Funding a Revolution Government Support for Computing Research (1999) / Chapter Skim
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5 Lessons From History
5 Lessons From History
Pages 136-156
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From page 136... ...
Such funding has supported both the development of new technologies and the training of students. The federal government has also paid for public research infrastructure, providing most of the funds for research equipment in university departments of computer science and electrical engineering, and has sponsored programs to provide access to and infrastructure for high-performance computing and networking.
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From page 137... ...
Federal research support has provided a proving ground for testing new concepts, designs, and architectures in computing, and it has helped hasten the commercialization of technology developed in industry laboratories. This influence has manifested itself in a variety of ways: (1)
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From page 138... ...
The graphical user interface, which became commonplace on personal computers in the l990s, incorporates research conducted at SRI International under a DARPA contract some 30 years earlier (Chapter 4~. The economic impact of federally funded research in computing is evident in the many companies that have successfully commercialized technologies developed under federal contracts.
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From page 139... ...
They tend to concentrate on research with broad applicability across companies and product lines and to share new knowledge openly.4 Because they are not usually subject to commercial pressures, university researchers often have greater ability than their industrial counterparts to explore ideas with uncertain long-term payoffs. Although it would be difficult to determine how much university research contributes directly to industrial innovation, it is telling that each of the case studies and other major examples examined in this report relational databases, the Internet, theoretical computer science, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, SAGE, computer time-sharing, very large scale integrated circuits, and the personal computer involved the participation of university researchers.
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From page 140... ...
Beyond supporting student education and training, federal funding has also been important in creating networks of researchers in particular fields developing communities of researchers who could share ideas and build on each other's strengths. Despite its defense orientation, DARPA historically encouraged open dissemination of the results of sponsored research, as did other federal agencies.
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From page 141... ...
and their subgroups have helped create communities of researchers and facilitated communication among them. The development of virtual reality, for example, benefited enormously from the creation of SIGGRAPH, the ACM's special interest group for computer graphics.
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From page 142... ...
Successful government research programs have supported research that private industry has had little incentive or ability to support because the commercial applications of the research were too distant and too uncertain, or because the research itself was so fundamental that individual firms could not expect to capture the benefits themselves while preventing others from doing so (see Chapter 2~. Private industry is generally not able to assume the risks inherent in such projects, nor does it continue funding research in a particular field over extended periods if the payback is unclear.
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From page 143... ...
Federally funded research in these areas succeeded in developing the technology to the point that private companies could both develop products and invest in productive research. In virtual reality, for example, the entertainment industry has built on early university research to create systems for pro
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Its interest is now driven largely by the video game industry and the search for improved user interfaces (see Chapter 10 for a case study of the federal role in virtual reality research)
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From page 145... ...
to develop a general-purpose aircraft simulator and that pioneered real-time digital computing. Despite the fact that SAGE was almost obsolete when it was finished, it provided invaluable learning experiences for the engineers and scientists designing and developing the communications and computing technology.
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Codd publicized the results of his work, seeding efforts in relational databases by several university researchers, including Michael Stonebraker and Eugene Wong at the University of California at Berkeley (UC-Berkeley)
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This work demonstrated the viability of personal computers, especially in the business marketplace, and IBM subsequently developed its own personal computer. Nevertheless, federal funding was important in supporting some of the early ideas on human-computer interaction (such as the computer mouse)
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From page 148... ...
If a particular agency cannot support a worthy research project for any of several reasons limited resources, poor match with agency objectives, or the judgments of individual program managers another agency may continue to sponsor potentially fruitful lines of inquiry. For example, DARPA and ONR declined to fund Michael Stonebraker's work on relational databases because DOD was already supporting other database research (see Chapter 6~.
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NASA supported development of the pioneering expert system DENDRAL, to deduce the likely structure of organic compounds from known chemical analyses and spectrometry data. The same is true in virtual reality research (see Chapter 10~.
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From page 150... ...
grew from a desire to use more efficiently the computing capabilities that were distributed among its many contractor sites. By allowing remote access to these disparate computers in a seamless fashion, DARPA program managers hoped to expand the number of researchers who could use them and increase their utilization rates.
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From page 151... ...
Such difficulties frustrate attempts to meaningfully measure the performance of research and also highlight the need for ensuring flexibility in the management and oversight of federally funded research programs. Researchers need sufficient intellectual freedom to follow their intuition and to modify research plans based on preliminary results.
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From page 152... ...
But such accountability must be balanced against the unpredictability of research. Structures for managing and overseeing federally funded research need to allow program managers to alter programs midcourse in response to preliminary results and need to recognize that research projects can produce valuable results even if they do not achieve their original objectives.
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From page 153... ...
Attempts to deliberately bring together university and industry researchers in collaborative projects can also be successful, but considerable flexibility must be allowed in specifying the nature of the collaboration. Organizational Innovation and Adaptation The history of computing is characterized by frequent modification of the structures for federal research support.
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From page 154... ...
But the desire to prevent another technological surprise like Sputnik and to separate defense research from interservice rivalry and near-term operational considerations demanded the establishment of a separate agency, DARPA. As the importance of computing became increasingly apparent for defense applications, DARPA established the Information Processing Techniques Office to manage computing research.
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3. Estimates based on data extracted from the National Science Foundation's database on Current Fund Research Equipment Expenditures in electrical engineering and computer science between fiscal years 1981 and 1995.
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From page 156... ...
5. Estimates based on data extracted from the National Science Foundation's database on Federal Research Obligations to Universities and Colleges for basic and applied research in electrical engineering and computer science between fiscal years 1981 and 1995.
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