Attached is a new DoD directive, reinforcing and clarifying the role of fundamental research at universities.  Roughly speaking, the new DARPA policies governing fundamental research at universities are now being adopted across all of DoD.  This means no pre-publication reviews, no export controls, and no issues with foreign researchers, except in “rare and exceptional circumstances.” It’s remarkably how rapidly things are returning to a sane state!

Three quick notes … First, I can’t believe that there weren’t more comments on John King’s terrific post,  “Fratricide and the Ecology of Proposal Reviews.”  This is serious business.  And it’s not “new news” — CISE has had the lowest average proposal scores in NSF for years.  We are killing ourselves in a misguided effort to show how smart we are.  (The number of “highly ranked proposals” that can’t be funded is, quite naturally, a criterion argued within NSF for the allocation of funds among Directorates.)  For god’s sake! Second, the NSF Graduate Fellowship awardees have recently been announced.  Did you know that the number of fellowships awarded to each […]

A friend of mine from Field X once served as a program officer at a major research funding agency. (Names changed to protect the innocent.) As part of a quality assurance scheme, he was asked to review the proposal process for Field Y. He was surprised that every proposal he looked at, whether funded or not, was rated very high. He asked the program officer for Field Y how proposals could be ranked if they were all rated so high. He was told to pay no attention to the rating, but to look at what the reviewer said. So my friend looked at a number of highly-rated proposals. He found […]

What is it with disasters? They’re coming fast and furious. Here’s the 411 on robots at the China quake. The Qinghai quake is the latest of the series of tragedies. Prof. Bin Li at the Shenyang Institute of Automation and an active member of the IEEE Technical Committee on Safety Security Rescue Robots, contacted the Chinese national earthquake response service this morning. It doesn’t look like ground robots are appropriate– the structures are mostly small and constructed from brick and mud. That type of construction is problematic– the brick and mud turns to a liquidized dust, acting like water to fill all the voids and displaces air. Even if there […]

John Markoff had an extremely interesting profile of DARPA Director Regina Dugan in today’s NY Times.  Be sure to read it, here. This follows on the heels of Dr. Dugan’s impressive and heartening House Armed Services Committee testimony, blogged here, and a Computing Research News article by Lazowska and Patterson describing “New Directions at DARPA,” here. Here’s my favorite paragraph from Dr. Dugan’s HASC testimony: “Upon arrival at DARPA, we were determined to understand and repair the breach with universities. We discovered the following: Between 2001 and 2008, DARPA funding to US research university performers did decrease in real terms, by about half. But, as importantly, a noble and recent […]

Those of you who haven’t taken a look at the GENI project in the last year or two need to do so. The name is the same, but the project is totally different, and totally right-headed.  Teams of top researchers are building a diverse suite of tools and technologies that will allow a broad range of networking research experiments to be carried out.  As an example, a set of research universities and research backbone networks are in the process of rolling out Stanford’s OpenFlow switches, which will allow novel low-level protocols to be run alongside TCP/IP.  More than 200 research leaders attended the 7th GENI Engineering Conference, held March 16-17 […]