NSF's CISE Advisory Committee -- chaired by Alfred Aho -- suggests that funding priorities should include telecommunications topics, virtual reality, speech recognition, distributed parallel processing, architecture, operating system software, parallel algorithms, compilers, large knowledge repositories, querying large databases of multimedia information, compression, human interfaces, and information indexes. Workstation research should receive more funding, with less for supercomputers. An NSF-wide HPCC advisory committee was discussed. (The White House is considering nominations for a national advisory committee.) [Juan Osuna (josuna@cra.org), CRA Bulletin, 5/27/94.]

(I'm wary of these committees: They tend to advocate whatever their own labs are doing or whatever is hot in their journals. Members are chosen for current success, not for insight into needs or opportunities. "Scientific opinion" must be balanced by entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, social scientists, and futurists -- maybe even graduate students and farmers. A moderated net discussion would be more valuable than a two-day panel meeting, if there were a way to generate a final report. Regardless, look for continuing funding in the areas that the panel has recommended.)

The Computing Research Association (CRA) has a new WWW server, http://cra.org/cra_b/, for its CRA Bulletin, job announcements, etc. To subscribe to the CRA Bulletin, send a "subscribe cra_b your name" message to listproc@cra.org. [Juan Osuna (josuna@cra.org), CRA Bulletin, 5/27/94.] (CRA is mainly for department chairmen and lab directors, but other CS professors can benefit.)

NSF has updated its program guidelines on Visiting Professorships for Women (NSF 94-68). FTP file nsf9468 from stis.nsf.gov. [grants, 5/29/94.]

UIdaho has a Grant Getter's Guide to the Internet gopher, gopher.uidaho.edu port 70. [gopherjewels, 5/30/94. CARR-L.]

The Ontario government will spend $10.6M on a resource center for computer hardware/software developers. The hope is to create 25K jobs over 5 years. [Ottawa Citizen, 5/19/94, p. F2. EDUPAGE.]

Rep. George Brown (CA) has gathered information on DoD earmarks, or pork. Materials and Electronics Technologies gained $193M, all earmarked. Clinton requested no money for Integrated Command and Control Technology; appropriators provided $160M and earmarked $186M! [Robert L. Park, WHAT'S NEW, 5/27/94.] ("Politicians are like diapers; they need changing often, and for the same reason." [George A. Michael (gam@lll-crg.llnl.gov). Jim Warren, 5/29/94.])