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Does the Military Dominate CS Research?
An anonymous reader asks: "It seems at my university the military has their fingers in much of the computer science research happening on campus: sensors, intelligent agents, autonomous vehicles, supercomputing. Is this the case at other schools around the US? How about outside of the US? How is the military shaping the current state of CS research? What areas of research atrophy because the funding goes to investigating military applications of new technology?"
Really, if you think about it, the military will eventually, if it doesn't already, have its fingers in any technology that it thinks will further its goals. School location or subject really doesn't matter to them.
Bleakness... Desolation... Plastic Forks...
The submitter must be a nigger.
You fill their house with a giant Jiffy Pop before you ignite it with your designed (but they took control over) laser.
The U.S. government is becoming increasingly militarized. If you are an American taxpayer, and you don't want to pay to kill people whose country you can't find on a map, I suggest you vote for Howard Dean, or the intelligent, non-violent candidate of your choice.
George Bush is not intelligent enough to lead the country. He only sells the government to the highest bidders, who happen to be oil-related companies like Halliburton, and weapons manufacturers.
Let's be realistic here. When has it not?
Computers were originally people who determined calculated firing tables. The first computers were used to calculate this information and break encryption codes.
The Internet is based on equipment and protocols that DARPA paid for. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency Check out the current and recent solicitations.
I'll grant you that business plays a large role too. It funds its fair share, but it seems as though it is more practical and immediate. The military seems to fund things that might not be very practical now, but can possible provide the edge in battle.
That was similar to my experience back when I was in school.
And considering the history of computing, it is to be expected.
Computers are tool for automating complicated by not particularly egaging tasks.
From code breaking, to calculating artillary tables, to distributing information. It's not know how that's the obstical, but maintaing focus and attention. With the millitary, few people have the resources or the motivations to tackle the extremes that remain, besides them. The upside is, while the projects might be defense oriented as far as the money is concerned. The people aren't. Some of the people writing their doctoral thesis based on those projects might just want to make the most kickass games (like one of my CSE TA's). Smarter robots might well lead to smarter monsters.
That's just the nature of the bleeding edge, the inscentive is always going to be strongest for militaries. You can get wrapped up in black helicopters or Chile 1950. Or you can step back and know them for what they are, individual quanta which are part of vast spectrum. While the military might have given us ICBM, and the possibility of nuclear holocaust, the secondary benefits were world wide communications satillites, GPS, the internet, aluminum cans, nuclear power, the death star, and the only chance to defend ourselves from a rogue asteroid.
Be happy for the money. Be happy for the challenge. Be happy for the opportunity to hone your skills.
But, then I'd have to kill you.
::i visited slashdot and all i got was this lousy sig::
I'm a little confused on the premise of this question.
Research needs funding.
If the military wasn't funding autonomous sensors, who else would?
And what does having military funding for some projects have to do with the "atrophy" of other non military projects?
Are you surprised you can't find funding for research no one wants?
Its little like asking how McDonald's research on hamburger recipes is adversely affecting research on hydrogen energy.
What do they have to do with each other?
Indeed, how dare the military fail to fund research into non-military applications!
It's obviously the military's fault if you can't get a grant.
After all, thier charter demands they fund all worth research, no matter how militarily useless!
It's not like there are private corporations doing research for non-military products
HEADSHOT!
:P
Oh.. wait.. wrong CS
My guess would be that the fundamentals of system design atrophy. In many ways the computer science field has seen very little innovation as far as "operating systems" are concerned. At least in the recent past.
Most systems try to mimick windows or something else, except for Apple's OS X. But on the other hand, it is also built atop a UNIX-style system, and is thus somewhat based on old ideas.
The IT industry has created such large barriers to entry that any new or radical ideas as far as desktop systems go (or servers, for that matter) have failed to enter the market successfully. Arguably, Linux's success is due to the fact that it's just a reimplementation of the old UNIX system design.
Colleges and other higher-level academic institutions are the testbed for new ideas in the CS field, and things like system design and a computers' fundamental setup have atrophied over the past few years, since I, for one, have seen very little that qualifies as "new."
