After World War II, under the influence (direct and indirect) of people like Vannevar Bush, a "grand bargain" was effectively struck between the US government and the nation's universities.  The war had demonstrated how important science and engineering research could be, through the Manhattan Project and the development of radar, among other things.  University researchers had effectively and sometimes literally been conscripted into the war effort.  In the postwar period, with more citizens than ever going to college because of the GI Bill, universities went through a period of rapid growth, and the government began funding research at universities on the large scale.  This was a way of accomplishing multiple goals.  This funding got hundreds of scientists and engineers to work on projects that advisors and the academic community itself (through peer review) thought would be important but perhaps were of such long-term or indirect economic impact that industry would be unlikely to support them.  It trained the next generation of researchers and of the technically skilled workforce.  It accomplished this as a complement to national laboratories and direct federal agency work. After Sputnik, there was an enormous ramp-up of investment.  This figure (see here for an interactive version) shows different contributions to investment in research and development in the US from 1953 through 2021: Figure from NSF report on US R&D investment  A couple of days ago, the New York Times published a related figure, showing the growth in dollars of total federal funds sent to US universities, but I think this is a more meaningful graph (hat tip to Prof. Elizabeth Popp Berman at Michigan for her discussion of this).  In 2021, federal investment in research (the large majority of which is happening at universities) as a percentage of GDP was at its lowest level since 1953, and it was sinking further even before this year (for those worried about US competitiveness....  Also, industry does a lot more D than they do long-term R.). There are many studies by economists showing that federal investment in research has a large return (for example, here is one by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas saying that returns to the US economy on federal research expenditures are between 150% and 300%).  Remember, these funds are not just given to universities - they are in the form of grants and contracts, for which specific work is done and reported.   These investments also helped make US higher education the envy of much of the world and led to education of international students as a tremendous effective export business for the country. Of course, like any system created organically by people, there are problems.  Universities are complicated and full of (ugh) academics.  Higher education is too expensive.  Compliance bureaucracy can be onerous.  Any deliberative process like peer review trades efficiency for collective expertise but also the hazards of group-think.  At the same time, the relationship between federally sponsored research and universities has led to an enormous amount of economic, technological, and medical benefit over the last 70 years. Right now it looks like this whole apparatus is being radically altered, if not dismantled in part or in whole.  Moreover, this is not happening as a result of a debate or discussion about the proper role and scale of federal spending at universities, or an in-depth look at the flaws and benefits of the historically developed research ecosystem.  It's happening because "elections have consequences", and I'd be willing to bet that very very few people in the electorate cast their votes even secondarily because of this topic.   Sincere people can have differing opinions about these issues, but decisions of such consequence and magnitude should not be taken lightly or incidentally.   (I am turning off comments on this one b/c I don't have time right now to pay close attention.  Take it as read that some people would comment that US spending must be cut back and that this is a consequence.)

Holistic evaluations are for machines, not people

According to mathematical legend, Peter Sarnak and Noga Alon made a bet about optimal graphs in the late 1980s. They’ve now both been proved wrong. The post New Proof Settles Decades-Old Bet About Connected Networks first appeared on Quanta Magazine

