Pentagon to Significantly Cut CS Research

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."

Comments

sigh...

[ocularDeathRay]

I am not surprised but this is kind of sad. Lets stop open ended research that may help people in the future... instead we will spend that money on killing people in the short term.

as great as this country is, it is sometimes frustrating to be an American

Re:sigh...

[Rostin]

There are at least two false dilemmas, here.

First, why do you assume that short-term military spending won't help people in the future? It's not at all obvious that having a powerful, technologically advanced military prevents us from helping people in the future. I would hope that the reverse is true, in fact.

Second, do you think there's a compelling reason to believe that in the absence of military research, people would stop killing one another? Isn't it true that (at least in theory) having better, more accurate weapons means that we kill *fewer* people?

Re:sigh...

[AKAImBatman]

+5 insightful? People, this is *CompSci* we're talking about here. Think for a moment. What materials does a CompSci researcher need? A few thousand dollars worth of computing equipment? Maybe ten thousand a year in custom board manufacturing costs? Beyond that you're just talking about people's wages. This isn't chemistry or rocket science where rare and expensive materials are needed for experiments! This is computer science where 90-99% of the research is intellectual!

Just think for a moment here. If they've got massive multi-million dollar budgets, where is all the research money going?

Re:sigh...

[snarkh]

It's not at all obvious that having a powerful, technologically advanced military prevents us from helping people in the future. I would hope that the reverse is true, in fact.


The US already has the most advanced military and by far the largest military spending. Why is such an increase in military research nececessary at this point in time?

Second, do you think there's a compelling reason to believe that in the absence of military research, people would stop killing one another?


Who said anything about the absense of military research. The question is about the purpose of redirecting funds from long term CS research into short-term military spending.

Re:sigh...

[cgenman]

I fail to see how funding people's wages is any different than funding chemistry research. Where does most of the cost of refining chemicals come from? Wages to people for the slow and ardruous task of making them.

If anything because the "90-99%" of the research is intellectual, it can be argued that more of the money goes to exactly what it is that you want more of.

Plus you now have the problem that as more and more money goes into the corporate sector, fewer and fewer people benefit. While the military's relationship with higher education has always had a little tension, it's the right place for the funding to flow to. If you fund research into advanced data mining techniques using quantum computers at a college, the money goes to creating research that can be used by everyone, including corporations, individuals, and other research institutions. You contribute to the education of more computer science students. If you decide to go elsewhere for your follow-up project, you can take the body of research that was done and go anywhere. By relying on private corporations, all you're doing is subsidizing the CEO's golf club memberships and tying yourself to a single vendor.

If they've got massive multi-million dollar budgets, where is all the research money going?

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say "research." I've never seen an educational institution that was wasteful about it's funding (Maybe Harvard). The professors and grad students are paid wages that nobody in the private sector would accept. They don't have crazy offices or private jets or 100,000 dollar golf club memberships. When was the last time the head of a college recieved a 30 million dollar golden parachute?

If you can't phathom where the research money is going, you are in no position to say that it is being wasted.

DARPA has always been the blue-sky arm of the military funding group, and it has served the country well in that respect. The internet is it's most obvious triumph (which is also comp sci), and that took something like 30 years to catch on. They also funded BSD, nuclear test detection research, and a whole lot else. To say that they're going to fund practical immediate research for making weapons instead is a little silly, we have branches of the military and civillian companies who do this regularly. DARPA, however, funds projects that have a 1 in 100 chance of taking off and changing the world. And DARPA funds hundreds of them.

Re:Technology

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems to go in a cycle, innovation followed by consolidation. Someone will make a breakthrough somewhere and we'll see the process start over again.

Re:Technology

[dnoyeb]

Don't think so. This was there before the bust, so why is there any relation to the bust.

Not saying there is anything special about this president but next time try to pick one who has friends in industries you want to see funded because thats how this game works.

it was an odd arrangement

[Trepidity]

Basic CS research ought to be funded, IMO, but there's no reason completely open-ended CS research should be funded by DARPA---that's what the National Science Foundation is for.

Of course, this cut in DARPA funding is unlikely to be matched by a commensurate increase in NSF funding, which is the real problem...

Twilight of the empire

[Anonymous Coward]

So the gist is that DARPA wants to fund companies, and not universities. And when they do fund .edus, they have outrageous restrictions, like requiring all help on a project be US citizens.

As a CS students, I can tell you: finding hack US coders is easy; find qualified US students who can do research is hard. It's like they don't teach math or science in US schools anymore or something. Kids from Greece or China or wherever come over here, and run circles around US students in formal predicate logic, discrete math, and other subjects that Ken and Barbie found too hard. It's no exaggeration to say that over 70% of all research students are foreign--simply because there are not many qualified US students. (It's a different story if we needed literature or communication students--we've got tons of those.)

America is a country where companies don't make anything anymore. Instead, they just own the IP, and outsource the *production* to China/Taiwan/India. Hell, look at Transmeta, also in /. news today: they are switching to a pure IP model. Exactly what makes use sure that this model is sane for a country? Production capacity is not very mobile, but intellectual talent does not have to stay put in the US. The engineers who invent the IP can just as easily be located (and will soon be born, educated, and working entirely) overseas.

US Companies went through a similar cylce of eating-the-seed corn in the 80s. What happened was they got their asses handed to them by Japan, where R&D was focused on basic science, and not the "short term" deliverables. Now, it seems DARPA is going to try to repeat the same experiment in failure.

