Funding Models and Progress
As a computer science researcher working toward a PhD, I&#x27;ve been very interested in learning about the history of funding and also thinking about alternative funding models.<p>Speaking from the standpoint of computer science, I believe the golden age of scientific funding was between WWII through the early 1990s.  Bell Labs and Xerox PARC invented a lot of the technologies that we rely on today, and there is still an untapped reservoir of research that has yet to be fully applied (I still believe that Smalltalk80 is quite futuristic in many ways despite its being 40 years old).  DARPA and its predecessor ARPA was key for funding a lot of fundamental computer science work.  Back in the 1960s ARPA had a funding model that emphasized &quot;funding people, not projects.&quot;  Alan Kay discusses this more at <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;worrydream.com&#x2F;2017-12-30-alan&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;worrydream.com&#x2F;2017-12-30-alan&#x2F;</a>.<p>Unfortunately, since the 1990s (and possibly before then), both industry and government have shifted to the model of &quot;funding projects, not people,&quot; and there&#x27;s a greater emphasis on delivering short-term results instead of funding medium- and long-term research efforts.  There is also the PhD production problem, where more PhDs are being produced than there are research jobs available for them, whether they are in academia, government, or industry.  This results in plenty of computer science PhDs working as software engineers in non-research environments.  For a few years I&#x27;ve been considering becoming a professor at a teaching-oriented university; computer science professors have been in high demand at teaching universities for the past few years, and there are fewer &quot;publish-or-perish&quot; and funding pressures for teaching-oriented professors than for professors at research universities.  But now with the COVID-19 pandemic and the sudden shift to online education, I am concerned that this shift to online education, as well as the economic fallout of COVID-19, may dry up opportunities at teaching universities.<p>Because I still want to pursue a career in research even if traditional opportunities dry up, I am interested in alternative funding models that will ensure that researchers could still make a living in a world that demands instant results.