Decrease of Highly Educated Technology Workforce

Description:

Following discussion as part of the European Lisboa conference (2000), the government of The Netherlands has set itself a target to become one of the most competitive and dynamic knowledge economies of the world. In order to realize this goal, the government wants to increase R&D spending to 3% of GDP vs. current spending of 1.8% only (2004). One of the main drivers of the succesful realisation of this goal comprises the availability of sufficient numbers of highly educated technological professionals for both public and private research institutions.

As it currently stands, the number of technological students in The Netherlands has been declining for many years in a row. In addition it appears, that after graduation, a large part of the technological professionals prefer to work in general business roles rather than scientific or engineering roles. Consequently, the number of technological affluent employees is expected to continue to decline going forward.

Enablers:

Increase in (perceptions of) career opportunities for techies; More flexible education programs: bachelor for technological students with business focus, masters for truly technological students; Increased acceptance of foreigners to technological degrees combined with easy access to visa and working permits after graduation

Inhibitors:

Declining quality and quantity of technological universities; Limited career perspectives for technological students; Rigid university programs, with limited potential to select business or scientific program early on in degree; Restrictive student and work visa conditions;

Paradigms:

Data-intensive computations arise in many domains of scientific and engineering research. Itself is not a driving force that would change people's view on the world, however, it does driven the development of Grid technology, because of its demanding requirement for large exchange and storage of datasets, and response time, which forces a concept of building common platform between geographically distributed processors. At the same time, with the advances in the development and maturity of data-intensive computation itself, many formidable problems in areas such as physics, bioinformatics, computational astronomy, computational biology, material sciences, archeology, and oceanography may in the future be sloved, which in turn would bring new research discoveries and reasonably new perspectives of the world into existance.

Experts:

PNNL [1] (http://www.pnl.gov/news/2004/04-64.htm) ORNL [2] (http://www.ornl.gov/)

Timing:

The development of data-intensive computation is more or less involved with the development of each of its application areas. It's hard to find it as a separate discipline and get clear milestones.