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Pentagon to Significantly Cut CS Research

Posted by timothy on from the how-dare-they-take-away-the-free-money dept.

GabrielF writes "Over the last few decades, DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has funded some of the most successful computer science research projects in history, such as the Internet. However, according to the New York Times, DARPA has recently decided to significantly cut funding of open-ended computer science research projects in favor of projects that will yield short-term military results. Leading computer scientists, such as David Patterson, the head of the ACM are outraged and worried."

3 of 408 comments (clear)

  1. Well... by sabernet · · Score: 5, Informative

    While this does royally suck, we cannot forgot DARPA is a defense agency after all. And in the modern, "Make war, not talk" times of the current administration, this was almost forseeable.

  2. Fusion research... by gnuman99 · · Score: 5, Informative
    Unfortunately, AI is very much like Fusion. It's only 20 years away (for the next century)

    No, AI is nothing like fusion. We *don't* know what is required (software-wise) to make a robot alive. We *do* know how to make fusion energy efficient and it was done.

    The perception that fusion doesn't work is from the early days of fusion research. Without doing any actual testing, physicists just though if you put the plasma in a magnetic bottle, you get fusion. When they actually done the experiment, they discovered more is going on in the plasma. You can't treat it as a gas. You can't treat it as a liquid. It is kind of a combination of both. Virtually everything in physics with regards to fluid/gas flow, as well as electromagnetism is part of the fusion reactor. Only NOW, after the experiments were done, do we understand WHAT is required to make fusion work and HOW to make it work.

    Unlike AI, fusion research has been done. It works. It is here now. All that is needed is money to build a test reactor based on *current* knowledge (no pun intended :), work out final nicks in application of the theory, and then we can build the first commercial fusion reactor.

    The obstacle to fusion is not science (or lack thereof), but lack of funding. You see, what people heard in the 60s about fusion, they still think it applies today.

  3. Re:it was an odd arrangement by wodgy7 · · Score: 4, Informative
    You're right, fundamental CS research would be funded by the NSF, in an ideal world.

    The problem is that things haven't worked that way in the real world, not for a long time. Since the late '70s there has been an assumption that DARPA will fund the bulk of CS fundamental research. Partly because of that, is has historically been *very* difficult to get a grant approved by the NSF for CS research unless it's very targeted towards the pure end of the research spectrum. Computer architecture (except very low-level engineering), graphics, human-computer interaction, even databases, etc. are all fields that the NSF has been reluctant to fund because by their nature, even the basic research has an "applied" component.

    Without an increase in NSF funding, the DARPA cuts are going to devastate many areas of CS research. It's really disheartening.