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DARPA Issues Call For Computer Science Devotees
coondoggie writes "The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is looking for a few good university-based computer science researchers who might be interested in developing systems for the US military. The move is seen, in part anyway, as a way for the agency to win more hearts and minds of the advanced science community."
Call on Theo De Raadt
...or does DARPA not already have a MASSIVE amount of researchers under their wing?
Yes, but there's been a recent policy shift.
DARPA has, for the past several years, been trying to refocus away from academic research and more into "applied" (meaning, basically, private-sector) research.
This has not worked out so well, in a number of respects (both practical and pseudo-political) so DARPA is now moving back towards a more academia-friendly approach.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
Did you RTFA? These aren't job postings. You already have to have a very particular job. A mere PhD is not good enough, no you must be employed at a university as a junior faculty member and have received your PhD within the last 7 years. (Amazing how quickly an advanced degree becomes stale. Guess it would have been discriminatory to require that every participant be under the age of 40.) This DARPA program is a way for you to secure your tenured faculty position by bringing in DARPA money.
Nowadays there are so many new PhDs fighting for so few positions that it has become extremely competitive. Lot of new professors quickly lose their positions for not having done enough quality publishing. DARPA will have no trouble recruiting, and attaching all kinds of onerous strings. Before the 1970s, you could have your own lab before you turned 30. Not impossible today, but very, very hard. This is a big reason why universities have been able to get away with paying at least 20% less than industry. And why DARPA can push such arbitrary criteria. Maybe they're trying to help younger faculty with this restriction of no more than 7 years. Bar highly, highly competitive, more experienced faculty from participating. But it is easy to see a self-serving pandering to the pop-science idea that people are mentally sharpest and do their best thinking and work before the age of 50 or perhaps 40. They're also angling for the more desperate professors who still have to prove themselves, and will therefore supposedly work harder. They may also impose their unthinking assumptions of how research should be done, and demand "action plans", "deliverables", and a full accounting of hours worked, as if research was only another business process. This is consistent with what I have seen from military backing of research efforts. That DARPA has the luxury to play along with such notions is yet another sign of how bad it is out there.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"