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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."
Since the whole .COM bust, technology has been slow moving. Doesn't come as a surprise funding will be cut on such either. Pretty sad unfortunately, but just look at the slowdown in any research, new products and innovation.
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
Obama is a twitter sock puppet
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.
This means they are going to use this money instead of fund the radically out of control social security right?
It's in serious need... They should get to that.
http://use.perl.org
Great! We didn't want to compete w/ India anyway...
[o]_O
I believe strongly that the feds should consolidate their IT into a department of Technology or IT. I know that the NIH (HHS), the NSF, the DoD and the DOE commonly fund IT research, but it often doesn't fit into their missions. Our gov't should support Technology development and infrastructure just like it supports health (HHS), transportation (DoT), Energy (DoE), Science (NSF), security (HS) and defense (DoD). Who is going to build the next public cyberinfrastructure if it isn't appropriate for the other departments?
Laboratree - Scientific collaboration based on OpenSocial.
all 3 Terminator movies in a row and clued in after a night of hard thinking that "Skynet v0.8" was too suspiciouly named to continue to v1.0.
The problem is that Computer Science hasn't advanced much since the 80's. All the core concepts have been long established, and precious little groundbreaking research has emerged. I hate to say it, but most of the valuable work being done today is at the commercial level. i.e. Building upon the CompSci foundations to create useful, real world products.
:-) Not that I begrudge the AI research. It's fascinating stuff and deserves to be done. Just don't expect any sort of immediate results.
The biggest area that I see research being useful is in artificial intelligence. There's so much that we;re still trying to comprehend about emergent behaviors. Unfortunately, AI is very much like Fusion. It's only 20 years away (for the next century).
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency at the Pentagon - which has long underwritten open-ended "blue sky" research by the nation's best computer scientists - is sharply cutting such spending at universities, researchers say, in favor of financing more classified work and narrowly defined projects that promise a more immediate payoff.
Government Officials state that this was the same justification for war with Iraq, and opposed to allowing UN inspections which were working to continue.
http://use.perl.org
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...
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
While it sucks for the CS people in the Pentagon, it just makes sense right now to divert money to things that will benefit the troops in Afganistan and Iraq. I'm sure that some of the CS projects help soliders on the ground, but as we know, 95% of IT projects aren't completed on time. So why not deliver better weapons, vehicles, body armor, and other technology that has the capability of saving lives right now.
Once we're completely out of Iraq and Afganistan, hopefully they'll put the money back into long term research.
You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life. --Winston Churchill
Report Says Pentagon Spending on Weapons to Soar
By TIM WEINER
Published: April 1, 2005
A new report by the Government Accountability Office warned yesterday that the costs of the Pentagon's arsenal could soar by hundreds of billions of dollars over the next decade.
The Pentagon has said it is building more than 70 major weapons systems at a cost of at least $1.3 trillion. But the Pentagon generally understates the time and money spent on weapons programs by 20 to 50 percent, the new report said.
A survey of 26 major weapons systems showed cost overruns of $42.7 billion, or 41.9 percent, in their research and development phase.
Last year, the overall projected cost for those same 26 systems rose $68.6 billion, or 14.3 percent, to $548.9 billion, from $480.3 billion in the last 12 months.
A wider assessment of 54 major weapons systems showed that a majority are costing more and taking longer to develop than planned.
While Defense Department officials questioned details of some assessments of the major weapons systems, they did not dispute the report's overall conclusions.
The Government Accountability Office, the nonpartisan budget watchdog for Congress, singled out several programs.
The research and development costs for the Army's Future Combat Systems, a program to build 18 sets of networked weapons and military robots for 15 combat brigades, have increased 51 percent in the last year, the report said. Army officials say the program could cost as much as $145 billion, or $53 billion more than first advertised.
The Joint Strike Fighter program, which is supposed to build 2,458 planes for the Air Force, the Navy, the Marine Corps and American allies, will cost $244.8 billion, or about $99.6 million for each aircraft, the accountability office reported this month. Four years ago, the program was supposed to cost $183.6 billion for 2,866 planes, or about $64 million for each.
The F-22 fighter jet program will cost $63.8 billion for 178 aircraft, or more than $356 million a plane, the office reported earlier this month. Twenty years ago, when the program began, the Air Force planned to buy about 760 F-22's at $35 million each.
A set of five surveillance satellites, called the Space-Based Infrared System-High, will cost $9.9 billion, not $3.9 billion as originally planned eight years ago, an increase of $1.2 billion a satellite, according to the new report.
The report also pointed to a Navy missile called the Extended Range Guided Munition. The program began seven years ago. Still in the test phase, it has cost $598.4 million. Seven years ago, it was supposed to produce thousands of weapons at a cost of $45,000 each. Today the price per missile is estimated at $191,000.
