The US Commerce Department’s National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) has announced co-funding for 79 new industrial research projects through its Advanced Technology Program. The government will share the costs of these projects with the industry. The awards were made in nine categories, including adaptive learning, photonics manufacturing and digital video in information networks. Internet, communications and convergence projects were notable winners. In particular, GE Corporate Research got the nod for planned improvements to high definition television (HDTV) receivers, while beleaguered Oregon company Tektronix Inc (CI No 3,497) won funding for its Video Fusion technology, which it hopes will do for web-based and interactive video what MIDI did for the recording industry. All that said, the product-centric nature of the awards and their dependence on industry for sharing costs typify the complaints made back in July by the Presidential Advisory Committee on High Performance Computing and Communications, Information Technology and the Next Generation Internet. The Committee says bureaucrats support short-term projects with immediate applications at the expense of longer-term, pure research, to the industry’s lasting detriment.
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