One thing I would like to do is try to completely reinvent the desktop system in college as a project, because many, many technologies are just improvements upon older ones. What the industry needs is a radically new system that takes advantage of what's out there now, as far as both ideas go and as far as hardware goes.
This is just my two cents, but if you look at basic system design (device drivers, processing, filesystems, et cetera), there has been very little that is radically new.
This is why I think basic system design has atrophied at the expense of other areas.
was the OpenBSD / DARPA funding: article here
I'm not really a big fan of the military in general, though obviously it has its uses. However, historically they have driven quite a bit of important research. Although not specific to computer science research they have done things like invent the magnetron (used in nuclear physics and microwave ovens), helped split the atom (bombs and nuclear power plants), and a number of other well known and important inventions. My point is that we know why the military wants technology, but it is up to us to find other uses for it. In fact if we Don't find other uses for it, it probably won't ever become cheap to produce and thus require more tax payer money to be spent on it.
By slashdot's standards, your little attempt at humor is considered fresh.
But I thought microsoft dominated CS research. This article says so.
At Wake Forest University, ROTC and Information Systems share a building (#26 on the campus map).
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
...or the terrorists. Depends which side has stronger players. It's about 50:50, Counterstrike is very ballanced game.
...ones that nobody else gives a shit about, and you probably shoudn't either. If you can't fund your research, you're either not trying hard and you're trying to blame your lack of motivation on the military, or you really have stumbled across something that is so beyond fucking worthless that you can't get an academic grant for it, and you should be rewarded for finding such a rare gem. That's really an accomplishment.
draws brains away from research in technology with no or little military application, things that might have great benefit in the day-to-day lives of most citizens.
And what EXACTLY those technologies might be? Anything powerful enough to heal people can be used to kill them as well...
Paul B.
Most companies and corporations that actually spend a percentage of their budget each year on R&D are going to keep it in house. Some may contract it out, but even then the contracting company gets next to no rights to the results of the research. Companies want to be able to trademark, copyright, and patent any reasearch so that they can make money off of it later.
Yes, their are a few corporations that give money to schools for R&D. But if you really look at what they are funding, the results of the research is a little sketchy to begin with and have little chance at being used later to turn any sort of profit. It's been my opinion that such grants are meant more as a tax writeoff than to produce anything useful.
So that leaves the government as the main source of money for research that has to do with anything cool or important.
The reason most things get done is because there is a pressing need, and people in the military understand this better than anyone else. Defending yourself and defending a nation is a pressing need, whether you'd like it to be or not.
It would be nice if we could all hold hands and do research for the good of humanity, but unfortunately, human beings aren't wired that way. Nothing would get done. This is why communist societies, which are beautiful ideas on paper, don't work.
One of the major fallacies that far too many people put a lot of faith in is that people are basically good. We are not.
I know this might sound harsh and cynical, but the fact of the matter is, once you accept the fact that human nature is brutal, selfish, and ugly, you're most of the way there toward a realistic world view.
And if you look at it pragmatically, you'll realize that necessity is the mother of invention, and almost all of the great technological advances in history stem from military necessity.
Yeah, it's not nice. No, I don't like it. But that's how it works.
If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
The history of computation is the history of war. From the Greeks and their studies of quadratics, to Galileo's ballistics tables (which funded all his later work), the Difference Engine, early mechanical calculators, etcetera. War has always been the driving force behind computation, sadly. Just look at super computers -- the US military keeps building new record holders JUST to model nuclear deterioration and detonation! Many physics simulations (the exact same ones that make cars safe now) were invented to test rocket, artillery, and bullet design.
The military funded the Internet.
The military, as one of the largest software developers on Earth, basically created software engineering and still pushes for hard numbers from projects and code.
When the military tried out OO technologies on flight simulators, they scheduled five different projects, the first one of which was set up to fail(!) so they could accurately determine what actual benefit they could get from OO.
