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Is America's IT dominance under threat?

Ed Frauenheim CNET News

Published: 20 Apr 2005 15:15 BST

Do you think that the US' poor showing — the poorest showing so far — is a reflection of [Americans] not taking it as seriously?
I've been thinking about that. The United States is used to being number one in everything. If we were fourth and it was, 'Oh, the other guys are just trying a lot harder,' that wouldn't be as big a deal. But I suspect that — given that we're 17th — it's more than that. It's not just like, 'Well, this one country is taking it really seriously and so we're never going to beat them at that.' You know, we're 17th. There's a lot of teams from a lot of countries ahead of us. So I think it's more serious.

Why did the US do so poorly?
First of all, I think that'd be a great study. That'd be a great study to see what's happening at these other places versus here.

From the ACM perspective, this is great. The contest is getting more popular, and people are taking it so seriously. It's impressive. The Russians winners — they won it I think a year or two ago — they got to meet [President Vladimir] Putin. They got to meet the leader of the country.

Wouldn't that be wonderful if that were true in the United States? What happens with our presidents? They meet the winners of the football championship, right? Gee, wouldn't it be wonderful if the presidents would meet the winners of the programming contest? Wouldn't that be a nice place? Wouldn't that be a better world?

That's a good point.
So I think a sense of national pride [influences how different schools perform in the contest]. Some of it is a sense of laziness. [The US has] always dominated the software industry, the computer industry... 'Why do we care how some amateur contest turns out. We know we're the best in the world at this, so where's the problem?' I think there's some of that.

Filtering it down to the level of the colleges, they may not be pushing it much?
Yeah. So, I think the question would be, what would it take for us to do well? Suppose this was seen as something that deserved more attention. It does in some sense measure us against how good the rest of the world is at these things. Would more-focused attention bring the United States higher up in this competition? And is it a simple thing or are they teaching differently? [Are] these other countries teaching more effectively?

I know as a faculty member I was kind of struck that at least the titles of the courses are the same as when I was an undergraduate student. I took a compiler course. Berkeley teaches a compiler course, you know, 30 years later... Are they actually teaching things in different ways in these other countries? Are they being more successful that way?

The other thing that's happening, absolutely, is a decision in these countries to increase their research funding in information technology. They are fairly significant increases, even in countries that don't have a lot of money. They decided that this is a good bet for some of reasons I said... it's not capital intensive, 'we're the type of people who would do well at that.'