SETI@home director denies funding crisis

By Andrew Colley, ZDNet Australia, 18 October, 2002 10:09

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SETI@home's director has moved to dampen fears the project is in danger of closing, claiming its chief scientist was "probably just in a pessimistic mood" when he emailed Australian scientists with a gloomy prognosis for its future. "We all have to devote a lot of our energy to raising money...sometimes it can be a bit discouraging," director David Anderson said. "[Chief scientist] Dan [Werthimer] was probably in a pessimistic mood...Dan speaks for himself." Werthimer recently emailed SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) Australia chairman, Frank Stootman, informing him that the US-based academic research group had stopped work to include Australia in the next generation of the project, SETI@home II, as its funding was "drying up" and added that the future of SETI@home I and II was "very uncertain". However, Anderson directly contradicted Werthimer, giving assurances that work on SETI@home II hadn't stopped and that its current funding situation did not pose an immediate threat to the project's continuation. "I think he was just exaggerating things a bit, I think that if he knew that his email was going to be publicised to the world he would have been more precise about things," said Anderson. When asked what Werthimer needed to say to be more precise, Anderson said: "his words are precise but they don't actually reflect the current reality." Anderson explained that like most academic research projects surviving from one grant to the next, it is normal for SETI@home to live with the threat of closure constantly. Anderson conceded that SETI@home II may be delayed, saying he was unable to guarantee it would commence in Australia next March. However he said that this was not indicative of unusually difficult financial circumstances. Anderson said that the project's general lack of human resources meant that administrators sometimes had to reorganise their priorities. "Sometimes work goes faster or slower but as of right now that's an ongoing project," said Anderson. The SETI@home project operates on a budget of around $400,000 (£260,000) per year. Its corporate sponsors include Sun Microsystems, Fujifilm, IBM, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Quantum Corporation, Network Appliance and Informix. "Our situation right now -- the money that we currently have will last for four to five months and we have several grant proposals outstanding -- that's really a typical situation for us," said Anderson. Anderson conceded that information technology companies had tightened their purse strings since the sector collapsed but said they have never been its main source of income. According to Anderson The Planetary Society and the state of California are the project's main sponsors. The project had also recently won a $900,000 grant that would support components of the SETI@home project. The grant was awarded to develop the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC), which is expected to support a number of distributed computing projects. SETI@home has also recently gained the ability to apply to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) for funding grants, following the recent repeal of laws preventing US federal government money being spent on searches for extraterrestrial life. Anderson said the group currently has three funding proposals before NASA. SETI@home also has two further corporate sponsorship deals, worth several hundred thousand dollars in total, pending.

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