The watchdog agency, in scores of reports produced since the end of the cold war, has consistently explained why so many weapons cost so much more than promised.
"Performance shortfalls, schedule delays and cost increases," the office has said, are "the logical consequences" of the weapons-buying culture.
Congress and the Pentagon "create incentives for pushing programs and encouraging undue optimism, parochialism and other compromises of good judgment," according to the office. In that culture, "persistent performance problems, cost growth, schedule slippage," and other failures "cannot all be attributed to errors, lack of expertise or unforeseeable events."
They are instead "embedded as the undesirable, but apparently acceptable, consequence of the process," the office has said. "These problems persist not because they are overlooked or underregulated, but because they enable more programs to survive and thus more needs to be met."
David A. Walker, the comptroller general of the United States, who oversees the accountability office, told Congress in testimony submitted with the report yesterday that that the traditional "buy it before you try it" practices that have pervaded the weapons-buying culture ar
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.
/. 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.
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
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.
On the plus side, by the time we fight the Mongolian Khanate in 2037 we'll have the best network firewalls in the world. :)
Stop learning! Only you can prevent esoterrorism.
... in favor of projects that will yield short-term military results.
If they can predict beforehand what a project will yield, then it's not research; it's engineering. So they should change their name from DARPA to DAPA.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Here's a link a link where no registration is required.
People! When you submit a link to the NYT use the New York Times Link Generator!
We don't need the military to drive computer innovation..we're doing fine.
This reminds me of the time the patent office was closed in the 19th century because someone proclaimed that everything that could be invented, had been invented. This is very short signed. The number of advances from DARPA research is quite impressive. Many top CS schools get quite a bit of money from DARPA. I don't know how they'll make up this shortfall. Of all the things to cut from the government budget, this is one of the worst. I'm not going to mention the B-word but how many stupid decisions is this administration going to make. How about we cut some of the congressional perks? Or any of the other 9000 things the federal government wastes on every year. Software is one of our few exporting industries, and now we are cutting its funding too. Not the end of the world, but still not a good thing.
"Those that start by burning books, will end by burning men."
So here's my question: how many Slashdot users are going to whine here about DARPA not giving out enough research money and then wander over to DailyKos and whine there about how the Bush administration has brought about the largest budget deficits in US history?
And how many people will post arguements that are entirely nonsensical.
They aren't cutting the cost. They are redirecting it.
AND!
I assure you that this funding is no where near the funding of the Iraqi war.
Which had nothing to do with 9/11.
So Bush made a choice to attack Iraq, gave us justification that at best was terrible intelligence and at worst was a bold faced lie.
Free money doesn't come without a cost to something else.
Exactly, The cost of the Iraq war is not only lives, but could fund social security and medicare quite nicely.
http://use.perl.org
Aside from Xerox's 64 bit MAC address which was shelved as the basis for IP addresses, there was another standard promoted by a group of companies from Apple to Atari to Western Electric/Bell Labs to Packet Cable to Knight-Ridder circa 1982 which consisted of an unsegmented system identifier and object identifier combined in an 64 bit address -- the SID growing from the LSB up and the OID growing from the MSB down.
It would have been a very different and far superior world if they had not been stopped by DARPA's idiots.
Seastead this.
In these times of budget shortfalls and spiralling national debt, money has to be saved somewhere. Things with unknown results a long way in the future are an obvious target.
Does it suck? Sure. But America has shown in elections it doesn't want European-style high taxes to pay for stuff, and when you can't pay for stuff, you can't have stuff.
Blah blah economy blah blah free market forces blah blah alledgedly unpatriotic intellectuals blah blah small government blah blah starve the beast blah blah 9-11 blah blah blah.
Michael
"Goodness me, how unlike the FBI to abuse the trust of the American public." -- The Onion
Not Customer Service.
Why isn't it an editor's requirement to define every TLA in a headline?
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
Then eat them.
KFG
Without even DARPA funding pure research, the US will really be screwed. AT&T, while it was a monopoly, had enough money that it did a lot of rather open ended research. That's gone. XEROX had the PARC for a while. That's gone. We got wonderful benefits from all the research they did for the space program, and now that's nearly gone.
Pure research is what makes for major innovations. It's what keeps a nation on top. The fact the the US invented the internet is one of the major reasons that the US is still so dominant in the IT field. If the US keeps funding some open-ended goals, it might manage to stay on top through these recessions due to inventing something the rest of the world just doesn't have. With the way things are now, the US will have trouble competing against India and China if it sticks to the same jobs that everyone else does.
