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Letter Report
Pages 1-11

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From page 1...
... Flagg, On behalf of the Committee on Going Global: Lessons Learned from International Meetings on Science and Technology, I am pleased to submit the following letter report that describes the 2009-2011 activities of the Board on Global Science and Technology and provides an initial characterization of the global S&T landscape that the Board can use as a roadmap to develop future activities. BGST met five times between November 2009 and May 2011.
From page 2...
... In its 1995 report Allocating Federal Funds for Science and Technology, the NRC recommended that: "The President and Congress should ensure that the Federal Science and Technology budget is sufficient to allow the United States to achieve preeminence in a select number of fields and to perform at a world-class level in the other major fields."3 The most recent Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) observed that: As global research and development (R&D)
From page 3...
... To maintain technological advantage in the priority S&T investment areas, DoD must not only focus its investment portfolio, but also ensure that its investments are informed by an awareness of research around the world. An effective and efficient DoD S&T investment strategy thus requires not only ongoing benchmarking at a granular level, but also sustained engagement and collaboration with other nations in order to more fully understand the nation-specific cultural factors that shape trends and accelerate (or impede)
From page 4...
... are limited in both timeliness and granularity, providing a retrospective picture derived from statistical analysis of available data. While valuable, such indicators provide little insight at the sub-field level within major disciplines and in emerging interdisciplinary research domains -- both of which are of vital importance in informing research investment strategies.
From page 5...
... chemical engineering relative to research in other regions of the world.18 Slightly fewer than 25% of the committee members were from outside the United States; they represented academia, industry and the federal government. The committee used a mix of quantitative and qualitative evaluation tools19 recommended in the earlier report and found that the mix yielded consistently robust results.20 Their Virtual World Congress, composed of 276 "organizers,"21 resulted in a proposed speakers list of 2,997 speakers (1,897 -- or 63% -- of who were American)
From page 6...
... Dan Mote, chair of the NRC Committee on Global Science and Technology Strategies and Their Effect on U.S. National Security, provided insights regarding S&T investment approaches adopted by other nations.
From page 7...
... drivers of change."26 The S&T Strategies of Six Countries study also noted the need for nation-specific indicators to augment measures such as patents, publications, degrees awarded, and S&T budgets, to "better monitor, track, and quantify S&T development in other countries and the United States in the future."27 The potential value of nation-specific indicators is suggested in Figure 1, which visualizes changes in one aspect of the global S&T landscape over time: the geographic distribution of highly cited research publications in autonomous systems in 2005 and 2010.28 In addition to a near doubling of the total number of research publications, strong growth can be seen in multiple "hot spots" around the world, including Beijing, Tianjin, and Changsha which show 2.6, 3, and 4-fold increases in publications, respectively. Why some "hot spots" disappear while others flatten or grow over time is an important question for the U.S.
From page 8...
... This can be seen as a limitation of the illustrative approach described here. Source: Board on Global Science and Technology.30 29 Here, there is little difference between circle color and circle size due to the relatively small size of the N used to generate these maps.
From page 9...
... The Board has developed a professional networking site and questionnaires to engage participants before meetings and to keep them involved afterward. The Board is also developing a datagathering tool that takes an interdisciplinary approach to obtain situational awareness in diverse areas of emerging science and technology.
From page 10...
... Key lessons from this presentation included not only the need for awareness of advances in the field of visual analytics, but also the potential value of using such tools to more efficiently explore and more effectively describe the complex and dynamic nature of the global S&T landscape. Data-intensive science is rich in that it affords exploration from multiple perspectives.
From page 11...
... ••• For the near future the BGST will continue to experiment with various ways of assessing the global S&T landscape in emerging areas, including use of the Ning site and the template assessment tool. However, the main focus will involve another experiment -- using NRC study committees with a fast-track study format to assess the trends in global S&T in a specific technical domain of interest to the DoD.


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