US tech research faces crisis
Published: 10 Nov 2005 15:55 GMT
An outspoken group of information and communications technology innovators is worried that the US is falling behind the rest of the world in technological innovation because fewer dollars are being allocated to long-term research.
At a symposium last week put on by the Marconi Society, technology researchers and scientists gathered to honour two colleagues — Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel and Claude Berrou, co-inventor of turbo codes, which are used in 3G mobile telephone standards.
At the two-day event, attendees voiced concern over the state of technology research in the US.
"I think we are in trouble," said Leonard Kleinrock, professor of computer science at the University of California at Los Angeles and creator of the basic principle of packet switching. "Years ago, people took a long-range view to research. There was high-risk research with the potential for big payoffs. That's no longer the case."
For much of the 20th century, major breakthroughs in technology came from large research laboratories like AT&T's Bell, Xerox's Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC) and IBM's Watson Research Centre.
These research facilities operated much like national laboratories, making their discoveries and innovations available to anyone for modest licence fees. Many of the inventions and discoveries at Bell, for example, were first used commercially outside the Bell system and benefited the nation as a whole.
The labs are still around, but some experts say the labs conduct basic research on a much smaller scale than they used to.
In the early 1960s, the US government started pouring money into information technology and communications research. It formed DARPA to fund high-risk, high-reward research. One of the greatest developments to come out of this research was the Internet, which started out as a research project to develop a communications network for the US military.
For years following the creation of DARPA, innovation in US communications technology grew substantially under government-funded research. Today, DARPA and the National Science Foundation fund a large portion of the academic IT research in the US, say research experts.
Flat US investment
But some of the engineering legends
attending the Marconi Society event say the nation is facing a crisis,
as industry-run research withers and government spending is slashed.
Much of today's most important and long-range research is moving to
Asia and Europe, which could have a significant impact on the US
economy as well as national security, they argue. The reason appears
simple: The US government is not increasing its investments in science.
Federal spending on scientific research has remained flat for several years. President Bush's budget request for 2006 proposes spending $132bn (£76bn) on scientific research, which is...
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