Some computer scientists cheered the July appointment of a new director for the Pentagon’s research agency. They hoped it could heal a breach that had opened between the academic computing community and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa.
They may be getting their wish. The New York Times reports that Regina E. Dugan, the new director, is now visiting universities nationwide “in an effort to rebuild bridges that were severed under the Bush administration.”
Relations had soured because of concerns that under its previous director, Anthony J. Tether, Darpa had scaled back financing for basic computer-science research at universities and instead was increasing money for projects that are classified or that promise a more immediate payoff. Mr. Tether’s successor is drawing praise for recent visits to the University of California campuses at Berkeley and Los Angeles, Stanford University, the California Institute of Technology, Virginia Tech, and Texas A&M, the Times reports.
“She came by Berkeley on Wednesday and had a frank chat about the past and the future, and I’m pretty encouraged,” David Patterson, a Berkeley computer scientist, told the Times. “She seems to genuinely value academic input into the defense-research enterprise and really wants to re-engage the research community in the Darpa mission.”
Ms. Dugan’s overtures follow an April 2008 speech in which U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates called for a new spirit of cooperation between the military and academe. The widely discussed talk was greeted with enthusiasm from some university leaders but skepticism from social-science organizations.
Mr. Gates’s vision—broadly known as the Minerva Initiative—came a step closer to reality last week, when the National Science Foundation announced 17 national-security-related social-science projects that will receive grants under a special agreement between the science foundation and the Department of Defense.
The projects are attempts to build quasi-universal models of governments’ and citizens’ behavior, using game-theory modeling, computer simulations, social-network analysis, or large-scale databases of historical events.
