LingPipe Blog

As some of you may have read on our About Alias-i page, up until two years ago, when we started picking up serious commercial work, the majority of our revenue was generated through government research programs. Our latest grant was in the area of text data mining for the National Library of Medicine (NLM), one of the institutes making up the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

This is the best thing I’ve found for an overview of where research and development money is being spent by the United States government:

It’s especially nice to see the upward trend of NIH funding over the past 10 years. We’re waiting to hear back on a Phase II SBIR proposal; it was our Phase I SBIR that launched our work in biomedical text data mining.

We were originally funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the folks who funded the folks who invented the internet. It’s really a shame that DARPA has been cutting back on academic funding (here’s another article), though I can’t say I miss phrases like “tooth to tail ratio”. Even the funding that exists for academics in speech and language processing, such as in the Global Autonomous Language Exploitation (GALE) program, are moving even further away from “research” and toward “development.”

I found it very surprising that the social science research budget (not counting psychology) was 5% of NIH’s budget. That’s a whole lot of social science.

This entry was posted on March 19, 2007 at 5:22 pm and is filed under Carp's Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.