I'm getting kind of sick of this tactic, where this fake concession is made before going on about how academia isn't designed well enough to deliver to industry.
If authors of articles like this didn't care about the efficiency of academia to deliver them research, what's the big deal if there are a bunch of people somewhere running around in circles? Hey, at least the CS academics occasionally produce something useful to industry, which is more than I can say about other groups running in circles. Sure it could be about burning through money, or a real desire to improve the state of CS academia. But if that was the case I'd expect these articles to have categorically different discussion and calls to action. Or - at the very least - address goals of acedemia other than performing research for industry.
I've never been an academic, and never want to be, but even I gave up reading after the "(I know, crazy, right?)" line. At that point, I knew for 100% sure, that the target audience of this article is not academics. Nobody is that much of a condescending prick to the person they're trying to persuade. This is not a "we need to talk" conversation this is a "I need to talk at you, so I can show off to other people."
This +1, er +1,000,000.
I would firmly state that academia by definition is not supposed to 'deliver to industry', and not even to society. The whole point of academia is to give the very smartest people (whatever that means) the freedom to explore ideas, so that a some point humanity may benefit from their ideas, experiments, and research.
My point is that it could be any number of generations of research from the current generation of (what seems like quack) research (to the establishment) will turn into being instrumental to our understanding of the universe. Galileo Galilei (and Copernicus) for instance. Their ideas (and research) did not sit well with the establishment of the Church (which was pretty much the central authority of everything at the time), but their ideas are now central to our understanding of our Solar system.
edit: formatting.
Students spend their money and time to learn something and frequently they get worked like a racehorse and nobody cares about if what they learn is transferable after the academic system no longer needs them.
If you are not going to be relevant to society the only thing I can do is vote for somebody who is going to cut your research budget.
That, and also, academia is several thousand years older than industry.
If you want to work on problems irrelevant to industry, go nuts.
If you want to work on problems relevant to the industry, it helps to double-check that your problems are relevant to the industry.
The desire to work on problems relevant to industry is coming from academia, not the author.
At the risk of sounding a little prickly with my comment - isn't it a little presumptuous to write off a certain amount of research as "wrong"? There are plenty of examples of research that didn't have a clear purpose leading to breakthroughs - safety glass, microwave ovens, and Teflon all spring to mind.
Also, focusing on efficiency doesn't really align with academia's purpose, which (to my mind) has more to do with fundamental research. This article about Xerox PARC springs to mind:
http://www.fastcodesign.com/3046437/5-steps-to-recreate-xero...
That is not the point of academia, and indeed not the point of why academics are offered tenure with their institutions. Please consider Galileo and Copernicus and the Church of the 15th and 16th centuries. Please consider history.
Google as a business may care about research being aligned with its business, or what 'society' or certain segments of society care about; Google really should not care what academia and academics want to work on. That is the point of, for better or worse, academia: independent research by some of our smartest people.
If Google, and industry, care about what gets research, they should fund it. They then can choose. Please leave academia and academics to be just that, academic.
Without government funding, support, and indeed the wider academia 'ecosystem', my father would have never been able to be a historian of the Scottish enlightenment, and producing the seminal book on Adam Smith. And if you don't think that the Scottish Enlightenment is important to our modern understanding of the Universe, then I suppose that you then have to rethink the contributions of these notable academics, scientists, engineers, and philosophers: David Hume, McLaren, Taylor, James Watt, Telford, Napier--off the top of my head.
My point is that my fathers book may not itself be a major contribution to a current revolutionary idea, but it will likely be part of some future realisation about economics, since Adam Smith is a major cornerstone of our current understanding of economic thought.
I like your post because I think it is the duty of academics to communicate their results for maximum positive effect and to represent real world impact accurately, but I also have to ask what can industry do to expose itself to excellent research which is sitting unused?
This dogma is one of worst thing happening to research.
Under this premise, investing in the arts is a waste of money, when you could invest in UX studies. Investing in the humanities is a waste of money, when you could invest in data analysis. Hell, why even have academia at all? Wouldn't it be better if education was managed and provided directly by the industry?
This fetish for optimisation only ends up hurting the sense of humanity in all of us. Not everything has to be done with the purpose of being disruptive, or in a frenzy for efficiency. Some people are just goddamn curious about bees and will study honey bees (as useless as it may sound) because understanding nature is a goddamn delight in its own right, even if it doesn't yield the next billion-dollar idea.
That innate delight and curiosity is where science is born. Let's appreciate that. It applies to STEM too. Maybe some academics don't care about your problems or in fact solving any problems at all, and decided to be in academia not for the "potentially-groundbreaking research" but just the thrill of finding new stuff and uncovering the beauty in the universe, don't you think?
In this case, please trying to take shortcuts towards their goal of improving the amount of publications and grant approvals. There is reward in the system for this kind of behaviour. You being a reviewer/jury position unfortunately do not have the luxury of a filter.
Is there a way to early catch this , by looking at past trends ?
Slight detour is that this is one of my rationale for spending time reviewing papers for journals/conferences. In average, only 10 to 20% of papers I review really stands out or appeal to me, which is correlated to acceptance rate of a top journal/conference.
