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From Sputnik to the WWW, a History of ARPA
Ian Lamont writes "Next month is the 50th anniversary of the Sputnik launch, but it's not just the start of mankind's exploration of space that should be observed. The 'October surprise' also changed computing forever, thanks to the subsequent creation of the Advanced Research Projects Agency. J.C.R. Licklider, the first director of IT research at ARPA, catalyzed the invention of an astonishing array of IT, from computer graphics to microprocessors to the Internet ... and even an early 'electronic office.' However, the long-range vision that Licklider promoted at the agency is allegedly in danger, according to some observers quoted in the article: 'In the early years, ARPA was willing to fund things like artificial intelligence — take five years and see what happens,' [CMU Professor David Farber] says. 'Nobody cared whether you delivered something in six months. It was, "Go and put forth your best effort and see if you can budge the field." Now that's changed. It's more driven by, "What did you do for us this year?"' Former ARPA director Charles M. Herzfeld blames Congress and a new crop of 'wishy-washy' agency heads. DARPA's response: It still is investing heavily in technologies that may take years to come to market, such as universal language translation, realistic agent-based societal simulation environments, and photonic communications in a microprocessor having a theoretical maximum performance of 10 TFLOPS."
From industry to Academia the general trend to is to focus on smaller and smaller time frames to judge success. This myopic view is exemplified anytime anything about NASA comes out. People moan about money wasted that could be used for social programs or some ignorant rant about how NASA's funding could prevent world hunger. You can also see it in how companies now are interested only in looking good for the next quarter. Where they mortgage the future of a company just to see higher Quarterly returns. We all hear of how Company X has a banner year but lets go of 1/3 of their workforce before the 2nd quarter to show a even rosier quarter. Academia is now slowly converting into just an alternative corprate R&D lab. Long term basic research is getting harder to fund and you need buzz words like "string theory", "nano technology", "Quantum", and "Intelligent Design" to get any funding from the current Government.
There are so many things that are useful to know beyond what is immediately useful. If it was naught for the hundred of thinker toiling away on trivial problems we wouldn't have such a broad knowledge base in science. We'd have much better made Full plate armors, Sailing ships, rapiers, pots, cast iron cook ware, black plague repelling perfumes, and Iron Plowshares. Many of the really interesting and unique inventions came about form basic research into trivial things. We need to fund those. Arpa net used to be one of the ones who did this but a general mindset of "we need results this quarter" will hurt science and humanity in general.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
And the current hostility toward immigration and the hoops that foreign grad students and postdocs have to jump through isn't helping, either.
It's not hostility to immigration. It's illegal immigration. I think you would find that a lot of right wingers on the forefront of the illegal immigration charge have a lot of H1-B employees with engineering degrees wondering why they have to jump through so many hoops to be a citizen when evidentally a bunch of illiterate crop pickers get to be citizens after sneaking across the border.
I do recall that Bush's immigration bill would have raised the H1-B limit, AND, changed the requirements for legal entry to be stacked more along an educational and professional background, rather than, how poor an immigrant is, or how much family there is, as is the case today.
This is my sig.
DARPA is doing OK; they've been getting results. I've dealt with DARPA on and off since the 1980s, and I ran a DARPA Grand Challenge team. That was something that needed doing. DARPA had been funding robotics research since the 1960s without much to show for it that DoD could actually use.
The academic AI community needed some serious butt-kicking. CMU had been working on automatic driving since the 1980s, with very slow progress. Stanford AI had totally tanked. MIT AI was off on the behavior-based robots tangent, which had peaked in the early 1990s. Some of the old guys had to be shoved aside to get things moving again. That's now happened.
In the private sector, though, computer science research is almost dead. Google is focused on applications; they do a little theory, but not much. Microsoft did some good work; their big contribution was moving Bayesian statistics into the mainstream, something for which Bill Gates was directly responsible. Beyond that, there's not much. The DEC research centers are gone; HP Labs barely exists, PARC was dumped by Xerox and isn't doing much, Bell Labs is barely alive, and IBM Almaden was severely downsized. (I happened to be visiting IBM Almaden the day IBM exited the disk drive business. It was like a funeral.) Apple does little basic research any more. Sony SCEA diverted most of their research talent into dealing with the horrors of the PS3 programming problem.
Smart people aren't going into research any more. They go into startups. Or finance. The two best people on our DARPA Grand Challenge team went to hedge funds, where they did very well financially.
Speaking as someone in one of those long horizon projects, the issue is not what they are funding, but how the funding occurs.
Measuring progress is important and valuable, but many of these programs have very ruthless annual (or worse, more frequent) progress evaluations. How do you fund a graduate student when you might lose funding in 6 months? How do you keep your innovators interested if the regular evaluation hurdles are all consuming?
What I'm trying to say is that the pendulum has swung too far towards proving you are making progress. Would the Internet have occurred if the initial funding passed through today's type of evaluation hurdles?
And yes, I'm conciously posting AC for a reason.