In a move which almost inevitably will have long term effects on the US economy, DARPA, the Pentagon’s research body, has since 2001 cut almost in half its funding granted to purely academic research in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, according to university researchers. At the same time, its spending on computer science research has risen slightly, with the majority of the money now going to applied projects with short term payoffs, often with military or national security applications.

“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.

DARPA disputes the accusations:

The agency, which responded only in writing to questions, contended that the criticisms leveled by the advisory committee and other researchers were not accurate and that it had always supported a mix of longer- and shorter-term research. “The key is a focus on high-risk, high-payoff research,” Jan Walker, a Darpa spokeswoman, stated in an e-mail message. Given the threat from terrorism and the demands on troops in Iraq, she wrote, Darpa is rightly devoting more attention to “quick reaction” projects that draw on the fruits of earlier science and technology to produce useful prototypes as soon as possible.

Link

Related Comments (1)