The military is funding the semantic web technologies, notably DAML, in hopes of getting better AI -- this will be needed for better drones and autonomous agents, not to mention scanning for terrorist activities...
There's just no question involved. The military will do things no other organization would even think of doing.
Here at the University of Alberta (Canada) the reasearch department does a wide variety of reasearch. Skimming through the various webpages, I had difficulty finding even one that was obviously connected to the military.
Basically, the short answer is no.
I did however, recently see a very interesting presentation on an AI project called ScriptEase. It is a program to reduce programming requirements abd ease module design for the game Neverwinter Nights. It is funded by Bioware (the company that produced Neverwinter Nights and which is based here in Edmonton.)
I guess it depends on where you live. I would be interested to hear from more people in other countries on this issue.
I don't think so. They may fund a major part of CS research, but they are doing they actual research.
Blogzine
Here's the correct link: Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
I support the Center for Consumer Freedom
Very little research funding in the UK or continental Europe is funded by the military. I've heard of the odd project related to defense against biological warfare, but never met anyone who took up such funding. In the UK, university funding comes state research councils (BBSRC, NERC, SERC etc.), national agencies (Carnegie, English Nature etc.), and a charitable trusts (Wellcome Trust, Beit Trust etc.). European funding is available from the European Commission under the Framework programmes - these are often linked to industry/academe partnerships.
I would think its a good training tool for the military. I can just imagine it: soldiers bunny hopping and strafing through Baghdad, or 1 person with the riot shield (in CS 1.6) owning all of Iraq with a knife, hehe. :)
got sig?
Either the researchers make a railgun to kill arabs, or they make a mass-launcher to reduce the cost of space exploration/colonization.
I'll leave it to you to guess which one *benefits* society in the end.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
I attended Wright State University near Dayton, Ohio. Almost all of the research being done there was for the Air Force or its contractors. Also, many of WSU's CS graduates (but not me, I program cash registers) went on to work for the Air Force or a contractor thereof. This is probably because the University is maybe 1/4 mile from Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and thus may not represent the typical university. Sometimes I would while away time between classes lying on my back on the quad watching C-130 cargo planes coming in low over the campus. Also, the planes would sometimes drown out the lectures if the windows were open:z shzshzshzshzshzsh
regardless of the marginal propensity to consume."
"Since the variable was declared static, next time we bzshzshzshzshzshzshZSHZSHZSHZSHZSHZSHZSHZSHZSHZSH
"Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now"
-Bob Dylan
Unknown host pong.
Guess the military should have stayed away from that whole ARPANET thing. At the very least I wouldn't have to put up with morons on the internet because there would be no internet.
Hollow words will burn and hollow men will burn.
Back in the early 80's, I was a geneticists/Bio-Tech. The industry had collapsed and the fueher had moved funding from civil to Defense via Darpa. What was interesting was the military came in and had us change protocols. When we first applied, we were a defense based grant. As time went on, I suddenly realized that we were not doing defense but offense. It was an eye opener. (The more interesting part was the number of Iraqi's that we were training back then; I understand that Texas did the bulk of the training though)
Recently, when we did the iraqi WMD inspections, We insisted on inspecting the universities. It was a wise precaution.
So yes, Virginia, we do the bulk of our research in the open at Universities, but it is not what it appears to be.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Here in Canada, we're relatively lucky. Instead of the military, we have corporations like RIM, Nortel and dominating research. Its lucky because the students can then go on and join those companies, compared to the US where the tech can be snatched and shelved and classified, and youre not employed if youre Pakistani :)
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
The best CS players seem to be short little gentlemen of southeast asian descent. They also know how to use the relevant counterstrike lingo, like "AWP" "pwn3d" "l33t" and "kekekekekeke ^__^"
Thanks, I'll be here all week.
A little background,
I'm a United States Army Officer, who majored in Computer Science at West Point. I'm currently the computer security officer, and the network designer for Afghanistan.
