OPEN to Wild Ideas: An engineer brings 'blue sky' research back to DARPA

摘要

SAY YOU'VE HAD A BRAINSTORM YOU think might lead to a totally new kind of weapon or to a networking breakthrough with national security potential. What better place to seek financing than the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, crucible of the Internet and Global Positioning System? Until recently, if you were a university-based engineer or scientist, getting DARPA support would have been difficult, if not impossible. For much of the past decade, the agency has turned to industry contractors it thought would produce results more quickly. Academics complained that the old DARPA, a risk-taking champion of pure research, was gone.