This is another moronic desicions i have seen come from the current US administration in the field of scientific research. ... Which given the current administrations track record is not a positive sign for world peace . .
What worrys me most is the fact they are diverting the funding into short term yield millitary research project
The 20th centuary can be rememberd for many many things and i think DARPA deserves alot of respect for some of the CS projects it funded , however near totaly ignoring the long term benefits of CS research projects in favour of short term gains will just lead to problems further down the line
I was angry enough when the US gouvernemt decided to halt funding to Stem-cell research and other things , now here is another nail.
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
With advances in communications technology, our Defense Department can outsource this sort of research to universities in countries where the cost is much lower. Countries like Iran, Yemen and North Korea are on the forefront of nuclear defense research, and would be happy to accept our funds for these sorts of purposes.
The CB App. What's your 20?
2. To where did Ramzi Yousef flee after the first WTC attack? Iraq.
3. Where did Zarqawi go to hide after he got chased out of Afghanistan after 9/11/2001? Iraq.
In what country is Salman Pak, a training camp where teams of four or five terrorists were taught to hijack civilian airliners with small knives? Iraq.
Go ahead, keep fooling yourself that there was no connection between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. Just because Al Qaeda is based on fanatical Islam doesn't mean someone like Saddam Hussein couldn't use them.
Outraged? Perhaps you may be outraged, but you slander individuals when you attribute them for saying things they did not say. Nowhere in the article did I read that anyone was outraged.
The military has decided not to put as much money into basic CS research as they did in the past. "Basic CS research" means theoretical research. By its nature, that means the Pentagon cannot turn around in 3 years and produce a tangible return on its investment. How dare those officials decide to not spend money that's not directly related to killing people or keeping personnel from getting killed! How dare those officials prevent foreign enemies from directly profiting from US funded military research! Why not attack your private sector employer? Most of them have been cutting back funding on basic research.
It certainly is unfortunate. But if you think basic CS research is critical to the US's well being (or more likely, your well being), bitch out your congressman for not funding research, not the military for doing its job. (Good for you for getting a CS degree, but the world does not owe you a living.)
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
April 1 - The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency at the Pentagon - which has long underwritten open-ended "blue sky" research by the nation's best computer scientists - is sharply cutting such spending at universities, researchers say, in favor of financing more classified work and narrowly defined projects that promise a more immediate payoff.
Hundreds of research projects supported by the agency, known as Darpa, have paid off handsomely in recent decades, leading not only to new weapons, but to commercial technologies from the personal computer to the Internet. The agency has devoted hundreds of millions of dollars to basic software research, too, including work that led to such recent advances as the Web search technologies that Google and others have introduced.
The shift away from basic research is alarming many leading computer scientists and electrical engineers, who warn that there will be long-term consequences for the nation's economy. They are accusing the Pentagon of reining in an agency that has played a crucial role in fostering America's lead in computer and communications technologies.
"I'm worried and depressed," said David Patterson, a computer scientist at the University of California, Berkeley who is president of the Association of Computing Machinery, an industry and academic trade group. "I think there will be great technologies that won't be there down the road when we need them."
University researchers, usually reluctant to speak out, have started quietly challenging the agency's new approach. They assert that Darpa has shifted a lot more work in recent years to military contractors, adopted a focus on short-term projects while cutting support for basic research, classified formerly open projects as secret and placed new restrictions on sharing information.
This week, in responding to a query from the staff of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Darpa officials acknowledged for the first time a shift in focus. They revealed that within a relatively steady budget for computer science research that rose slightly from $546 million in 2001 to $583 million last year, the portion going to university researchers has fallen from $214 million to $123 million.
The agency cited a number of reasons for the decline: increased reliance on corporate research; a need for more classified projects since 9/11; Congress's decision to end controversial projects like Total Information Awareness because of privacy fears; and the shift of some basic research to advanced weapons systems development.
In Silicon Valley, executives are also starting to worry about the consequences of Darpa's stinting on basic research in computer science.
"This has been a phenomenal system for harnessing intellectual horsepower for the country," said David L. Tennenhouse, a former Darpa official who is now director of research for Intel. "We should be careful how we tinker with it."
University scientists assert that the changes go even further than what Darpa has disclosed. As financing has dipped, the remaining research grants come with yet more restrictions, they say, often tightly linked to specific "deliverables" that discourage exploration and serendipitous discoveries.
Many grants also limit the use of graduate students to those who hold American citizenship, a rule that hits hard in computer science, where many researchers are foreign.
The shift at Darpa has been noted not just by those researchers directly involved in computing technologies, but by those in other fields supported by the agency.
