For me, it all started with a YouTube video¹ of a shrimp on an underwater treadmill accompanied by the "Benny Hill" theme song. Why was this shrimp on an endless journey, running seemingly forever, and why was it so gosh darn funny? The humor question is easy—you don't see shrimp hitting the gym every day. But why did this video exist in the first place? Of course there are thousands, if not millions, of humorous videos involving treadmills on YouTube, but only this one was being investigated by the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space and Technology. It turns out this video was part of research that was funded by the United States National Science Foundation (NSF).

You might start to wonder why putting a shrimp on a treadmill is important research, but let me assure you, it is. Professor David Scholnick at the Pacific University in Oregon conducted this research to understand how water quality can affect shrimps' movements and the distances they can travel in a short time. And Professor Robert Full, a biologist at UC Berkeley who works closely with roboticists, uses similar videos of various animals (from crabs to cats) on treadmills to understand the biomechanics of their locomotion. It turns out these animals are extremely efficient. By understanding how nature can achieve such highly efficient locomotion, we may be able to build more advanced and smaller robots. New, efficient mini robots could be deployed to search and rescue missions because they are smaller and could run for longer on a battery.

We need research that not only points to new, more efficient algorithms, but also to more efficient ways to use computing to stop the spread of disease or to help people lose weight.

This formative basic research may seem unimportant or even comical, yet it has the potential to provide discoveries that could change the way robotics works or have other unforeseen applications.

Why should we do this basic research and more importantly why should anyone, especially the government, pay for it? And why should computer science research take place in academia if there are thousands of companies in Silicon Valley and around the world creating new, innovative technologies and products? These questions are becoming increasingly important for us as a research community to answer as interest in federal funding for the sciences decreases.

Other fields have long dealt with having to provide financial justification for their research. Physicist David Kaplan, theoretical particle physics expert from John Hopkins and producer of the film "Particle Fever" about the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, often gets asked about evaluating the results of such a large project in financial terms. His reply: "I have no idea. We have no idea. When radio waves were discovered, they weren't called radio waves, because there were no radios. They were discovered as some sort of radiation."²

To me this is at the heart of why basic research is so important, because undiscovered knowledge can impact the world in amazing, unintended, and unforeseeable ways. Often advanced research topics may sound obscure or arcane, or even unnecessary (much like a shrimp on a treadmill) to outsiders, but experts in the field may think these are the very projects that should get funded. Right now in the U.S. a witch-hunt, reminiscent of the Golden Fleece award of the 1970s and '80s, is on to find government funded research that should not have been funded. Currently the House Committee on Space and Science has been investigating a number of NSF research grants across a wide variety of topics, including computing projects that investigate crowd sourcing, ubiquitous sensing on mobile devices, and creativity support tools and gaming.³ And the time-honored tradition of anonymous expert peer review of research projects at the NSF is coming under close scrutiny as well. Of course, there are many issues with peer review, and we should no doubt have more oversight into how the NSF allocates funds, but my fear is that these investigations are very politically motivated.

In many ways this is part of a larger goal of the House Committee on Space and Science to defund social science research.⁴ While we as computer science students may think this has little to do with us, it actually hits much closer to home. Computing research is increasingly focused on social networks and understanding how people interact with and through computers. We need research that not only points to new, more efficient algorithms, but also to more efficient ways to use computing to stop the spread of disease or to help people lose weight. This issue covers health and technology, and what we see is that so much of this research really focuses not only on computing, but also on understanding people and the intersection between CS and social science, or CS and health or biology. This kind of research is critical for CS and for CS students to have an impact in the world today. However, it seems we as a community need to do a better job of conveying the importance and value of our work. In the age of YouTube, TED, and crowd-sourced funding on Kickstarter, we need to be thinking beyond our publication record.

One could make an argument that CS research could be done by the large tech industry. Certainly there is great innovation coming from industry in the form of new technologies, new applications, and also new research topics (Microsoft Research is one of the largest publishers of CS research). But, often the constraints that help industry come up with new solutions can be burdensome for pursuing research that has no clear financial benefit today. And the fast pace of industry means labs come and go,⁵ interest in research topics change quickly, and internal funding is often short term, making it hard to have long-term research projects. We still need publicly funded research in computing.

Social science and applied research matter. And they matter in a CS context. We student members of the computing community need to stand up and make it clear that we see a future in which computing is an integral part of any research agenda, ensuring that computing has a broad and diverse definition in the years to come.

—Sean Follmer and Inbal Talgam-Cohen

  Footnotes

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qj-yAHTfVeE

2. http://sploid.gizmodo.com/heres-the-perfect-answer-to-why-we-must-invest-in-pure-1665820877/+ericlimer

3. http://news.sciencemag.org/policy/2014/10/battle-between-nsf-and-house-science-committee-escalates-how-did-it-get-bad

4. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/06/02/house-passes-nsf-funding-bill-takes-slap-social-sciences

5. http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-to-close-microsoft-research-lab-in-silicon-valley/

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