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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."
Well, the Japanese are better off in many ways.
Or do you define 50% of your loans held by
Chinese banks an American success story.
Dude, we're in TRILLIONS of dollars of debt,
the boomers are about to bankrupt the rest of
the budgets.
Japan's got a few problems with banking. We've
got systemic failures.
I suppose you can look at the numbers today,
and say the US is better off. But the US
is better off because the government borrowed
trillions of dollars and pumped it into the
economy. If the Japanese did the same, they'd
look great today as well. But in 10-15 years,
when those bonds come due... look out.
The military does not really have a problem finding "whole new classes of weapons systems" to research for the long term. It's rather the other way around, if you look at something like Future Combat Systems -- an extremely expensive, quite possibly pie-in-the-sky redesign that goes against decades of military thinking which will require success in a rather large number of utterly unproven technologies to work. Lightweight, lightly armored heavily networked vehicles complimented by large numbers of mobile attack / recon robots?
It's the people outside the Pentagon pointing out that the money spent on futuristic weapons systems will hurt the ability to find funding for shorter-term but still rather useful projects.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
Disclosure: I'm a graduate student at a major research university, doing public research that happens to be funded in part by DARPA and the DoD. The research is long-term, but is in a field that will clearly have national security implications.
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).
Then you've never seen how research happens at a major university. Waste happens *differently* than at major corporations, but it happens in vast amounts, often in the form of wasted time.
At a private company I used to work at, when there was a minor problem with my working environment (too cold), it took a day or two to fix. At a top-rated university, a more serious problem (lights that turn off by themselves every ten minutes) took seven months to fix.
At the same company, security was taken very seriously. When the door to the server room was being repainted, we had a security guard stand there, literally watching paint dry. At the major university, we had five break-ins to our building last semester and yet it's still possible to break in in 15 seconds with nothing more than a newspaper. (The last of those break-ins cost the university about $10,000 in computer equipment, and it took four months to get the computers replaced and running again).
I haven't even started on the amount of time wasted on pointless administrative tasks (e.g. two weeks telling payroll how to do their jobs).
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.
Professors don't get crazy bonuses, but the top administrators get pretty hefty salaries and bonuses (like a beautiful house on campus). Compensation for administrators is approaching corporate levels.
Plus, universities find lots of ways to sphon off federal grant money. Any major purchase or salary coming from a federal grant gets a ~50% "overhead" charge tacked on--that money goes to the university.
It literally hurts me to see DARPA cut funding to universities (my group took a hit), but I can understand why it's happening.
Pure research is a fraction of what it was 20 years ago. Bell-labs is a shadow of its former self, PARC a wisp, and a very senior IBM fellow said in a seminar that Yorktown Heights has gone from "R&D" to "D&D". ( I think he means development and development, but I get the image of scientists with torches chasing blue-suited accountants through the halls)
Our basic research situation was bad enough 10 years ago that NEC started buying up the scientists from the other labs that were laying them off, and running it's own basic research facility at Princeton.
U.S. research used to be a three-sided affair, with the government labs, private industry, and academia, all doing some mixture of applied and basic research, and passing ideas and people between them. Every now and then an idea got loose, and became a real product. Now, we're in the grips of a mindset that believes that the world is too complicated for their undereducated minds to understand, and that a bonus today is worth the entire company tomorrow. Therefore, we're not putting money into forward-looking research, and we're not encouraging people to go into the technical fields, have dreams, and then work to make them real. We're back to the basics; entertaininment, overconsumption, dogma, and War without end.
After we finally wipe ourselves out, and the racoons evolve to replace us, I hope they're more farsighted than we.
the more accurate the calculations became, the more the concepts tended to vanish into thin air. R. S. Mulliken
We do occasionally get good things out of it, and it does let bright people develop ideas and technologies that have broader uses, but mostly it develops better and better technology for killing people. Sure, we've gotten communications satellites, and the Internet does things that UUCP-net didn't do. But there's a huge amount of solar energy research that simply didn't get done because the college kids who were good at thermodynamics went to work developing aerospace technology instead. And while that aerospace technology has civilian applications, much more of it is for jumbo jets than for small private aircraft and free-flight navigation that would make air travel more practical and decentralized. (I *still* want my flying car :-)
Some of the agricultural research has been seriously useful. But too much of it has been directed in ways that support big agribusiness quasi-industrial farms instead of family farms, and towards pesticides that enable mass production, toward genetically modifying plants to make them more resistant to pesticides so that they're more practical for pesticide-based farming, and towards monocultures rather than increased diversity. And if you thought software patents were nasty, you should go look at the biological patent explosions of the last 20-30 years.
Medical research seems like it wouldn't have this problem, and while it's nowhere near as bad, it's still a mixed bag. Most medical techniques that are useful on battlefields are useful on other trauma, and more Americans are still killed every year by the side-effects of the War on Drugs than the wars for oil, and far more by car accidents than either one. But government-funded medical research has unfortunate interactions with the FDA's regulation of new drug development - the regulatory barriers make it economically difficult to develop drugs that have less than a billion-dollar market, and the government funding tends to encourage large labs, and make up for some of the regulatory problems by funding universities which can avoid the regulatory barriers rather than fixing the regulatory barriers.
Short-term military-focused research is far more of an interference to the evolution of our economy than long-term mixed-use research. But they're both bad.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
>>> - breakthroughs in graphics
>
>All designed in the 60's through 80's, but lacking in powerful enough hardware until the late 90's.
Total nonsense. Most of the recent advances---such as fluid sims, deformable objects, motion capture, and the like---were made possible because of better algorithms---i.e., research---rather than any advance in hardware. I can guarantee you running algorithms from the 60's-80's on modern hardware wouldn't give you the kinds of results the multi-billion-dollar entertainment industries are looking for.
>>> - breakthroughs in vision
>
> ???
Did you get mail today? How do you think it got sorted? Computer vision algorithms started doing that in the last two decades.
Most uses of vision in industry are pretty low-profile---things like automatic verification of manufactured component quality---but are neither trivial nor ancient.
>>> - stunning advancements in computer architecture
>
>Eh? What stunning advancements? Most of the architectures in
> use today go all the way back to the early 70's.
You'd be a fool to think that a P4 is 70's technology just because an 8086 was designed a long time ago. Building a computer with modern lithography and 70's-era designs would be a laughable failure; caching, for example, has improved hugely since then, with significant work on parallelizing the multi-stage decoding, fetching, and execution of individual instructions with extensive branch prediction and speculative prefetching.
Part of the problem is, earth-shaking discoveries don't spring fully-formed from a computer scientist's brow. Each one is built up over years of painstaking work, carefully laying the groundwork necessary to get there.
That's the reason you can point to much earlier precursors of "recent" advances, and also the reason you can't point to truly recent ones---the research that's being done right now is too abstract and specialized for you to know about it, and by the time it's something that you'd have heard of, it's probably no longer new.
Essentially, your complaint is "why haven't I heard of all the new advances at the cutting edge of computer science???" My response is "why should we go out of our way to tell you what we're working on if you can't be bothered to look for yourself?"
You haven't heard because you haven't looked hard enough. The only one to blame for that is you.