"I can see they are after deliverables, but the unfortunate thing is that basic research gets squeezed out in the process," said Wolfgang Porod, director of the Center for Nano Sc
wot no sig
Modding up to 5 a 15-second cut and paste post is simply ridiculous.
You moderators ought to be ashamed of yourselves.
Hopelessly pedantic since 1963.
> Leading computer scientists, such as David
> Patterson, the head of the ACM are outraged and
> worried.
Everyone who's budget is cut is outraged and worried.
--
Toby
This is another step towards the U.S. becoming military, unproductive Rome which used the prosperity from peaceful, enlightened Greece to bring misery and death to its people.
Greece produced a wealth of culture. From Plato and Aristotle's philosophy on governments we derive our idea of the republic, where every individual's rights are important, and democracy, where the people rule. From Euclid and Pythagoras we know the principles of geometry and that the earth is round. These were discovered around 300-500BC.
Then the Romans came and put an end to this period of amazing discovery. It would be a millennium before the Rennaisance and science would be born. In Rome, everything was put in terms of fighting war. Math was only useful if it could be directly used in battle. It was taught to students in forms like "a phalanx eight deep and twenty wide consists of how many warriors?" People were not encouraged to learn for learning's sake.
Let's not make the same mistake.
That is why some CS researchers are upset. DARPA may be responsible for the internet, but what other important research has come to the CS world as a result? Examples please. If you say TIA then I don't want their money funding such research. Did Gnutella come from DARPA research? No. P2P might just be seen as a tool for infringment, but it has potential for much more. It is the basis of the internet. It helps route around censorship and "top level" control. The internet doesn't need DARPA anymore. Most of the new breakthroughs in CS are gonna come from some teenage hacker and his peers, not to mention those who make the hardware and software that the internet runs on. The pentagon wouldn't know 4th generation warfare if it bit them in the ass. And it is. The future of warfare is the men on the ground. Not some high falutin' computer system. Leave the CS research to computer people, not the DoD. They need to figure out how to prevent politicians from getting them involved in quagmires.
... When you're not at war, keep your techies on the payroll doing whatever will keep 'em interested, but when you're at war, refocus.
The US is at war. Get used to it.
If you don't like the strings that are attached with the money, don't accept the money. Theo didn't, which is fine, and his posse whined about it somewhat, which is annoying but also fine.
Besides, given how much stuff DoD is buying COTS, it looks like private industry and academia can handle 'pure' research anyway, and if you're gonna fight a number of wars, give away tax cuts for the rich and free viagra for the elderly, you gotta find the money somewhere...
The cost has been worth the rewards.
So you would give up your child's life to secure Fallujah?
So you condone lies as justification for the poorer class of America to go fight for what you deem important.
Social Security and Medicare cannot come before security.
Not only should it come before security, WHAT ABOUT THE IRAQ WAR IS SECURITY?
The security of the USA and the world has been better now that Saddam is in jail and a free democratic government in Iraq is formed.
Wrong, the security of the US is obviously worse because of this. You are completely wrong.
The dominoes are falling in the Middle East, and draining the swamp in Iraq will prove to be one of the most brilliant moves ever.
That's why Bush only takes credit for it when who comes into power fits his agenda.
http://use.perl.org
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).
Slashdot. It's Not For Common Sense
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.
Oh no. The US military will not own emerging internet technology. Hang on, I need to break out the kleenex.
Meanwhile FPGAs have displaced DSPs, FFTs and are overtaking CPUs for embedded applications. There are even rumblesof FPGAs seriously impacting the HPC market. Times are a changin so I'm not surprised to see traditional CPU-based CS research being downsized in response to this paradigm shift. Perhaps we need to take VIVA seriously just as Cray, SGI, Starbridge Systems, SRC, Nallatech and others are doing.
What's past is NOT ALWAYS prologue for the future!
You are saying correctly, among other things, "...assuming that population and income projections hold true." That's a significant assumption over 30 years, as it includes the economic behaviour of people who are not even born yet. It's too early to panic about it, and certainly better to spend money on general, "blue sky" research in the (realistic) expectation that some of it will pay off so we can afford to fee all the old folk then. People like me. Assuming those yet-to-be-born can be convinced it's a good idea.
What keeps me going is my inertia.
Since starting work at NSF supporting the CISE (Computer and Information Science and Engineering) Directorate almost 4 years ago I can tell you from first hand experience that their workload has exploded. Make no mistake, the amount of money CISE has gotten has significantly increased (though probably not to the extent that other agencies have cut basic research). The scientists and staff there are working their butts off to review and fund grants. I've sat in on meetings listening to VERY smart people who are "plugged" in to what is going on.
There are some things Scientists/researchers can do to help things along (not money related).
