New DARPA Leadership

[jsktrogdor]

Me and my roommates often like to dwell on how far humanity has managed to advance technologically in its brief history; which usually result in us ping-ponging back and forth various interesting tid-bits about where we are now, where we were then, and where we will be soon. For instance, the first people known to of navigated from one side of Africa around the southern cape then back around north again were the Ancient Egyptians. It took them three years to complete the journey, you can compare that to the Voyager missions in the 1970's that managed to reach Saturn (over 1 billion km's away) in the same amount of time.

It was in the search for bits of info on human technical advancement that I stumbled on this New York Times article and became curious what other people would think of it.

It basically talks about an organization in the US government known as "Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency" or "Darpa" for short. If you havent heard of darpa before, regardless of where you live, they've still effected you. Its a portion of the US government that is "results oriented", and designed to take the brightest minds and direct them towards cracking tough yet revolutionary science and technology.

Darpa is built around specific projects undertaken by elite scientists and engineers who sign on for several years to provide service to the country. It is results oriented and not meant to be a long-term home for researchers.

The key words being "results oriented", this is a research organization seeking to not only research issues but solve the "high-risk technology gambles". Its their results that make them important:

In the past, Darpa has supported the design of the ARPAnet, the forerunner of the Internet and many of the technologies that define the modern computer age, as well as military systems including the stealth fighter, unmanned drone aircraft, the global positioning satellite system [thats GPS], and even the M16 rifle.

In short, this is no kid in a basement with a chemistry set, this is one of the pinnacles for "elite science". The article is of interest to me because it describes the new leader of the Darpa organization. If you read the article it goes into depth on how intense this woman is. She's making a point of aggressively and fairly successfully drag-netting the top universities for the world's brightest and best. As well as putting a heavy and often unreasonable pressure on her co-workers for creative thinking. One of the people she's recruited is Peter Lee, whose the chairman of the Computer Sciences Dept at Carnegie Mellon. The article goes more in depth about his description of her but this is the jist of it:

For Dr. Lee, it has been an intense experience so far. He said that Darpa had been collegial, but that he had been struck by the challenges that he had been put under by the director.

“It’s what I imagine it’s like working for Steve Jobs,” he said. “The amount of intellectual pressure we’re put under all day, every day is significant and beyond anything in my professional experience.”

It pays off, he said.

So you have a woman whose being described as a Steve Jobs-esque catalyst for invention, surrounding herself with the worlds brightest minds, who puts a heavy focus on creative thinking; leading an incredibly well funded research organization notorious for producing results with several departments that focus on things like: "technologies, including social networks, synthetic biology and machine intelligence.". In fact she personally describes the time we're living in as a “renaissance of wonder.". So.... I feel like if half the things in this article are true, we're going to see some revolutionary ideas, science and technology coming out of Darpa in the years to come.

Your thoughts? Are we due for an uber-renaissance on top of what has essentially been a continuous renaissance since the original Renaissance? Or is this media hype?

[Ramashan]

Back in Dec I worked on a production where a bunch of Darpa folk came in to talk about their independently automated automobile challenge that they have. Basically they challenged teams to come up with a system that would independently navigate a vehicle first across a pre-designed course and then in an urban environment. The only rule was that there could be no human interaction with the automobile.

From what they said, the technology exits and has been tested in NYC without people even knowing it. Basically, when you jump into a cab it might just be driving itself. It uses LADAR and GPS to navigate and know its surroundings. I spoke to the lead engineer at Volkswagon and he said that the only thing keeping the technology out of the consumer market is insurance. But that he hopes that in 5 years that we will have cars that are capable of driving themselves in traffic conditions. As someone who commutes in traffic for 3 hours total each day, this would be great.

http://www.darpa.mil/grandchallenge/index.asp

[jsktrogdor]

I think you did, but if you read the article it describes a simaler challenge that was thought up by the new director when she worked at darpa earlier. They challenged people to track down 8 balloons around the nation in what was thought to be an impossible challenge of finding them. They ended up with an MIT team winning using some type of super-powered search function that probed social networking sites.

[erasmus777]

It does feel as though we're on the cusp of some big changes. Even if you just watch the videos from TED, it's clear that "enhanced" reality is just around the corner. All sorts of things are in the works: wireless electricity, cobalt-infused cotton fibers that can make a T-shirt deflect bullets, materials that bend light so as to make themselves invisible, nano weaponry, etc. The next decade should be very interesting from a technological point of view.

[jsktrogdor]

It does feel as though we're on the cusp of some big changes. Even if you just watch the videos from TED, it's clear that "enhanced" reality is just around the corner. All sorts of things are in the works: wireless electricity, cobalt-infused cotton fibers that can make a T-shirt deflect bullets, materials that bend light so as to make themselves invisible, nano weaponry, etc. The next decade should be very interesting from a technological point of view.

hehe, TED is a big part of our ping-ponging sessions ; we've gotten sucked into the world wide telescope recently which was shown at TED one year.

[Farnan]

Yea, DARPA is amazing. One of the DOD's most influential organizations.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA#Past_Projects

The thing about DARPA though is most of its projects are done by universities and DARPA provides the funding. It is one of the primary funders of university research.