Australia has CSIRO (I'm a former employee), which is not quite the same but has had some big successes such as WiFi, seL4.
From being on the inside for a short period of time, I've had a glimpse at just how hard this is. Projects come and go, getting killed for budgets, politics, etc etc
The commitment and early vision, are very difficult to re-create.
I'm most familiar with WiFi as I worked with one of the inventors. It was patented in 1992 based on research in radio-telescopes for detecting black holes, which had been done years earlier.
If you think about what most computers were like, and what we were doing with them in 1992, WiFi would have made no sense. It would have made less sense when they started work on it.
Most computers were desktops, you didn't take a laptop to get a latte (which was also just barely a common beverage). Most people didn't have the internet, so there wasn't much to connect to. Your computer didn't move, so why have it wireless. Mostly you'd connect to a printer, which was also huge, so may as well be wired.
There was nothing you would do on the network which would use the speed that WiFi was capable of.
It would be almost a decade before it would be somewhat useful, and not until 2008, with the arrival of smartphones that it was a necessity.
So yes, I believe most countries should try to support a DARPA like environment. I don't believe most countries will be successful in their attempt.
CSIRO does "basic research", but depending on what department you are in, project terms are limited and projects are focused on finding a way out of the building.
The projects I worked on were all on tight budgets and deadlines with the goal of finding a way to commercialize the research.
That being said, I'm not a researcher and my job was finding/developing a commercialization path for existing research.
> If you think about what most computers were like, and what we were doing with them in 1992, WiFi would have made no sense. It would have made less sense when they started work on it.
In 1998 I was setting up a shared internet connection in the apartment block I lived in. I remember wondering if I should go for a bundle of ethernet cables in the stairway or this newfangled WiFi thing. Neither I nor anyone else in the block had ever tried WiFi, and I believe it was still a few years before I did.
Went for the cables - and it ran without a hickup for all the time I lived there. Nobody else used the connection much so student-me ended up with an insanely fast 512kbps at 1/10 the price.
I was CSIRO DIT in times gone past, 1988 timeframe. It was an amazing place to be. We were doing OSI work. Perhaps it's better that didn't go the distance :-)
SEL is a modern miracle. The decision by the government to de-fund the work is a tragedy.
The thing most people don’t get is that wifi reflects off the human skin and goes through walls so guess what. Yup that’s right. You are visible through your walls from hundreds of feed away. It’s kind of a problem.
Not really, because we have rule of law. There are plenty of illegal ways to spy on people's private activity and we cope. If there's a hillside in view of your house, somebody can hide in the bush with a telephoto lens to watch you cooking dinner. Various active radar type technologies can see through walls. There are ways to pick up sound from a distance.
Last I heard, this seeing people with Wifi was very poor resolution and filled with noise but worst of all, the system had to be trained on the specific rooms it was being used on so you couldn't apply it secretly.
You clearly don’t want to have to worry about this lol. Your first response is that it is illegal (so is speeding).
Second seems to be that the tech is uncommon and has poor resolution.
^ this is true with the first digital cameras as well.
As the MIT researchers first publishing their work on this know, the minimumly viable tech needed to use wifi to passively see observe each breath someone takes is 5% hardware and 95% software. We aren’t talking about cutting edge tech. We are taking about commonly available tech that is just used to observe distortions in the 3d radio propagation geometries.
The actual hardware required to see exactly where someone is behind walls and what their hands are doing costs less than $300. Most of it is software needed to reconstruct the geometry from the signals. Software like this is notorious for being randomly and abruptly open sourced.
Yea, and you can make bombs in your house and mail them to people. You can buy drugs online. You can trade child porn, you can abuse your own children. You can commit all sorts of crimes easily and secretly but you'll go to jail if you get caught.
You can also see if someone's breathing by noticing condensation on their windows in winter or seeing them enter their house one day and come out another day. They must have spent the intervening time inside breathing. If that's the level of invasion, it hardly matters.
It's completely bonkers to claim that "rule of law" in the US protects our privacy from any type of digital intrusion. "cope" might be the right word if you mean "completely ignore/obseqiuously accept our lack of privacy".
Hackers on the internet are lawless because they're in Russia or wherever, but somebody looking through your walls with wifi will be personally present in your street where he's at risk of being caught so it's a completely different kind of risk.
Totally agree about peeping toms. But, if a company gets to spy on you via their devices with impunity, your politicians representing you get pay bumps.
You sound as if you aren’t aware of wifi beam antennas that can connect from about a mile away, or aware that drones can be equipped with multi-array wifi antennas.
I guess I used too extreme an example so you misunderstood. The distinction I'm making is that those things you mentioned put the person doing them at risk of arrest because they must be physically present while hacking from Russia doesn't.