1. Learn how to write a grant! (Use proper English, be clear about what you are trying to accomplish).
2. When given the opportunity, accept a request to become a grant reviewer (called "panelist" in NSF speak)
3. Don't get all bent out of shape when your grant gets turned down! Like submitting short stories to magazines for publication the majority don't make it. Go back to the drawing board, check your EGO! Listen to people who don't like your idea and see what can be done.
4. Write your congressman (duh...everybody should do that!) and support more money for NSF! (Well...that's money related but you get the point)
He obviously put some effort into removing any paragraph breaks. Apparently that's worth a +1 Informative or two nowadays...
People will pass up steak once a week, for crap every day.
Meanwhile, Bush is handing $1B to superstition societies. Because prayer research is keeping us safe, and mandatory investment by the whole population, regardless of personal superstition inclinations, has such a strong return in untaxed income.
--
make install -not war
High tech is mature - why spend on basic research?
l
High tech is currently mature? I'm sure our children and grandchildren will disagree if we give them the chance.
We should spend on basic research because it provides the foundations for the applied research. Sure, we might have enough "basic material" to go on for a while, but eventually, we're going to need more. We could wait until we need to do more basic research, but there will be a delay and then we'll stagnate for a while. Rather than stagnate, let's keep momentum, or at least try to not stagnate as much.
You're suggesting we live off the fruits of our parents and grandparents basic research labor while not contributing anything for our children and grandchildren.
Do you listen to CDs? Do you ever store data on CDs? Do you watch DVDs? Do you ever store data on DVDs?
If so, then you benefit from basic research that was done over the last few hundred years. If for nothing else, we should spend on basic research for the same reasons that we appreciate people having done basic research in the past: basic research provides the foundations for applied research which provides the deliverables.
Anybody who questions the value of basic research should read this:
http://camel.math.ca/vault/future/moody/moody.htm
If everybody just bought off-the-shelf components instead of trying to come up with something new, we'd still be listening to music on a wax cylinder and watching B&W silent movies, or worse.
Personally, I'm very glad SONY and Philips decided to not continue buying off-the-shelf.
...funded by DARPA. A search of the TRN archive returns 235 stories from the last five years that include the word DARPA and the phrase "computer science." The same search of Google Scholar turns up 18,200 research papers.
Eric Smalley
Or maybe he's just a whiney bitch that needs to fuck off.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
Meanwhile, the Pentagon will be spending hugely more money on more expensive weapons. Because of all the armies poised against us, now that we've got that low-rent Cold War out of the way. Why pay for communications research during an infowar (like the TerrorWar), when we can buy missile defense systems against the departed Soviet Union?
--
make install -not war
Carly Fiornia's latest carrer move is with DARPA.
Ok, there seem to be quite a few people saying "The U.S. is at war, get over it" and "The 'D' in DARPA stands for Defence". Did anyone even try reading the article? They specifically say that basic research funding was not reduced one iota during the Vietnam War.
Why is the Bush Administration so intent on driving our economy into the ground?
[o]_O
Don't tell me about prior art - it doesn't stop the USPTO from granting patents, and it doesn't help overturn them unless you spend more than the royalties on lawyers.
I'm not sure that the actual research is changing. It's just that instead of it being public, it is being kept as military "trade secrets" (i.e. classified) so they don't have to deal with the patent leeches.
What does this mean for ReiserFS? The project is currently being funded by DARPA.
I like CS professors, but there's something damned precious about someone who seems to actually believe that the government should just give him/her money without asking for any deliverable. And, if the government somehow cuts off the stream of money, they have a right to bitch about it.
Just because most of the foundations of computer science have been well understood for some time doesn't mean there aren't many problems worth solving that still exist.
When you see changes in govenment funding of high-tech research like this, you can go back in history of ther super powers, for instance, this mirrors the gradual wind-down and collapse of the british empire. The british empire had the biggest high-tech navy in the early 20th century and the competitive pressures brought on by other competing super powers of the day, and the pressures of fighting the first world war was too much to sustain this empire. The first things to go when an empire is winding down, is the government funding for basic science and applied sciences (both of which are big requirements of military industrial complexes). The fact that a lot of high tech that a country needs to grow its future can only be funded by govenment (industry is too short sighted in most western countries because their profit models don't support such long term thinking). It can be seen that the asian countries (in this century) will eclipse the United State and the western world in economic growth in high-tech such as biotech, nanotech and the development of super AI's etc, all of which will have massive applications in future computer and keeping people perpetually young (ie: biotech developments in stem cell research and making of custom stem cells from scratch and nanotech). Of course, all these technologies can have military applications too (so we will find better ways of blowing eache other up (boring)). If you cut back on basic research, you lose the long-term (25 year or more) race to stay ahead of the technological curve.
