nology Research to Meet Society's Needs,² the 2000 CSTB report that focuses on long-term goals for maintaining the vitality of IT research. Many of the themes achieved prominence in (3) the 1995 CSTB report Evolving the High Performance Computing and Communications Initiative to Support the Nation's Information Infrastructure,³ known informally as the Brooks-Sutherland report. Other reports contributing to this synthesis include (4) Computing the Future: A Broader Agenda for Computer Science and Engineering (1992),⁴ (5) Building a Workforce for the Information Economy (2001),⁵ (6) Academic Careers in Experimental Computer Science and Engineering (1994),⁶ (7) Embedded, Everywhere: A Research Agenda for Networked Systems of Embedded Computers (2001),⁷ and (8) More Than Screen Deep: Toward Every-Citizen Interfaces to the Nation 's Information Infrastructure (1997).⁸ In the text that follows, these reports are cited by number as listed, for easy reference, in Box 1.

Here are the most important themes from CSTB's studies of innovation in IT:

• The results of research

  • America's international leadership in IT—leadership that is vital to the nation—springs from a deep tradition of research (1,3,4).

  • The unanticipated results of research are often as important as the anticipated results —for example, electronic mail and instant messaging were by-products of research in the 1960s that was aimed at making it

    2	Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, National Research Council. 2000. Making IT Better: Expanding Information Technology Research to Meet Society's Needs. National Academy Press, Washington, D.C.

    3	Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, National Research Council. 1995. Evolving the High Performance Computing and Communications Initiative to Support the Nation's Information Infrastructure. National Academy Press, Washington, D.C.

    4	Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, National Research Council. 1992. Computing the Future: A Broader Agenda for Computer Science and Engineering. National Academy Press, Washington, D.C.

    5	Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, National Research Council. 2001. Building a Workforce for the Information Economy. National Academy Press, Washington, D.C.

    6	Computer Science and Telecommunications Board., National Research Council. 1994. Academic Careers in Experimental Computer Science and Engineering . National Academy Press, Washington, D.C.

    7	Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, National Research Council. 2001. Embedded, Everywhere: A Research Agenda for Networked Systems of Embedded Computers. National Academy Press, Washington, D.C.

    8	Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, National Research Council. 1997. More Than Screen Deep: Toward Every-Citizen Interfaces to the Nation's Information Infrastructure. National Academy Press, Washington, D.C.