Information Technology in the Service Society: A Twenty-First Century Lever

The use of information technology (IT) has revolutionized the structure of management and the nature of competition in a variety of industries.1 IT is especially important in the service sector, which now accounts for about 74 percent of the value added in the U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) and about 76 percent of national employment (Table S.1) and enjoys a healthy $52 billion trade surplus…

An Assessment of Space Shuttle Flight Software Development Processes

Review the entire flight software development process from the initial requirements definition phase to final implementation, including object code build and final machine loading. • Review and critique NASA's independent verification and validation process and mechanisms, including NASA's established software development and testing standards. • Determine the acceptability and adequacy…

National Collaboratories: Applying Information Technology for Scientific Rese…

The fusion of computers and electronic communications has the potential to dramatically enhance the output and productivity of U.S. researchers. A major step toward realizing that potential can come from combining the interests of the scientific community at large with those of the computer science and engineering community to create integrated, tool-oriented computing and communications system…

Computing Professionals

Ensuring economic competitiveness and satisfying societal needs will depend increasingly on what people do with computer-based technology. Changes in that technology are having profound effects: the shift from large, centralized computing systems to smaller and distributed systems is fueling the growth in demand for computing systems and enabling the spread of computer- based technology into ou…

Probability and Algorithms

The main purpose of this report is to give an understanding of the power that comes from applying probability in the theory of algorithms, but an equally essential aim is to point out the variety of ways in which probability plays a role. One useful step in understanding this variety comes from making a clear distinction between the subject of probabilistic algorithms and the subject of probabi…