DARPA COMES DOWN TO EARTH

There’s always been a ten­sion at Darpa, the Pentagon’s far-​​out research arm, between help­ing fight today’s bat­tles and fund­ing projects that might impact the war twenty years down the line… or go nowhere at all. Generals want the lat­est toys from the Defense Department’s answer to James Bond’s “Q.” But with­out Darpa’s day­dream­ing, there’d be no stealth fighter, and no Internet.
Back in 2003, the Senate Armed Services Committee was wor­ried enough about Darpa get­ting overly-​​practical that it launched an inves­ti­ga­tion into whether the agency had “raided” its basic research bud­get to finance “near-​​term goals.“
Now, the Times reports, Darpa is cut­ting its funds for “open-​​ended ‘blue sky’ research by the nation’s best com­puter sci­en­tists… in favor of financ­ing more clas­si­fied work and nar­rowly defined projects that promise a more imme­di­ate payoff.”

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…
“Virtually every aspect of infor­ma­tion tech­nol­ogy upon which we rely today bears the stamp of fed­er­ally spon­sored uni­ver­sity research,” said Ed Lazowska, a com­puter sci­en­tist at the University of Washington and co-​​chairman of the advi­sory panel. “The fed­eral gov­ern­ment is walk­ing away from this role, killing the goose that laid the golden egg.”

THERE’S MORE: Darpa may be invest­ing more in super-​​secret com­puter sci­ence research. But over­all, the agency’s pro­posed clas­si­fied bud­get has shrunk by over a third, a Congressional source tells Defense Tech.

April 2nd, 2005 | Money Money Money | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.