The Senate has unanimously passed a $1B/5-year supercomputing initiative similar to that passed by the House of Representatives in July. NSF appears to have won out over DOE as lead spending authority, although network operation will fall to an interagency group. The bulk of the money, if approved, will be for research on supercomputer communication, with $650M this year for NSF, $388M for NASA, and $31M for NIST. Part of the funds will support NREN, the National Research and Education Network. [Edmund L. Andrews, NYT. SF Chronicle, 9/12.]

A report on the Pentagon Critical Technologies Plan says that funding for passive sensors is expected to increase $102M (24%) in FY '92, and high-performance computing will increase by $64M (59%). Most other research areas will decrease. [Myron Struck, Defense Electronics, 8/91.]

The new, 17,000-person Air Force Intelligence Command (AFIC) at Kelly AFB, TX, will become operational October 1. The command will merge functions now handled by the AF Foreign Technology Division (Wright-Patterson AFB, OH), AF Special Activities Center (Fort Belvoir, VA), and AF Intelligence Agency (Washington, DC). [ibid.]

In yet another restructuring, DARPA director Dr. Victor H. Reis has been promoted to Director of Defense Research and Engineering (DDR&E). He replaces Dr. Charles M. Herzfeld, who is a candidate to be director of the Critical Technologies Institute (part of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy). Ronald Fraser, former EVP of the Charles Stark Draper Labs, is expected to become director of DARPA. Fraser spent the last year with DoD's office of test and evaluation. [ibid.]

DARPA is giving $5M of its $50M cooperative-ventures money to the Linguistic Data Consortium. The LDC will collect raw and annotated text, speech, and lexical data in English and foreign languages. The work will be done under contract to companies and universities. Contact Charles Wayne, (703) 696-2259. [Brian Robinson, EE Times, 8/5.]

Cooperative Research and Development Agreements (CRADAs) are a mechanism for transferring technology from the nine national labs to private industry. Although available since 1987, few computer or electronics companies have taken advantage of them. A new "accelerated CRADA" process is being introduced to cut the paperwork time from 18 months to 2 months. Under prodding from state senators, Sandia National Labs (Albuquerque, NM) has just signed its first private-industry R&D agreement. Initial transfers are in IC and semiconductor fabrication. [Brian Robinson, EE Times, 8/26.]