Subscribe

Office of Science and Technology Policy Blog

  • City in a Box: Municipal Makeover Comes to Texas

    Posted by Beth Noveck on September 20, 2010 at 12:48 PM EDT

    Today I am in Manor, Texas (pop. 6,500), to celebrate the burgeoning open government movement underway in America’s towns and cities. Manor is embracing the Obama Administration's vision of creating effective and efficient government that fosters transparency and innovation. By using new technology to enable open and collaborative ways of working, government—whether federal, state, or local—can deliver better citizen services with fewer resources.

    read the rest
    Learn more about Ethics, , Technology

  • Three New Science Envoys Announced

    Posted by Phil Larson on September 17, 2010 at 5:27 PM EDT

    In an expansion of the groundbreaking science diplomacy program that grew out of President Obama’s “New Beginnings” speech in Cairo last year, the State Department has released the names of three new U.S. Science Envoys. The new envoys were announced last night at an awards event by Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) at the request of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. They are Dr. Rita Colwell, a Distinguished Professor at both the University of Maryland at College Park and Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health; Dr. Gebisa Ejeta, a Distinguished Professor of Agronomy at Purdue University and an acclaimed plant breeder and geneticist; and Dr. Alice Gast, President of Lehigh University. The new envoys will travel to South and Southeast Asia, Africa, and the Central Asian/Caucuses region in the coming months. To read more about the envoys, see the State Department’s official release.

    The event at which the new envoys were announced was hosted by the U.S. Civilian Research and Development Foundation, which last night conferred its prestigious George Brown Award upon one of the Nation’s first three envoys: Dr. Bruce Alberts. OSTP Director John Holdren introduced Alberts at the event, noting that Alberts’ trip to Indonesia was “spectacularly successful” and included a meeting with President Yudhoyono who, as a result of Alberts’ visit, addressed the Indonesian Academy of Sciences—becoming the first Indonesian president to do so in the country’s history—and outlined a bold new plan for Indonesian science and technology and a reinvigoration of cooperation with the U.S.

    Alberts and the other two inaugural Science Envoys—Dr. Elias Zerhouni and Dr. Ahmed Zewail—who were named last November, together traveled in the past year to a total of 11 countries in North Africa; the Middle East; South and Southeast Asia; and Europe to build relationships and create new science and technology collaborations.

    For more information on the Science Envoy program, visit OSTP’s Global Science Diplomacy page.

    Learn more about Foreign Policy, Technology

  • Automotive X-Prize Embodies Administration's Focus on Innovation

    Posted by Rick Weiss on September 17, 2010 at 8:37 AM EDT

    OSTP Director John P. Holdren yesterday participated in an awards ceremony for the Progressive Automotive X Prize, a public-private challenge in which a total of $10 million in prizes was awarded to three teams that created production‐capable vehicles with energy-efficiency equivalence ratings of at least 100 miles per gallon.

    Established automakers, start‐ups, universities, independent inventors, and even a high school team were among the 111 teams that entered the competition, which was sponsored in part by the Department of Energy. Dr. Holdren announced the winning team in the “Alternative, Side-by-Side Seating” class: The Mooresville, N.C.-based “Li-ion” Team, short for lithium ion, which is the kind of battery that powers this elegant, all-electric vehicle.

    In tandem with important aerodynamic features that enabled it to achieve 182 MPGe in on-track testing, this vehicle also accelerates from zero to 60 mph in just 14.7 seconds and boasts a range of more than 100 miles in realistic driving.

    As Dr. Holdren noted during the ceremony, the Progressive Automotive X Prize embodies much of what President Obama has said over the past year about the value of using prizes and challenges as a way of tapping the ingenuity of citizen solvers to meet the many challenges today facing the Nation.

    “The President knows that the challenges we face today—challenges relating to energy, the environment, agriculture, and national security—are simply too big for government or the usual private-sector problem-solvers to solve alone. We need all hands on deck,” he said. “That is why it is so inspiring to see that the teams honored here today are entrepreneurs outside the circle of “usual suspects” in the auto industry. One telltale sign of that is that the Li-ion Motors team is from North Carolina—which no one can really think of as a suburb of Detroit.”

    In September 2009, the President announced his Strategy for American Innovation, in which he called upon agencies to increase their ability to promote and harness innovation by using tools such as prizes and challenges to solve tough problems. In March 2010 the White House Office of Management and Budget issued a memorandum to all agency heads affirming the Administration’s commitment to this approach and providing a policy and legal framework to guide agencies in using prizes to stimulate innovation to advance their core missions.

    And just last week, the White House unveiled Challenge.gov, a new online platform where entrepreneurs, innovators, and citizen solvers can compete for prestige and prizes by providing novel solutions to tough national problems, large and small. Check it out, and see if there is a problem you might be able to solve!

    Congratulations to the Li-ion team and all the Automotive X Prize winners celebrated today.

    Dr. Holdren at X-Prize Event

    OSTP Director John P. Holdren gives remarks at yesterday's Automotive X-Prize event in Washington, DC. (Photo courtesy X-Prize/John Shore)

    Learn more about Technology

  • Who Inspired You?

