Review of NASA's Aerospace Technology Enterprise An Assessment of NASA's Pioneering Revolutionary Technology Program (2003) / Chapter Skim
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3. Report of the Panel on Computing, Information, and Communications Technology
3. Report of the Panel on Computing, Information, and Communications Technology
Pages 20-37
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From page 20... ...
The CICT program, funded at $138 million for FY2002, comprises 242 individual research tasks. The goal of the CICT program is to "enable NASA's scientific research, space exploration, and aerospace technology missions with greater mission assurance, for less cost, with increased science return through the development and use of advanced computing, information and communications technologies" (Tu, 2002~.
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From page 21... ...
, and Glenn Research Center in Ohio (July 24, 2002~. This report discusses top-level issues that are relevant to the entire CICT program in the next section, "Overall Observations." Other sections discuss the research portfolio of the CICT program, the quality of CICT research plans and overall methodology, how well the CICT program has connected with the community outside NASA, and the quality of the technical staff and facilities at the NASA CICT facilities visited by the CICT panel.
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From page 22... ...
iWhile the Liquid Crystal Based Beam Steering task could use a better understanding of space qualification requirements, the task is still considered by the panel to be world-class for its potential impact on space architecture. CNIS project Grid Infrastructure Support and Development User Services IS project Model-Based Programming Skunk Works Mind's Eye: Knowledge Discovery Process Capture Automated Discovery Procedures for Gene Expression and Regulation for Microarray and Serial Analysis of Gene Expression Data Robust Intelligent Systems Based on Information Fusion ITSR project Low Dimension Nanostructures and Systems for Devices and Sensors SC project Backbone Network Communication Architectures Distributed Space Communications Systems Large-Scale Emulations During the course of this review, the CICT program demonstrated that it had taken appropriate action and either terminated or redirected these nine tasks (Tu and VanDalsem, 2003~.
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From page 23... ...
Also, the panel sensed that, to some extent, CICT management was required to "force fit" a toplevel research vision onto disparate research tasks that it had inherited from other programs (Tu, 2002~. The CICT panel believes that NASA could address this concern by using a research program architecture for the current CICT program as well as an architecture that identifies future targets.
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Distributed Cooperating with others Improves usefulness of Working to extend Since the technology is rapidly computing to establish the state current NASA services, use the maturing to the point of (CNIS) of the art but has computation resources.
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CICT Status NASA Mission Positives for Improvement Data mining (IS) At one time NASA was NASA has significant Applying different data Can regain leadership status to an international leader, internal needs to analyze mining approaches to address NASA-specific but the agency has lost complex engineering specific projects to problems (massive amounts of several key personnel.
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From page 26... ...
While the majority of tasks under the CICT program were good, a subset of tasks often did not have clearly defined products or system deliverables or clearly identified customers. Even under a pure research agenda, benchmarks for success should be established early in the process by task PIs in coordination with the eventual customer for the research.
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From page 27... ...
These technology areas are generally driven by a need unique to NASA that is not being fulfilled by industry, academia, or other government agencies. The panel urges CICT management to examine these areas in detail so that other segments of the CICT program may emulate their success.
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From page 28... ...
Nanotechnology is far less certain to be incorporated into NASA missions than, for example, Microsystems research based on more established technologies and materials. The panel believes that the nanotechnology work in the CICT program is very narrow in its scope and that, by itself, the work seriously overlooks important, promising research areas such as those focused on lightweight, high-strength materials that are of obvious relevance to NASA for launch into space.
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. However, the CICT program has not yet ad
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As stated earlier, the CICT panel encourages all managers within the CICT program to establish clear metrics as a means of evaluating the tasks under their purview. Task Deliverables and Their Fit to NASA Goals The CICT panel found task deliverables other than those of the SC project to be poorly defined.
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From page 31... ...
This list is not meant to be allinclusive for the entire CICT program. Onboard Fault Identification for Planetary Rovers Domain-Specific Self-Adaptive Software Multi-Resolution Planning in Large Uncertain Environments Team-Oriented Robotic Exploration Tasks on Scorpion and K9 Platforms Probabilistic Reasoning for Complex Dynamic Systems Causal Reasoning Automated Data Management Distributed Data Mining for Large NASA Databases Robust Intelligent Systems Based on Information Fusion This apparent disconnect between the task and NASA missions or even CICT program goals may be due, in part, to a lack of communication from top management to the PIs.
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From page 32... ...
Reviewing and Selecting Proposals CICT appears to have a good methodology for reviewing and selecting proposals, although at the start of this review, it was not apparent to the review panel how labor is divided between internal and external reviews in the CICT program. There is also an inherent conflict of interest in having a NASA manager choose between keeping a task in-house that is, having NASA employees perform the work on the task and outsourcing it (where an external company performs the work)
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From page 33... ...
TECHNICAL COMMUNITY CONNECTIONS The CICT panel was charged with looking at how well the CICT program is linked to the technical community at large. These are some of the questions asked in the statement of task: Is there evidence that the research plan for the area under review reflects a broad understanding of the underlying science and technology and of comparable work within other NASA units as well as industry, academia, and other federal laboratories?
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From page 34... ...
The panel notes that the CICT program has taken steps in the right direction. For example, the chair of the IEEE Nanotechnology meeting held in August 2003 was a NASA Ames researcher working under the nanotechnology portion of the program.
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In some of the tasks, the work is very specific to NASA missions, so little work being conducted outside NASA will apply to those missions. In almost all other tasks within the CICT program, it appears that PIs are sufficiently familiar with current research being conducted in their fields outside NASA.
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From page 36... ...
FACILITIES, PERSONNEL, AND EQUIPMENT During the site visits and during various interactions with researchers throughout the course of the review process, the CICT review panel found the qualifications of the CICT scientific staff to be very good and easily comparable to those of world-class researchers. As noted in the previous chapter, the external investigators that the CICT program has employed are also world-class and of high renown.
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From page 37... ...
Program Overview," presentation to the committee and panels on June 11, 2002. Eugene Tu and Bill VanDalsem, NASA Ames Research Center, "CICT Actions in Response to the NRC Review of NASA's Pioneering Revolutionary Technology Program Interim Report, dated January 16, 2003," material presented to the committee on April 21, 2003.
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