Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!utcsri!utegc!utai!ubc-vision!ubc-cs!manis From: manis@ubc-cs.UUCP Newsgroups: can.politics Subject: Re: Potshots Message-ID: <891@ubc-cs.UUCP> Date: Fri, 6-Mar-87 02:15:23 EST Article-I.D.: ubc-cs.891 Posted: Fri Mar 6 02:15:23 1987 Date-Received: Fri, 6-Mar-87 23:46:35 EST References: <206@fornax.uucp> <3063@watdcsu.UUCP> <241@pembina.alberta.UUCP> <251@pembina.alberta.UUCP> <3085@watdcsu.UUCP> Reply-To: manis@ubc-cs.UUCP (Vincent Manis) Distribution: can Organization: UBC Department of Computer Science Lines: 65 Dave Brewer suggests that US universities do *better* research than Canadian (or British or French or Australian or ..., by induction on my part), and relates that to the amount of money they have at their disposal. I too have no objections to accepting military money (I came to that conclusion when I realised, during the Vietnam war, that every cent spent from the military budget on "useless" unclassified research was a cent which couldn't be spent to drop napalm on a little Vietnamese child); however, the result of the enormous military spending is to skew the emphases in different research areas. I'll use computer science as the only field on which I'm competent to remark, but I'm sure the same is true in other fields. In the US, the major source of military money for Computer Science is DARPA. Other agencies include the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR), and the Office of Naval Research (ONR), as well as specific contracts let by the various forces (which tend to be more developmental rather than pure research). "Pure" research is funded by the National Science Foundation, primarily. Up to the middle 1970's, DARPA (or ARPA, as it was then known) operated to target areas of pure science which might be particularly useful to the military. The development of the ARPAnet, as well as the various message protocols and much early mail software, came under this rubric. So too did time-sharing operating systems, computer speech recognition, robotics. Similarly, ONR had a massive "AI" grant to Carnegie-Mellon University which included the funding of C.mmp, the Hydra operating system, compiler research, and other things (I spent a summer at CMU once working on an Algol 68 compiler which was funded as AI by ONR). Of course, there was much classified research, but much of the military money was intentionally targeted at longer range research. (As I recollect, some of the original LOGO work at MIT was funded by ONR!) In about 1975-1980, DARPA gradually shifted its emphasis toward work which was more directly military, culminating in what eventually became the software part of SDI. In part, this was because the military was under pressure to show it wasn't "wasting" money (this from a government which deals with General Dynamics and FMC!). As a result, the military is now in a much stronger position to dictate what research is done. Thus CMU now does a lot of Ada-related work. Obviously s/he who pays the piper calls the tune. But what has happened in the US is that research funds which might have gone to NSF now routinely go through DARPA or a similar agency. As a result, the military is in a position to fund "fad" research, which may or may not have any longterm value. Rather than a multiplicity of funding agencies, the US has now concentrated all of its eggs in a few baskets; long-range "pure" research (e.g., theory), and research whose primary goal is non-military get short shrift. Somebody mentioned a chart in IEEE software showing the sources of US research funding. DARPA had a bar which extended across the page, while NSF's barely departed from the left margin. Even though Canada's research (and education) policies are atrocious, at least our institutions aren't hopping on quite as many bandwagons because that's where the money is (don't deluge me with mail: I know of lots of Canadian exceptions to that statement). We aren't doing enough; but at least (except for the SRTC) we aren't wasting money. ----- Vincent Manis {seismo,uw-beaver}!ubc-vision!ubc-cs!manis Dept. of Computer Science manis@cs.ubc.cdn Univ. of British Columbia manis%ubc.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa Vancouver, B.C. V6T 1W5 manis@ubc.csnet (604) 228-6770 or 228-3061 "BASIC is the Computer Science equivalent of 'Scientific Creationism'."