You can't cut Counter Strike research!
What will I play now?
The U.S. Navy has for a while been working under this new model: focus on short-term-beneficial research rather than the longer-term stuff. (This applies to all Naval research, not just computer science.)
I've spoken with a sponsor in the Office of Naval Research (ONR). He said that that they're starting to realize the weakness of this approach, and expect to ramp-up longer term research investments in the next few years.
Perhaps the same thing will happen with DARPA-funded research in a while.
I don't see how VP Cheney will allow this to happen. Without DARPA doing basic research, the Internet would not exist as we know it. And without the Internet, no eBay. And without eBay, our economy would truly be in the dumps.
In software production, oursourcing is a mistake begat by a mistake, not a solution to the slovenly state of US developers. Indeed, the US has a lot of developer talent that companies refuse to hire because, in the minds of accountants, it makes no sense to hire one expensive and skilled developer when they could hire three cheap inexperienced developers at a lower cost.
This roots itself in the false assumption that three newbies can do the work of one skilled developer. The truth is this is almost always not the case. But projects keep failing, and accountants and managers busy themselves by missing the point and hiring more people more cheaply. I mean, the problem was they spent too much, not that they did too little.
The assumption that high level managers love to make is that 90% of all workers are equal in their capacity for toil in the proverbial salt mines, and the other 10% should be moved into management. It's a horribly wrong and misguided assumption, but it's what's lead us to the near slave-wage practices of visa'd immigrants and the absurd situation with outsourcing (which has backfired badly). Big companies are floundering on IT work, and floudering badly.
Meanwhile, American based Software amd Research and industry is enjoying something of a grass-roots revival. Lots of small, agile companies are popping up making focused products that no big software haus can possibly compete with. American research is more and more about the working demo than the paper (although when appropriate, the Paper is almighty).
Even better for American research, we've got compaies doing it privately but publicly disclosing the results. Yes, Avaya, I'm looking at you and giving a big thumbs up.
You're right though, that the destiny of the American Software Industry is at a turning point. Either we make it or break it at this point. Big companies need to make the jump to small, agile software units. Open Source and Agile Development are making big inroads in this, and these techniques are an American invention.
At the same time, American universities are having this huge influx of foreign talent and these folks are realizing that if you're bright, now is the time to make a startup! It's like we've finally hit the point in time when the ".com bubble" should have begun to form. We have the tech now, we understand the practices. All we need to do is shake off the dogmatic policies of corporate fear and do what Americans are notorious for doing best, "Getting it done."
Slashdot. It's Not For Common Sense
all I have to say, that *its' about fucking time* someone made it a requirement to use US citizens in technology programs.
Now maybe we can have TAs teaching American students who American undergrads can understand.
Then we can start a virtuous cycle of having American students accomplish things, instead of having our grad schools going back to China and Pakistan whenever the mood suits them.
American CS Professors should be *ashamed* they have not put the interests of the USA first by hiring only foreign TAs. At least whoever changed this policy will see that this will make for a stronger american workforce and stronger US citizen technology graduates.
In a global economy, America has *got* to take care of its own. If not, we are soooo fucked, because everyone else (chinese, indian, paki, etc.) do exactly this.
"I can see they are after deliverables, but the unfortunate thing is that basic research gets squeezed out in the process," said Wolfgang
In a way, DARPA is right to cut funding to academia. Over the last forty years, scientists have made a complete mess of programming. We now have a world full of incompatible operating systems and programming languages, a veritable tower of Babel. Yet, software is as failure prone as ever. Software disaster stories are now making the evening news on a regular basis. Does academia take the blame, even partially? Don't count on it. They've invented every excuse in the book, from "there is no silver bullet" to "we don't have enough funding." It's sickening.
I say, unless the computer science community gets off its spoiled collective ass and comes up with a solution to the software reliability problem, it deserves to get its funding decreased. Drastically.
I haven't quite figured out what that something is, but I'm sure someone will come up w/ something.
[o]_O
I'd always try to get Protoss carriers as fast as possible, but usually I got wiped out first by a zealot rush. Maybe your analogy is more apt than you realize.
Consider that, even when the pentagon is funding open ended research, the deciders on how to grant the funding, in the back of their minds, know that they work for the military, and will act accordingly, however subconscious their motivations may be.
It would seem to be a lot more sensible to have an organization with broader goals to decide on how to fund open ended science.
This really isn't anything new. The ARPA/DARPA that created ARPAnet and a lot of the early advances in computing hasn't really existed since the mid to late 70's. At that point the there was a demand that projects return usable results within 2-3yrs. I don't know what it has been like for the last 20yrs, but unless there was a change towards more openended research I don't see how this is much different.
