3 ms·

What do you mean mission creep and how can you avoid it when you have "blue sky" projects? As I understand it those types of projects, by their very definition,

What do you mean mission creep and how can you avoid it when you have "blue sky" projects? As I understand it those types of projects, by their very definition, are trying to do something so unprecedented that they don't have a clear roadmap and will always go off into many tangents before circling back to their main goal. Take the moon landing for example: early rocketry pioneered technologies in chemistry and controlled explosives, material science, mathematics, and computation before the first Mercury mission to say nothing of systems engineering, a very broad field born almost entirely from the NASA space program. DARPA is the agency that takes on projects that are way outside of the capabilities of any other research organization in defense and its a lot less focused on commercializing technology than the NIH or even NASA. The very interesting thing about DARPA is how its management is structured so differently from every other government agency. DARPA has a $3 billion budget with a staff of less than 300 people who are mostly project managers and administrative staff (compare to NIH - $30 bil/20,000, NSF - $7 bil/1,700, or NASA - $19 bil/17,000). By policy these PMs have a strict term limit of four years and the only DARPA PM I know of that served a second term did so over two decades after his first. These PMs have scientific advisory boards that don't have any term limits but the mandatory turnover for management means that they come in with clear goals and deadlines that seem to remove career advancement out of the picture (although to be fair, most DARPA PMs are way beyond worrying about their career prospects). No other government agency works this way and it has paid dividends not only for our defense but for technology and society as whole. Unfortunately there isn't a DARPA equivalent of https://spinoff.nasa.org https://spinoff.nasa.org

rayiner 10y ago
> What do you mean mission creep and how can you avoid it when you have "blue sky" projects? Imagine if during the Mercury project, someone threw in: "oh, and while we've got someone in space, we should do a spacewalk too."
- akiselev 10y ago
  Can you give a specific example as it relates to DARPA? A space walk would have been mission creep for the Mercury program only in the most trivial way because the technology was already developed by that point. The problem was the unacceptable risk and lack or reason to do any kind of spacewalk (Mercury and the mission procedures were not even remotely designed for in-flight repair).
  - rayiner 10y ago
    So our project (XG) was about developing radio networks that could opportunistically use spectrum without a priori channel allocations. That was hard enough when you took into account challenging environments (terrain obstacles, jammers, etc). But DARPA decided the radios also had to be able to make decisions in conformity with regulatory policies written in this declarative XML language. It became this huge tangential AI project: http://xg.csl.sri.com/technical_reports.php http://xg.csl.sri.com/technical_reports.php.
    - elcritch 10y ago
      Honestly, sounds like the side-AI project could be the exact point of a "blue sky" project but that open ended "maybe this won't result in a explicit result in this decade" ain't for everyone. Neither good nor bad. The ability to produce AI tuned opportunistic spectrum allocation could have far reaching implications in fields outside of spectrum analysis. Many of the biggest problems faced by modern organizations is dealing with beaurocracy while efficiently allocation resources. Maybe this never lead to anything, but then again who knows if this could lead to a whole future field of efficiently scaling large organizations ... Take a look at the outputs of undirected DARPA funding and the results still bearing fruits decades later: computer animation by people like Ed Catmull (culminating in Pixar), Alan Key and object oriented programming, tcp/ip, etc. The bigger question of whether this side project could yield fruit has more to do with the type of team environment of the project and whether the pursuit came from a genuine "I wonder if...". E.g. One of the best predictors of the useful of such blue sky discovery is whether there's a large element of "this seems fun/intruiging!" as appeared to the driving motivation of Ed Catmull when he invented texture mapping. And thanks for the links! I'm actually _very_ interested in reading these papers. There's been a lot of intruiging work and research on type-valued types (c.f. Iris programming language). But there's a difficulty of describing and translating rulesets from various vague human logic into effective computer passable rulesets.
      - _pmf_ 10y ago
        > Honestly, sounds like the side-AI project could be the exact point of a "blue sky" project As a separate follow up project; not as a sub-project that stalls the main project (which is how it will be done since "What else are we going to do with the money? Doing the boring work of ironing out the kinks in the main project?").
thisrod 10y ago
> systems engineering, a very broad field born almost entirely from the NASA space program What's the evidence for that? The Idea Factory, a history of Bell Labs, claims that it was originally "system engineering", back when America's phone network was called the Bell System. Of course, there was a lot of overlap between Bell Labs and NASA. Echo, Telstar, transistors and so on.

rayiner 10y ago

> What do you mean mission creep and how can you avoid it when you have "blue sky" projects? Imagine if during the Mercury project, someone threw in: "oh, and while we've got someone in space, we should do a spacewalk too."

akiselev 10y ago
Can you give a specific example as it relates to DARPA? A space walk would have been mission creep for the Mercury program only in the most trivial way because the technology was already developed by that point. The problem was the unacceptable risk and lack or reason to do any kind of spacewalk (Mercury and the mission procedures were not even remotely designed for in-flight repair).
- rayiner 10y ago
  So our project (XG) was about developing radio networks that could opportunistically use spectrum without a priori channel allocations. That was hard enough when you took into account challenging environments (terrain obstacles, jammers, etc). But DARPA decided the radios also had to be able to make decisions in conformity with regulatory policies written in this declarative XML language. It became this huge tangential AI project: http://xg.csl.sri.com/technical_reports.php http://xg.csl.sri.com/technical_reports.php.
  - elcritch 10y ago
    Honestly, sounds like the side-AI project could be the exact point of a "blue sky" project but that open ended "maybe this won't result in a explicit result in this decade" ain't for everyone. Neither good nor bad. The ability to produce AI tuned opportunistic spectrum allocation could have far reaching implications in fields outside of spectrum analysis. Many of the biggest problems faced by modern organizations is dealing with beaurocracy while efficiently allocation resources. Maybe this never lead to anything, but then again who knows if this could lead to a whole future field of efficiently scaling large organizations ... Take a look at the outputs of undirected DARPA funding and the results still bearing fruits decades later: computer animation by people like Ed Catmull (culminating in Pixar), Alan Key and object oriented programming, tcp/ip, etc. The bigger question of whether this side project could yield fruit has more to do with the type of team environment of the project and whether the pursuit came from a genuine "I wonder if...". E.g. One of the best predictors of the useful of such blue sky discovery is whether there's a large element of "this seems fun/intruiging!" as appeared to the driving motivation of Ed Catmull when he invented texture mapping. And thanks for the links! I'm actually _very_ interested in reading these papers. There's been a lot of intruiging work and research on type-valued types (c.f. Iris programming language). But there's a difficulty of describing and translating rulesets from various vague human logic into effective computer passable rulesets.
    - _pmf_ 10y ago
      > Honestly, sounds like the side-AI project could be the exact point of a "blue sky" project As a separate follow up project; not as a sub-project that stalls the main project (which is how it will be done since "What else are we going to do with the money? Doing the boring work of ironing out the kinks in the main project?").

thisrod 10y ago

> systems engineering, a very broad field born almost entirely from the NASA space program What's the evidence for that? The Idea Factory, a history of Bell Labs, claims that it was originally "system engineering", back when America's phone network was called the Bell System. Of course, there was a lot of overlap between Bell Labs and NASA. Echo, Telstar, transistors and so on.