US Computer Science Eager for Funding

A report issued by the Defense Science Boards earlier this year describes computer science as having outgrown the Defense Department's capacity to support and fund the industry it largely created. In the absence of a transition strategy, the possibility of the United States losing its competitive edge in university research is now very real. Over the past four years, DARPA estimates that it has cut funding for university research for computer science by almost half. In congressional testimony, DARPA director Anthony Tether said that some research projects have moved out of universities and into industry, and described DARPA funding as having remained "more or less constant." At the NSF, funding has actually increased, though the portion of the proposals for computer science projects it sponsors has dropped from roughly one-third to 14 percent. "We are looking at a situation where perhaps 40 percent of the good proposals we get, we don't have the money to fund," said the NSF's Peter Freeman, citing the war in Iraq and natural disasters as higher priorities for government funding. The lack of university funding has shifted much of the burden for supporting research to the corporate realm, which typically only supports short-term projects that have an evident business value. Since 1999, MIT's computer science department has seen the portion of its funding supplied by DARPA drop from 62 percent to 24 percent. As research funding becomes a lower priority for a government grappling with an escalating budget crisis, there is widespread concern that other nations, particularly China, could supplant the United States in the next 10 years as the world's leader in technological innovation. Evidence of this trend can be found in the facilities that many companies are establishing in China, India, and other countries, as well as the appearance of large new universities, such as one China recently opened with a capacity for 30,000 students.

[Source: ACM TECHNews Volume 7 Issue 873, December 2, 2005 ]