This year, Bell Labs celebrates its hundredth birthday. In a centennial celebration held last week at the Murray Hill, New Jersey campus, the lab’s impressive technological history was celebrated with talks, panels, demos, and over a half dozen gracefully aging Nobel laureates. During its impressive 100 year tenure, Bell Labs scientists invented the transistor, laid down the theoretical grounding for the digital age, discovered radio astronomy which led to the first evidence in favor of the big bang theory, contributed to the invention of the laser, developed the Unix operating system, invented the charge-coupled device (CCD) camera, and many more scientific and technological contributions that have earned Bell Labs ten Noble prizes and five Turing awards. “I normally tell people, this is the ‘Bell Labs invented everything’ tour,” said Nokia Bell Labs archivist Ed Eckert as he led a tour through the lab’s history exhibit. The lab is smaller than it once was. The main campus in Murray Hill, New Jersey appears like a bit of a ghost town, with empty cubicles and offices lining the halls. Now, it’s planning a move to a smaller facility in New Brunswick, New Jersey sometime in 2027. In its heyday, Bell Labs boasted around 6,000 workers at the Murray Hill location. Although that number has now dwindled to about 1,000, more work at other locations around the world The Many Accomplishments of Bell Labs Despite its somewhat diminished size, Bell Labs, now owned by Nokia, is alive and kicking. “As Nokia Bell Labs, we have a dual mission,” says Bell Labs president Peter Vetter. “On the one hand, we need to support the longevity of the core business. That is networks, mobile networks, optical networks, the networking at large, security, device research, ASICs, optical components that support that network system. And then we also have the second part of the mission, which is help the company grow into new areas.” Some of the new areas for growth were represented in live demonstrations at the centennial. A team at Bell Labs is working on establishing the first cellular network on the moon. In February, Intuitive Machines sent their second lunar mission, Athena, with Bell Labs’ technology on board. The team fit two full cellular networks into a briefcase-sized box, the most compact networking system ever made. This cell network was self-deploying: Nobody on Earth needs to tell it what to do. The lunar lander tipped on its side upon landing and quickly went offline due to lack of solar power, Bell Labs’ networking module had enough time to power up and transmit data back to Earth. Another Bell Labs group is focused on monitoring the world’s vast network of undersea fiber-optic cables. Undersea cables are subject to interruptions, be it from adversarial sabotage, undersea weather events like earthquakes or tsunamis, or fishing nets and ship anchors. The team wants to turn these cables into a sensor network, capable of monitoring the environment around a cable for possible damage. The team has developed a real-time technique for monitoring mild changes in cable length, so sensitive that the lab-based demo was able to pick up tiny vibrations from the presenter’s speaking voice. This technique can pin changes down to a 10 kilometer interval of cable, greatly simplifying the search for affected regions. Nokia is taking the path less travelled when it comes to quantum computing, pursuing so-called topological quantum bits. These qubits, if made, would be much more robust to noise than other approaches, and are more readily amenable to scaling. However, building even a single qubit of this kind has been elusive. Nokia Bell Labs’ Robert Willett has been at it since his graduate work in 1988, and the team expect to demonstrate the first NOT gate with this architecture later this year. Beam-steering antennas for point-to-point fixed wireless are normally made on printed circuit boards. But as the world goes to higher frequencies, toward 6G, conventional printed circuit board materials are no longer cutting it—the signal loss makes them economically unviable. That’s why a team at Nokia Bell Labs has developed a way to print circuit boards on glass instead. The result is a small glass chip that has 64 integrated circuits on one side and the antenna array on the other. A 100 gigahertz link using the tech was deployed at the Paris Olympics in 2024, and a commercial product is on the roadmap for 2027. Mining, particularly autonomous mining that avoids putting humans in harm’s way, relies heavily on networking. That’s why Nokia has entered the mining business, developing smart digital twin technology that models the mine and the autonomous trucks that work on it. Their robo-truck system features two cellular modems, three Wifi cards, and twelve ethernet ports. The system collects different types of sensor data and correlates them on a virtual map of the mine (the digital twin). Then, it uses AI to suggest necessary maintenance and to optimize scheduling. The lab is also dipping into AI. One team is working on integrating large language models with robots for industrial applications. These robots have access to a digital twin model of the space they are in and have a semantic representation of certain objects in their surroundings. In a demo, a robot was verbally asked to identify missing boxes in a rack, and it successfully pointed out which box wasn’t found in its intended place, and when prompted travelled to the storage area and identified the replacement. The key is to build robots that can “reason about the physical world,” says Matthew Andrews, a researcher in the AI lab. A test system will be deployed in a warehouse in the United Arab Emirates in the next six months. Despite impressive scientific demonstrations, there was an air of apprehension about the event. In a panel discussion about the future of innovation, Princeton engineering dean Andrea Goldsmith said, “I’ve never been more worried about the innovation ecosystem in the US.” Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt said in a keynote that “The current administration seems to be trying to destroy university R&D.” Nevertheless, Schmidt and others expressed optimism about the future of innovation at Bell Labs and the US more generally. “We will win, because we are right and R&D is the foundation of economic growth,” he said.