    Posted by Jim Gates on September 16, 2010 at 6:16 PM EDT

    Ed. Note: Today President Obama announced the launch of Change the Equation, a CEO-led effort to dramatically improve education in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM), as part of his “Educate to Innovate” campaign.

    Years may go by and memories may fade but just about everyone remembers a special teacher they had in the K-12 years who made a big difference—don’t you? A teacher who opened your eyes to something new or beautiful or showed you something about the possibilities of a subject in school that you had not appreciated before?

    Those of us who have the privilege of serving on the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology were talking about this recently and comparing stories about our own favorite and life-changing teachers, and we had an idea: Why not make a short video in which we could tell our stories, as a means of amplifying a message we were already developing about the importance of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education?

    The discussion came up in the course of preparing a new report on STEM education that PCAST released today, and it resulted in the production of the short video you can see below, which was produced by Visualante Media and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. We hope you enjoy getting a peek into the academic beginnings of some of the President’s science and technology advisors, and that it inspires you to do your share—as a student, a teacher, a corporate donor or philanthropist—to reach for the stars and do whatever you can do to strengthen this important backbone of American education.

    Download Video: | mp3 (4MB)

    Jim Gates is a member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology

    Learn more about Education, Technology

  • RTD2: Research for Robotics

    Posted by Tom Kalil and Sridhar Kota on September 15, 2010 at 3:09 PM EDT

    In July, the heads of the Office of Management and Budget and the Office of Science and Technology Policy identified robotics as one of the Administration’s R&D priorities for the President’s FY2012 budget.

    Robotics is an important technology because of its potential to advance national needs such as homeland security, defense, medicine, healthcare, space exploration, environmental monitoring and remediation, transportation, advanced manufacturing, logistics, services, and agriculture. Robotics is also nearing a tipping point in terms of its usefulness and versatility as technologies such as software, chips, and computer vision continue to improve.

    OSTP has been working with Federal agencies and the research community to identify concrete steps that the Administration can take to promote U.S. leadership in robotics.

    As part of this effort, five agencies teamed up to issue a joint solicitation for small business research for Robotics Technology Development and Deployment (RTD2). Small businesses can apply for research funding for a wide range of topics, including robot-assisted rehabilitation, robotics for drug discovery, and robots that can disarm explosive devices.

    Expect to see more to come in the months ahead from a newly energized and collaborative Federal robotics community!

    Tom Kalil is Deputy Director for Policy in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy

    Sridhar Kota is Assistant Director for Advanced Manufacturing in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy

    Learn more about Technology

  • OSTP Delivers Preliminary Plan for National Earth Observations

    Posted by Shere Abbott on September 10, 2010 at 6:03 PM EDT

    OSTP today delivered a key report to Congress outlining a strategic approach to enhancing our capacity to observe our home planet and its interconnected atmospheric, geologic, and environmental systems. The report, Achieving and Sustaining Earth Observations: A Preliminary Plan Based on a Strategic Assessment by the U.S. Group on Earth Observations, was requested by Congress in the 2010 Consolidated Appropriations Act (Public Law 111-117). It illustrates how the President’s FY 2011 budget enables a reversal of the decline of our Nation’s Earth observation infrastructure—an infrastructure that is critical to protecting life, property, natural resources and ecosystems, and national security.

    Each day, the scientific community collects millions of individual Earth observations, allowing us to examine, monitor, and model atmospheric composition, seismic activity, ecosystem health, weather patterns, and hundreds of other characteristics of our planet. However, our Nation’s technical infrastructure for making these observations has been in decline over the last decade. To address this challenge, the report identifies 17 critical Earth system parameters, such as gravity, soil moisture, ocean color, and solar irradiance, that must be observed from space, in the air, on land, and at sea, as well as below the land and ocean surfaces, and articulates how the President’s FY 2011 budget funds the essential systems to carry out these observations.

    As OSTP Director John P. Holdren and I have testified before Congress, there is a growing awareness of the value of integrated Earth observations for meeting a variety of environmental and other public policy objectives. In the coming year, the Administration will be working with Congress to develop a more comprehensive national strategy for Earth observations, designed to improve coordination and efficiency across the Federal government. The new report represents an important first step towards the development of that detailed strategy. In preparing it, OSTP worked closely with the Federal agencies assembled in the U.S. Group on Earth Observations (USGEO), a subcommittee of the National Science and Technology Council’s Committee on Environment, Natural Resources, and Sustainability (CENRS). We are also working internationally with China, the European Union, South Africa, and 79 other nations through the intergovernmental Group on Earth Observations (GEO) to implement a Global Earth Observation System of Systems, or GEOSS, by 2015. The end result of GEOSS will be access to an unprecedented amount of environmental information, integrated into new data products benefiting societies and economies worldwide.

    Through these national and international strategies to advance Earth observations, the Obama Administration is working to ensure that our Nation’s decision makers, businesses, farmers, health care workers, and indeed all our citizens have the information they need to take actions to improve human well-being and the health of our environment.

    Shere Abbott is Associate Director for Energy and Environment in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy

    Learn more about Technology