Yes, I did a cursory look at the search results in google scholar. Just because it has the acronym DARPA in it with the phrase "computer science" doesn't mean it was DARPA funded research. Therefore your claim of 18,200 research papers is not an accurate count of DARPA funded research papers. Unless you count my using the internet in research as being "DARPA funded" because I used something [the internet] that DARPA research funds helped develop.
A *huge* fraction of U.S. DoD money has been diverted from research to fund the war in Iraq.
It's possible that, once we manage to lose the cowboy mentality, the longer-term research will resume.
Don't underestimate the cost of the war in Iraq on the DoD's normal operations.
Very little has come out of comp. science research in universities and research institutes in the last few years. The cutting edge is being driven by consumer goods.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Computer Science is just another science like Maths and Physics. In Science, researchers try to discover *generalizations* and *laws* that are like *ultimate truth* by means of experimentation and validation. Maths and Physics have discovered those *laws* and hence people are now more interested in applying them to different fields e.g. biophysics, nanotech etc. similary basic research in CS has peaked the moores law and hence researchers need to focus more on the applications like Bioinformatics, GIS etc Darpa has made a timely move to focus more on application of the technology rather than invest further on basic science which infact is the job of NSF like agencies.
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
Do we have control outside the "green zone" yet? As Rumsfeld said, we are spending billions, while they (terrorists) are spending millions. Read up on 4th generation warfare. Then tell me we are revolutionizing warfare. At least from a cost to performance ratio. "Machines don't fight wars, people do, and they use their minds." -Col John R. Boyd
A lot of that research came out of the Strategic Computing Initiative that was part of the Reagan administration's Strategic Defense Initiative (aka Star Wars.) Mainframes and PCs could be funded quite adequately by the private sector (though some fraction of that was selling mainframes or mainframe-based services to government bureaucracies as well as to the real world). But developing speculative weird architectures is much harder to get funded in the real world, and SDI needed immense amounts of computing capability to solve control problems and image processing as well as to deal with the fact that efficient targeting turned out to be an NP-hard problem.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
That's not entirely true, because we're also mostly getting the wealthier students from other countries, so there are very bright students from around the world who can't afford to come to the US to study - but the wealthier students could usually afford a better-than-average education before they get to grad school as well, so that helps increase their quality.
Of course, there's the question of why so many of the best schools are in the US; there are also outstanding schools in England and continental Europe (and in lots of other places, but American snobbery mostly doesn't recognize them :-), and an Oxford or Cambridge education is still just as good and just as high a reputation even though the American empire has mostly supplanted the British empire, and I assume that the Sorbonne is still as good now as when my grandfather went there. I suspect a lot of it is not just the quality of the school, but the relevance to the modern economy, and people around the world are following the money just as people around the US do (and until recently, it was here.) And universities are self-reinforcing institutions - if you've got a lot of good people there, that tends to improve the quality of the education, and the reputation of the school, so more good people get there, and the university gets to keep the best of them, increasing the extent to which that improves the quality of the education...
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
And most of the "great scientific advancement" coming out of the Japanese MITI bureaucracies funding their research institutions and Fifth Generation Computing project has turned out to have been better Public Relations than actual science. You haven't seen them take back the computer industry. All that Artificial Intelligence research has been pretty much fruitless (though AI suffers from the problem that any time anybody there develops something actually useful, everybody says "that's not Really AI, that's just {pattern matching, text-to-speech, etc.}") and probably more useful AI-like research has been developed to make kick-ass games than for any practical applications.
That's not to say that the US isn't in deep deep economic trouble, because it is. Don't just blame us boomers for hanging out and having too few kids, though - if you want to blame boomers, blame the Bush Administration for running up huge debts they won't be in office to have to pay back, and for putting out bogus statistics about Social Security (which *is* bankrupt, and would be helped radically by private investment, just not the way the Bush League is proposing, and which will be cutting back benefits radically just about the time I would have been retiring, except that my pension will also be cutting back radically if it still exists at all.) The right solution for Social Security's problems starts with not only doing honest statistics, but also with not running up rabidly increasing debt.
