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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
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
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
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.
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!
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.
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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?
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.
Yes, because defense contractors are known for being punctual.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
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.
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.
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.
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