While the military has come up with some great toys recently, they don't drive research anymore. Darpanet (pre-internet), secure transmission (with the help of NSA), the atom bomb, are over 50 years old. But when you really think about it - the last thing the military research has done for the average joe is GPS, and that was started in the 70's.
When the military had a huge budget, and computers were exorbitantly expensive and arcane, the military was a leader in tech. But now when anyone can drop $800 to get a computer that was astronomically more powerful than those, you no longer lead the way.
Admittedly there are some projects that are out there that the military funds, but you see similar research in universities or corporations. Robots, protective suits, chemical detection, body armor are just a few examples. Most of the time, military researchers are looking at the cool stuff, the best way to blow stuff up.
If you look at purely CS stuff the military is just trying to keep up. We have 27 systems to track where people, vehicles and planes are, most don't talk to each other. We don't make our equipment or contract some one to make it anymore, we just buy our routers from CISCO, our servers from Dell, and our computers from many companies, just like the rest of America.
The military is no longer a factor in CS research
It would seem that the NSF should be brought into the discussion. They fund a variety of CS and computer related research. Their recent reorganization (yes, we realize that this is a b-school weighted nonsense term) is based on better addressing "real" needs in the area.
If you are not familiar with the projects they fund, you really are not looking hard enough.
I personally don't know about CS research, but as far as nanotechnology goes, I know that most of the funding comes from the military. The "holy grail" for a research professor is a five year multi-million dollar DARPA grant.
They put the most money out there, so more people do research for them. In many cases, I don't think military policy determines what is researched. There are many of these great grants which go unclaimed. Usually I think a professor will try and get a grant offer written to match his or her research. A lot of reserach has obvious military applications, even if it's as mundane as improving field ration shelf life. The military will still fund it if you can write the proper grant proposal.
Then add to that "...and if it screws up even the slightest bit, under any circumstance, in such a way as to so much as hurt somebody's feelings, we're screwed." In that regard, the military provides a hell of a test bed for high-risk, high-concept toys, well away from the prying eyes of trial lawyers. Adaptive cruise control probably could not have been developed in a liability-conscious environment like, well, the real world. Without years in the hands of testers who knew enough about personal responsibility to be entrusted with extremely fickle multimillion dollar jets, your ludicrous SUV would be that much harder to drive inattentively. A decade keeping jet fighters about a meter from each other at supersonic speeds refined the product to the point it could be implemented in an environment that, while far more mundane, is far more expensive to fuck up in.
This is not my sandwich.
enough said
Kudos to you, sir, for your insightful commentary on societal decay. You're entirely correct about each generation's dismissal of their parents' comments about how much better things used to be, but I never thought to consider that perhaps these things are true, and that societal decay would be responsible.
:)
I'm not entirely sure that I agree with all of your points, but your statements provoke thought, and I'd be a fool to try and debate the bit about apathy increasing with every generation. Bravo.
Dan
No, but I do imagine they pretty much pwn America's Army
Cole's Law: Thinly sliced cabbage
Remember that Clark (whose only military victories were a Sudanese aspirin factory and Waco, TX) wanted to attack Russian forces in the former Yugoslavia. If a Britsh general hadn't rightfully disobeyed Clark's order, we'd be at war with Russia today.
The defining moment was when they pulled the plug in Berkeley's BSD group in the early 1980s (DARPA decided to fund Mach instead) and BSD went on anyway, with private funding.
mustard gas, nitrogen mustard is (or was) used as an antineoplastic or cancer drug. A very close relative of nerve agents are used to treat Myasthenia Gravis.
The truth is the military is very concerned about things like logistics, medicine, personel management and security all areas that are also the concerns of any bussiness or government. Most civilians have no idea of how little military activity is involved with the direct application of combat power
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
This isn't as uncommon as one might think. It's an informal Army tradition that new soldiers fresh out of basic training will get assigned an impossible task. A soldier I know of was told to go get a chemlight (the military's version of a glow stick) battery from the motorpool. He returned with a 50 Lb. humvee battery...
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Counter strike research?? Ive been a member of that team for years :)
I couldn't think of a sig.