The Clinton Administration got away with their economic difficulties partly by having a major economic boom underneath them, and partly by refinancing the US's long-term high-interest debt with short-term low-interest debt, and partly by having a Congress that was a different political party that shot down all the expensive new stuff they *wanted* to do. The Bush Administration hasn't had any of those advantages, so they've been able to irresponsibly drag us deeper into debt.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Cost-Plus was a great scam, but one thing it did was meant that the government could engage in technically risky projects developing things that nobody in the world really knew how to develop, because they were basically taking all the risk, so they could get people to work on them. During the 80s, especially the late 80s and especially after Gramm-Rudman, when the government was being pushed towards being "fiscally responsible" or at least accountable, what happened was that they tried to push most of the risk onto contractors. The old system meant that the 80-20 rule usually got you the 80% that was useful, and part of the 20% of speculative stuff, so you'd end up with 85-90% of the original objectives, and kill it off at 100-120% of the cost, and sometimes you could do something useful with the speculative stuff as well. Under the new regime, contractors couldn't really risk that - they were tending to be forced into fixed-cost bids for things when that 20% of ill-defined requirements didn't have a fixed scope or workload or success probability, so they had to either refuse to work on things, or get very aggressive about negotiating scope and finding other ways to extract money out of it, but it was tough to do anything creative - things became excessively bureaucratic.
Another problem was that the Feds, especially the DoD, kept increasing the number of mandatory features without realizing the speculatory nature of them. So it wasn't just fault-tolerant OR cryptographically secure - it was fault-tolerant AND cryptographically secure AND GOSIP-compliant (the OSI protocol stack stuff) AND B1-secure (even though the researchers only barely knew how to do B1 or B2 Orange Book Security, and requiring GOSIP meant you were in Red Book territory) AND written in Ada, of course, AND POSIX-compliant, including the new real-time POSIX features that weren't solidified yet. And it had to be Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) equipment, because that was how you contained costs and prevented businesses from making the Feds pay for all their new speculative development work. While I ran into the worst excesses of that tendency with NASA projects, it was almost as bad for the FAA and the Treasury Department (on desktop-PC-plus-server bids) and even State Department communication networks.
The FAA also tended to require that everything be compatible with every other piece of equipment the FAA had ever deployed, whether than equipment was documented or not or even had cable connectors that anybody made any more, much less knew the protocols for, and they needed far more nines worth of reliability than anything in the commercial world, because if airplanes crash into each other, it's their ass politically. I worked on one FAA project where my company was a subcontractor to the bidders who were the lucky ones that lost - IBM were the poor bastards who won, and burned through billions of their own dollars as well as the FAA's before the project got canned years later.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
If we just outsource the work to India, the budget cuts can be absorbed without loss in productivity.
Vote for Pedro
You can run with the equivalent of name servers that tell you the current best (QOS) routes given a particular system address.
The big failure of the DARPA guys was to presume that the hardware capabilities of the routers they were running with during the early days of IP was not going to scale along with the network. It did but by then we were stuck with their god-damned network class structures.
Seastead this.
How about Google and Akamai? Both were---to the extent of my knowledge---basic research that turned out to be immensely useful. Both are now woven deeply into the fabric of the internet---I'm pretty sure you've used both today---and neither is all that old.
That you don't know about research results doesn't mean they're not there.
Where will new innovations like riot shields and the galil come from?
Getting funding for the breakthrough research that created among other things the internet, is exactly what Gore (somewhat clumsy) pointed out that he had done while in Congress. Funny ironi that the present government is now "lead" by the the guy who seemed to make his whole election campaign back in 2000 on misrepresenting Gore's remark, and that this government lacks the vision of Al Gore to continue to fund this important research.
--- guns don't kill people, people with guns kill people ---
You committed yourself to wasting precious time when you came to /. in the first place, man. Besides, it wasn't irrelevant, only TANGENTIAL. Hughes Missile Systems was almost totally DoD/DARPA funded, so that story could perhaps be construed as anecdotal rebuttal to the contention that universities waste more DoD money than corps do. Besides, isn't the amusement value of the mental image of a building full of angry 1970's engineers with black-framed glasses, wide ties, and sideburns, standing on chairs hanging paper and cardboard contraptions from air vents worth the "precious time" you spent?
Now this post does indeed constitute a totally irrelevant waste of precious time.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Indeed? Seriously timothy, shame on you. Science is important as a basic part of our culture. Not for us to accomplish goals, but to make a life with rigorous and joyous curiosity more worth living. Steps like this simply devalue our culture and quality of life. Whether this event is cause or effect in the devaluation doesn't really matter, it's part of a cycle that bodes poorly for all of us.
because of the war.
And there's a push, it seems, from the highest levels to really trim everything.
They are part of the Deparement of Defense, their primary mission, as is the primary mission of all other parts of the DoD, is to provide for the national security of the United States via military operations, or the support thereof.
Cutting back other things to focus on the primary mission is exactly what they should do.
If you are going to criticize this move, criticize it based on the DARPA mission. If you think the extra stuff they did was important enough to be funded by the feds, contact your congresscritters and tell them you think an agency should be stood up to fund such research.