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But are any of those large scale DARPA projects pushing the foundations like some of the prior ones did? The ones you list are very applied, which may be appropriate for a nation at war, I took her point to be "where will the foundation for the next big thing come from?"

Hmmm, where would we place their VLSI project (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VLSI_Project), which among other things according to Wikipedia supported BSD?

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IMHO, semi-autonomous robotic control is one of the holy grails of CS.

Robotics hardware is maturing rapidly, but the software algorithms for visual sensing, planning and manipulation aren't there yet. This is standing in the way of robots running (vs walking) efficiently, tidying up your cluttered desk, or taking care of our elderly.

"semi-autonomous robotic control is one of the holy grails of CS"

Agreed 100%, and it's a difficult and worthwhile set of AI problems (just not ones I'm personally interested in :-). I have no trouble with the Grand Challenge given that the state of the art makes it practical, it's that other ... perhaps more foundational stuff is apparently being neglected. The stuff that's "wow!" in 10 years.

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