Pentagon to Significantly Cut CS Research 408
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."
free registration blah blah blah (Score:0, Informative)
Well... (Score:5, Informative)
Pentagon Spending on Weapons to Soar (Score:2, Informative)
Report Says Pentagon Spending on Weapons to Soar
By TIM WEINER
Published: April 1, 2005
A new report by the Government Accountability Office warned yesterday that the costs of the Pentagon's arsenal could soar by hundreds of billions of dollars over the next decade.
The Pentagon has said it is building more than 70 major weapons systems at a cost of at least $1.3 trillion. But the Pentagon generally understates the time and money spent on weapons programs by 20 to 50 percent, the new report said.
A survey of 26 major weapons systems showed cost overruns of $42.7 billion, or 41.9 percent, in their research and development phase.
Last year, the overall projected cost for those same 26 systems rose $68.6 billion, or 14.3 percent, to $548.9 billion, from $480.3 billion in the last 12 months.
A wider assessment of 54 major weapons systems showed that a majority are costing more and taking longer to develop than planned.
While Defense Department officials questioned details of some assessments of the major weapons systems, they did not dispute the report's overall conclusions.
The Government Accountability Office, the nonpartisan budget watchdog for Congress, singled out several programs.
The research and development costs for the Army's Future Combat Systems, a program to build 18 sets of networked weapons and military robots for 15 combat brigades, have increased 51 percent in the last year, the report said. Army officials say the program could cost as much as $145 billion, or $53 billion more than first advertised.
The Joint Strike Fighter program, which is supposed to build 2,458 planes for the Air Force, the Navy, the Marine Corps and American allies, will cost $244.8 billion, or about $99.6 million for each aircraft, the accountability office reported this month. Four years ago, the program was supposed to cost $183.6 billion for 2,866 planes, or about $64 million for each.
The F-22 fighter jet program will cost $63.8 billion for 178 aircraft, or more than $356 million a plane, the office reported earlier this month. Twenty years ago, when the program began, the Air Force planned to buy about 760 F-22's at $35 million each.
A set of five surveillance satellites, called the Space-Based Infrared System-High, will cost $9.9 billion, not $3.9 billion as originally planned eight years ago, an increase of $1.2 billion a satellite, according to the new report.
The report also pointed to a Navy missile called the Extended Range Guided Munition. The program began seven years ago. Still in the test phase, it has cost $598.4 million. Seven years ago, it was supposed to produce thousands of weapons at a cost of $45,000 each. Today the price per missile is estimated at $191,000.
The watchdog agency, in scores of reports produced since the end of the cold war, has consistently explained why so many weapons cost so much more than promised.
"Performance shortfalls, schedule delays and cost increases," the office has said, are "the logical consequences" of the weapons-buying culture.
Congress and the Pentagon "create incentives for pushing programs and encouraging undue optimism, parochialism and other compromises of good judgment," according to the office. In that culture, "persistent performance problems, cost growth, schedule slippage," and other failures "cannot all be attributed to errors, lack of expertise or unforeseeable events."
They are instead "embedded as the undesirable, but apparently acceptable, consequence of the process," the office has said. "These problems persist not because they are overlooked or underregulated, but because they enable more programs to survive and thus more needs to be met."
David A. Walker, the comptroller general of the United States, who oversees the accountability office, told Congress in testimony submitted with the report yesterday that that the traditional "buy it before you try it" practices that have pervaded the weapons-buying culture ar
no reg. link (Score:3, Informative)
People! When you submit a link to the NYT use the New York Times Link Generator [blogspace.com]!
Better Formating (Score:3, Informative)
April 1 - The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency at the Pentagon - which has long underwritten open-ended "blue sky" research by the nation's best computer scientists - is sharply cutting such spending at universities, researchers say, in favor of financing more classified work and narrowly defined projects that promise a more immediate payoff.
Hundreds of research projects supported by the agency, known as Darpa, have paid off handsomely in recent decades, leading not only to new weapons, but to commercial technologies from the personal computer to the Internet. The agency has devoted hundreds of millions of dollars to basic software research, too, including work that led to such recent advances as the Web search technologies that Google [slashdot.org] and others have introduced.
