I'm not sure DARPA is that hot these days. Having worked on a DARPA project and talked to (and gone drinking with) a lot of people in academia and industry that

I'm not sure DARPA is that hot these days. Having worked on a DARPA project and talked to (and gone drinking with) a lot of people in academia and industry that work on DARPA projects, it seems they're suffering from focusing too hard on yearly "deliverables". In my experience, that makes it difficult to get anything too interesting done as people (due to budgetary constraints, particularly at the industrial research labs) focusing on getting the minimum deliverables done, instead of trying new things. The downside here is pretty obvious: if a DARPA program manager could specify 3 years in advance what should be achieved, then it isn't really research, more like engineering. I guess that's why most savvy researchers only write DARPA/NSF proposals for things they've already done (but not published on); gives them money to work on the _next_ big thing :-)