Cellphone jammers are probably a clearer example of cheap tech that can be used covertly but it's illegal and people usually don't.
Another important factor is that they aren't scalable because it takes a human a lot of work to hack only extremely local targets, not a program that can scan computers all over the world automatically.
Just wait until smart home/HAR devices become more popular in ~10-20 years. We'll have grids of radar in our homes whose explicit purpose is to track our movements.
I feel there is an enormous difference between DARPA and CSIRO primary the "D". How many incredible innovations has DARPA made that will never reach the public because they give a strategic advantage?
I commented above, Australia have the Defence Science and Technology Organization (DSTO) which is the military version of the civilian CSIRO. I worked at DSTO for a year, really interesting stuff.
"The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), established in 1958, is an agency within the Department of Defense (DOD) responsible for catalyzing the development of technologies that maintain and advance the capabilities and technical superiority of the U.S. military." [1]
[1] https://fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/R45088.pdf
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency: Overview and Issues for Congress
I worked for DSTO, which is kind of the defence version of the CSIRO. Amazing place to work due to the large budgets and lack of any real pressure to deliver anything in particular in any timeframe.
As you said some fantastic projects, but a lot of political budget decisions.
> If you think about what most computers were like, and what we were doing with them in 1992, WiFi would have made no sense. It would have made less sense when they started work on it.
Wifi made tons of sense and everyone was desperate for wireless connections, cables were a pain and it was obvious that laptops were going to be a big thing. It was easy to imagine because it's basically: cellphones+laptops = awesome.
OK. Insulin, then. Some academics got to play with puppy dogs and get paid by the public purse, then then went and donated their patents to a non-profit. What a waste!
The US trade deficit & endless money printing is funding many of these countries' advanced projects. China in particular. 100 years from now whomever is left in this world with some semblance of free will and expression will look back on US self-hating/self-destructive political rhetoric and the policy it engendered, laughing and crying at the folly of it all.
Solar power would likely not be nearly as lost cost as it is now without investment by China. You could argue about wether it is fundamental ip or manufacturing ip that was developed but imho there is much knowledge and economic activity that simply doesn’t happen unless you are in the area where the factories are.
Can you elaborate on what breakthrough happened there in solar? I always thought it was economies of scale and cheap labour that led to photovoltaic cells becoming cheap.
But I do agree that it is very efficient to prototype and scale things there because of manufacturing ingenuity and efficient supply chains.
An "economy of scale" is part technology, part educating a labor force, and part infrastructure, and it's intentional creation takes focused industrial strategy shaping long term capital allocation. Especially with non-software industries.
A collection of iterated improvements that require the regulation, the local enterprises, and the workers to align in a particular way is not exportable, nor a breakthrough.
In a ha-ha-only-serious way, I think this is a big part of the answer. DARPA is the only US funder that’s willing to pay for experienced staff. If your proposal needs a half-dozen seasoned scientists or engineers, they’ll pay for it.
In contrast, the NIH and NSF are very trainee-focused: a typical project consists of one professor loosely overseeing 1-3 “trainees”. We obviously need future scientists, but this model has a ton of drawbacks in terms of speed, quality, and even the nature of the project (which needs to let three people be somewhat-separately “evaluated”). It has also no room in it for any ICs more than four or five years post-PhD, which is bonkers given what the same organizations just paid to train them!
$3~4B is indeed quite big budget. However, it's dwarfed by big tech's R&D budget. FB alone spends $20B+ each year.
I guess one key difference is that unlike FB, DARPA money doesn't need to be confined to make quick and visible returns, thus they can focus on more long term problems.
The Dream Machine: J. C. R. Licklider & The Revolution that Made Computing Personal, by Michael Waldrop[1], is one of the books out there that touches upon the early days of ARPA, what happened, and how computing & networking was jump started under by a far-seeing thrown-into-position bureaucrat who both dreamed big personally but more so, stood back & gave multiple far seeing groups of techies free reign to bring their dreams to life. A lot of other books I've read also speak similar stories, and I tend to believe them.
It's a near & dear book to me (although due for a re-read at this point), & I think many others. A history of many of the ideas circulating, and how many overlapped & reinforced on the way to building what ended up being the internet. There's more internet-centric accounts like Where Wizards Stay Up Late or Dealers of Lightning, but Dream Machines remains the favorite of many[2].
I just cant emphasize enough how much benefit I think there is to government granting good hard working big idea people, with not a lot of oversight or expectations. The counter though, is that these were relatively small organizations, all in all, and the goal is not to create jobs for life (as I feel like most other research institutions tend to do) but to fund projects, ideas, for a duration, and then move on, re-allocate funds.