The shift away from basic research is alarming many leading computer scientists and electrical engineers, who warn that there will be long-term consequences for the nation's economy. They are accusing the Pentagon of reining in an agency that has played a crucial role in fostering America's lead in computer and communications technologies.
"I'm worried and depressed," said David Patterson, a computer scientist at the University of California, Berkeley who is president of the Association of Computing Machinery, an industry and academic trade group. "I think there will be great technologies that won't be there down the road when we need them."
University researchers, usually reluctant to speak out, have started quietly challenging the agency's new approach. They assert that Darpa has shifted a lot more work in recent years to military contractors, adopted a focus on short-term projects while cutting support for basic research, classified formerly open projects as secret and placed new restrictions on sharing information.
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 [slashdot.org]. "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.
The shift at Darpa has been noted not just by those researchers directly involved in computing technologies, but by those in other fields supported by the agency.
"I can see they are after deliverables, but the unfortunate thing is that basic research gets squeezed out in the process," said Wolfgang Porod, director of the Center for Nano Sc
Does decent formatting mean nothing to you? (Score:4, Informative)
You moderators ought to be ashamed of yourselves.
Fusion research... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:it was an odd arrangement (Score:4, Informative)
The problem is that things haven't worked that way in the real world, not for a long time. Since the late '70s there has been an assumption that DARPA will fund the bulk of CS fundamental research. Partly because of that, is has historically been *very* difficult to get a grant approved by the NSF for CS research unless it's very targeted towards the pure end of the research spectrum. Computer architecture (except very low-level engineering), graphics, human-computer interaction, even databases, etc. are all fields that the NSF has been reluctant to fund because by their nature, even the basic research has an "applied" component.
Without an increase in NSF funding, the DARPA cuts are going to devastate many areas of CS research. It's really disheartening.
Re:Should I be worried? (Score:2, Informative)
Firm semantical foundations, the Pi-Calculus [ed.ac.uk], Game Semantics [ox.ac.uk], Full Abstraction results for various languages [uottawa.ca], Zero Knowledge Proofs [weizmann.ac.il], Breakthroughs in Program Logics (Separation Logic [qmul.ac.uk], Honda-Logics [qmul.ac.uk]), Proof-Carrying Code [cmu.edu], Model-Checking [mit.edu].
Re:Should I be worried? (Score:4, Informative)
How about the entire field of non-supervised machine learning: support vector machines, and training of hidden Markov models? These methods are finding application in everything from spam filtering to speech recognition to genome analysis.
There's hope (Score:3, Informative)
I've spoken with a sponsor in the Office of Naval Research (ONR). He said that that they're starting to realize the weakness of this approach, and expect to ramp-up longer term research investments in the next few years.
Perhaps the same thing will happen with DARPA-funded research in a while.
Re:sigh... (Score:3, Informative)
There is a big difference in initial and iterative costs for physical sciences vs computer science.
For initial startup for CS a university may invest millions on new computer equipment for students to build and test their programs. In physical sciences a university may invest millions on a piece of equipment to run the experiment, but they also have to invest millions more on one or more metrologies to analyze the experiment and infrastructure for chemical delivery, chemical disposal system, chemcial storage. The cost of chemicals is not wage related, its the cost of buying them from companies, since it's essential that the chemicals you have are pure and consistant.
The biggest difference is in the iterative costs. For CS the cost of iterations is relatively low, you just recompile your code, in physical sciences you have to consume more physical resources. Also in some fields such as Mat. Sci. or MechE, the university doesn't always have resources available to build what you need. So each time you want to do an experimental run, you have to pay for an outside company to create your metal ingot, or custom machine the part you need, which can quickly get very expensive
Penny wise, pound foolish (Score:3, Informative)
Google? Akamai? (Score:2, Informative)
How about Google and Akamai? Both were---to the extent of my knowledge---basic research that turned out to be immensely useful. Both are now woven deeply into the fabric of the internet---I'm pretty sure you've used both today---and neither is all that old.
That you don't know about research results doesn't mean they're not there.