The Office of Naval Research (ONR) has announced "Authoring Intelligent Training Systems with Speech Interaction Capability" as a topic in the FY'96 DoD Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative Program. The objective is "to design and prototype an authoring system that would support authors in producing artificially intelligent training systems for Naval applications that are integrated with job-relevant interactive electronic documentation and have true natural language interaction capability, integrating state-of-the-art speech recognition and generation with appropriate dialogue structure." (It would speak in shorter sentences, I presume.) $1.5M/year may be available, split between 1-2 projects led by US institutions of higher education. 5-page white papers are due 12/15/95; proposals will be due 3/20/96. See . [Helen Gigley , NL-KR, 10/25/95.]

An NSF task force on the Future of the NSF Supercomputer Centers Program has filed its final report with the National Science Board. It's available at , with pointers to other studies. [Richard E. Kaplan , comp.sys.intel, 10/25/95.]

Navy Capt. Kathleen Paige, Aegis technical director, said at a recent conference that DoD's Ada policy will have to change within the next few years. One problem is that it takes at least six months for an Ada compiler to be available for any new processor. [Aerospace Daily, 10/2/95. Al Underbrink.]

The House intends to change the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) back into the National Bureau of Standards (NBS), dropping technology thrusts such as the Advanced Technology Program (aka "corporate welfare," previously known as "strategic research for competitiveness"). NBS and the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Agency (NOAA) would fall within a new National Institute of Science and Technology (NIST), so "NBS can use the old towels." The President still plans to veto the dismantling of Commerce. [Robert L. Park, WHAT'S NEW, 10/27/95.]

If you want to help Congress set priorities, better do your homework. The National Budget Simulater from UCB's Center for Community Economic Research is . For info on California's budget and community economics groups, see . Other international, national, regional, and local government-related servers can be found on , from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). [INFOBITS, 10/95.]