The kind of R&D that DARPA is doing and the kind of R&D that Facebook is reporting in their yearly report are very, _very_ different numbers. Every single tech company reports ongoing development work as "R&D," whereas much of the work that DARPA or other national labs do is exploratory and towards a lot of different projects.
For instance, at every company I've worked at, all of the infrastructure is under the R&D budget.
Like in the last two years, quite a lot of software developers in Poland suddenly started doing "R&D", because performing the necessary rituals to convince the tax man that your CRUD app is "research" let you drop your tax rate to 5%.
That's not the case in the US. There is no federal tax break in the US for "R&D" as far as I'm aware. Companies can deduct all expenses from their income. So there isn't even really a need for a tax break here. All salaries, rent, operational expenses are deducted from the income.
Moreover, many US corporations are effectively encouraged by tax law to go into debt (and always operated under debt), because having a zero effective income means you pay zero taxes. So that's what many companies -- they spend a little bit (or sometime a lot) more than their revenue, and thus report a loss each year (consequently paying zero taxes).
Yes, if you work in a large US company, they will tell you explicitly that they want to categorize as much work as possible as "research", for tax reasons. You may have to fill out questionnaires asking whether your work might fit any of a series of definitions of "research".
Interestingly, the time is also classified by the ‘class’ of research, where class one research involve very basic improvements (like changing the speed at which you make something) that have a different tax bracket than class five research, which is closer to basic/applied research with no clear application in sight.
DARPA doesn't actually do much (any?) research on its own. Its role is to award contracts to "performers" that actually run the experiments, train the models, build the devices, etc.
In other words, a big chunk of (e.g.,) Teledyne's R&D budget is actually the same money as DARPA's R&D budget.
Not sure that's it. Consider the difference in motivation between trying to figure out how: to get people to click on advertisements; vs prevail when people are trying to kill you.
Source: was at BBN while DARPA pushed the Internet and created SIMNET. Did work for DARPA at own company later. Never met a wooly-haired, wild-eyed fellow nerd or VC with half the imagination of buzz-cut DARPA people.
3.5 billion for every DARPA project is a hilariously low number. DARPA projects are famous for having low budgets, completing under budget, and completing under time. It has an extremely worthwhile return on investment.
No US government research project aims to be under budget. Money is viewed as a finite expiring resource and there's every incentive to avoid your contractors from returning ceiling to the government.
I would not consider DARPA work to be low budget. DARPA programs are very typically in the $50 million range and program resources are split up between multiple performers. Sometimes larger program bets are made, especially in hot areas of research or programs where there are large integration costs.
Meanwhile Germany created this bureaucratic monstrosity: https://www.sprind.org/en/ Their offer is really hard to understand. As a founder I want DARPA alike grant, but I guess, this organization will not give me one. Other sources claim, that this agency supports idea with up to €200k. That’s a laugh number compared to DARPA. As a taxpayer I just have a feeling about tons of money wasted in this funny political project.
> First, whatever the hell DARPA is, it is not a demand-side approach to innovation policy, which the OECD defines as things like public procurement, regulations, standards and consumer policies. Second, demand-side, by definition, is pretty much the opposite of mission-driven. Third, DARPA has never had scale-up and commercialization of research as a mission. And fourth, DARPA, to the extent it ever worked, worked because it had a relatively narrow mission, not a grab-bag like “agri-food, clean-tech and digital services”.
I don’t think that’s right about DARPA and commercialization.
I worked on a few programs and commercialization came up regularly. The PMs wanted to know your plans for regulatory testing/approval, if you had met with the relevant agencies, were you filing patents, etc. This literally started at the day 1, the proposers’ day, and the end goal was very clearly to have an off-the-shelf option that the DoD could buy en masse. They have other organizations, like In-Q-Tel that are also clearly meant to push this along.
From being on the inside for a short period of time, I've had a glimpse at just how hard this is. Projects come and go, getting killed for budgets, politics, etc etc
The commitment and early vision, are very difficult to re-create.
I'm most familiar with WiFi as I worked with one of the inventors. It was patented in 1992 based on research in radio-telescopes for detecting black holes, which had been done years earlier.
If you think about what most computers were like, and what we were doing with them in 1992, WiFi would have made no sense. It would have made less sense when they started work on it.
Most computers were desktops, you didn't take a laptop to get a latte (which was also just barely a common beverage). Most people didn't have the internet, so there wasn't much to connect to. Your computer didn't move, so why have it wireless. Mostly you'd connect to a printer, which was also huge, so may as well be wired.
There was nothing you would do on the network which would use the speed that WiFi was capable of.
It would be almost a decade before it would be somewhat useful, and not until 2008, with the arrival of smartphones that it was a necessity.
So yes, I believe most countries should try to support a DARPA like environment. I don't believe most countries will be successful in their attempt.