For the past 2 years, a response to an RFP has netted two unrestricted grants of about $40,000 for Associate Professor Frank Dellaert of the School of Interactive Computing to develop new online three-dimensional mapping technologies for Microsoft's Virtual Earth. Dellaert says the RFP application process is far less cumbersome than some federal grant applications, which require technical proposals 15 to 60 pages long. "With Microsoft, you write one page of text; there is no budget, just a back-of-the-envelope calculation. It's extremely painless."  Source: AAAS Science Magazine