Don't get me wrong. This is not the last straw for the US R&D system, but merely one more straw in what has to be the last bundle. It's twilight of the empire, folks. If you're young, start learning another language.

A far better solution is to let all students in US institutions work on projects. (If a project is truly classified, then just use one of the many defense contractors.) When foreign students graduate, most of them (not all) want to become US citizens. What better way to recruit new talented citizens for a country? With the *reeeediculous* DARPA restrictions, many of the foreign students I know are going home. They expect (rightly) that in 10-15 years, their countries will dominate in the industries they've trained for.

Re:Technology

[notque]

Not saying there is anything special about this president but next time try to pick one who has friends in industries you want to see funded because thats how this game works.

I'd rather my president have a combatitive relationship with industry than a friendly relationship.

Re:Should I be worried?

[kb9vcr]

The whole purpose of long-term research isn't to bang out invention after invention. It's an investment in the future of the technology.

Inventioning things that aren't apparent and obvious but which are useful and ground breaking is all about funding ideas which usually don't pan out. If your not willing to spend money to try risky ideas then the technology that might have been 20 or 60 years off will NEVER come.

Re:This Makes Sense

[be-fan]

Yes, because defense contractors are known for being punctual.

Re:This Makes Sense

[localman]

You're relatively new to this world, right? :)

We can put a pile of high-tech weapons and defense systems in the hands of our troops. It won't make a spit of difference. The issues there are political and social. Decades of killing hasn't made any progress at all. I just gets worse. If we kill people more efficiently that's not very likely to change.

Why do you think there are so many countries that have been terrorized for decadees? Lack of good enough weapons? I would tend to think it runs deeper than that.

This is different from a regular war where you've got a leader of a cohesive nation invading other nations. In that case you can "win". This stuff is based on centuries of internal religious conflict amont the people themselves. It's unlikely we'll make a high enough percentage of the people there happy in the near future.

Ah well. Let's just nuke the whole area and let God sort them out. Because weapons will help. Right?

Cheers.

Experience of a Governement Contractor

[Paradox]

So, I program for Lockheed, and therefore for the Air Force directly, and I can tell you the kind of feedback we've been getting. I can also tell about the kind of feedback we got when I was hanging around the Computer Security groups at UCSB's graduate labs.

The Government seems fed up with Computers. They need them, they need them incredibly badly, but they can't seem to get exactly what they want. This goes for both contract work and research work. I'll adress it in two parts.

For Research Work: Two major factors are at work here. First is the rule of 80/20. We can do 80 percent of what DARPA (or whatever they're named this week) wants, but that last 20% ("Now make it distributed!" or "Now make it fault tolerant!" or "Now make it cryptographically secure!") needed to make the system usable is really really hard. Lots of research projects have hit dead ends. You expect this to happen in research, of course, but still...

Also, I always got the vibe that DARPA was more than slightly pissed off with us Open Sourcing everything left and right. Maybe it was just us they seemed cross at (and by cross I mean grants and funding tended to shift away from projects with lots of open source offerings), but I've heard other folks doing research mention this too.

I mean, you can easily get the impression that the Government has an attitude of, "You're supposed to be working for us!" Every time a group open sources DARPA-funded stuff (or the components of it, which is usually the case), other people benefit from the research. This may leave a sour taste in the mouth of the accountants over there.

For Contract Work: The US Government's policy is horribly broken. "Cost Plus" contracts may have been great in the 50's for jets and stuff, but we're reaching the point with computer systems and software where we're proving that Design Up Front does not work for large projects.

But, the various millitary branches have so much CYA (Cover Your Ass) paperwork, precedent and process that they cannot disentangle themselves. It's a really bad situation for them, because they have to adapt or die, and they're dying. This is not to say that the Army or Air Force will "go out of business," it's that projects... multi-billion dollar projects... are failing every year now. New projects, huge projects that even a lightweight process would need hundreds of people to deal with, are starting at costs that are so low they'd barely turn a profit for a contractor, because the Army/Navy/Air Force expects to fail.

What I think the Government really needs to do is become more tech-savvy in general. They need to start paying top dollar to hire the best engineers. No more of this "We Give Good Benefits" junk. The Government needs to have its own research groups and they need to be driven by results, technical excellence, and they need to have open-ended budgets (that are limited by results).

Re:Should I be worried?

[braindead]

It looks like we found the root of the problem. You're looking at technology that's widely available today and say "all that was invented 20 years ago, there's nothing new going on".

The problem is that it takes 20 years for many fundamental advances to make it into mainstream. So the fundamental research that you claim is not happening? You'll see it in 20 years, when it will be mainstream.

Re:Technology

[Doc Ruby]

The role of government in costly downcycles is to reinvest in stabilizing the cycle. Especially when the cycle has been so integrated with government spending, and when it returns so well on investment. 50% of American economic growth is technology. And American defense depends on retaining our tech edge - so tech investment is an essential role for the DoD. They might have made a more persuasive argument for weaning the tech R&D community from DoD money when it was booming. But cutting it when the DoD budget is booming, and American tech is busting, is to kick this essential industry when it's down.

Re:Technology

[Aix]

Agreed, but the US government should be asking itself whether it can afford to have that breakthrough happen somewhere else. It is extremely foolish (and yet commonplace) to think that Americans have a monopoly on innovation.