"Industry focused" doesn't necessarily mean it's looking to push the needle of industry much yet. Often the first paper academics and students do in an area will really be about trying to take an industry problem into the lab, to see if they can prod it and discover what's interesting about it. Not yet about trying to push their research out into industry. Little experiments are how we get to look at new problems for the first time when we're not close enough to buy you a beer. And little papers are how we get to start discussing what we're doing with our peers at other universities. In a sense, where start-ups have Minimum Viable Products, PhD students and academics have Smallest Publishable Activities to start exploring a new area ;)
Sabbaticals and internships are a lovely idea, but it's increasingly hard to get universities to give leave to do that. (Backfilling an academic's teaching can be surprisingly hard to arrange, and then there's the academic's service roles for the university, their PhD, masters, and honours students, etc) So I expect most academics will always have many more research interests than sabbaticals / placements.
Ok, those are the constraints - on to the value:
Most universities do focus fairly heavily on industries in their area. (eg, agriculture in regional areas). But it's not a good idea for all their research to focus on that. If we teach in an area, we want to be at least somewhat research-active in it, as that's how we keep teaching from stagnating. And in lots of countries, students find it too expensive to move far from home, so they study at a uni they're in the catchment for. So unless we want to shrink the future pool of employees to children who grew up in academic-beer-buying-reach of a company in that industry, we really do need some research happening at universities outside beer-buying distance. Which means you'll get a bunch of "bad industry research" papers as they first explore the area.
You might not want a new multi-hop algorithm. But a graduating masters student who's designed their own multi-hop algorithm with different characteristics, and undergrads having had some exposure to the problem...
And sure, the interaction design student might only have developed their app for one mobile platform, not several, and only tested it with a dozen people not a million. But really that's because we figure it's probably sensible to find out if it was even worth writing for one platform, before we spend so much of that government-funded time on writing it to work across several...
There's quite a few things industry, such as Google, could do to help if you're keen to make the match between research and industry closer. One is to disseminate your problems, not just your libraries.
If Google emailed "here's a good small problem and project we'd be interested in" (a different problem to each university), I doubt there is a CS department in the world that would refuse to offer it as a project for their honours students. (Which means the faculty who supervise the students would be looking at the problem with interest too.) The academics would just need to know it's a unique problem for them -- that they're not being asked to compete with an unknown number of other honours students and academics around the world on the same problem (which really would be inefficient as well as unfair on the students).
The point the article tries to make is that if you're trying to research something relevent to industry, it's probably not nearly as valuable academically as something more exotic would be, so you'd better make a good effort to make it practically valuable to compensate.
Nobody is that much of a condescending prick to the person they're trying to persuade.
In context the line didn't appear condescending at all as I read it. A little sarcastic, that's all. The author made it clear that he doesn't think academics need to produce something that's actually used by consumers. And the author was/is an academic. If you'll allow me to speculate, it seems that you don't have the highest opinion of academics and so it seems possible that you might further think that in order to be valuable they need to produce a product that is economically valuable. If you read the "I know, crazy, right?" line with that attitude, I can see how it might appear much more condescending than it actually is.
This is not a "we need to talk" conversation this is a "I need to talk at you, so I can show off to other people."
This is a non sequitur. "This article isn't trying to persuade academics, therefore it is trying to promote the author's social standing at academics' expense". The author identified a problem and offered a potential solution, does that mean he also has to persuade? Your statement presents a false dichotomy, that he has to either persuade academics or shame academics to promote himself. I say that he doesn't make an attempt to persuade beyond identifying problem and solution because he doesn't want to bore the reader with rhetoric, nothing more nefarious.
(I work in an industry research lab, write code for a real product, and publish academic computer science papers.)
You can argue, quite rightly perhaps, that focusing on impact/industry applications is a bad idea, and that we will miss out on important epochal discoveries, but that is a problem with society, not the author of the blog post.
No f-ing way.
Cornell University has many departments that are good, but when I look at the agriculture and vet school they are beyond anybody else.
Ag schools do research which is relevant to the technological and business problems of their industry. They do plenty of work on genetic engineering, chemistry and work closely with the likes of Monsanto. They are doing a lot for big ag. They also do research to help small farmers beat pests without pesticides, produce and market (delicious!) Halal meat, even help householders same money and have a better lawn. "Organic" and "Alternative" innovations diffuse into the mainstream. Pesticides are expensive to buy and to apply; if there is a cultural tweak that's cheaper, they'll do it in a flash. When corn prices got high, Cornell promoted dairy farmers to plant cabbages and other crops as an alternative forage.
They are always beta testing new crops in our area; Cornell and UNH are finding variants of plants that perform well in the cold Northeast climate, have expanded Wine production and are commercializing new fruits such as the Paw Paw.
Their research is relevant, and it is also communicated directly to the public and industry. Cornell Agricultural Extension has an office in every county of the state that you can walk up to and call and get questions answered, go to an event, etc. They work with trade publications, local government.
And it is not just New York, they do research on tropical agriculture and run a program to get access to agricultural literature to anyone in poor countries that need it.
I would point to that as being a much more real "technology transfer" than the people who are concerned about copyrights and patents.
Please don't make unsubstantive, divisive generalizations like this in HN comments. They make the threads worse, including your otherwise fine comment.
This is all much different from a software researcher who can just work from his/her lab (or even bedroom) at all times. It's easy to lose sight of the greater industry when you don't need its (direct) help to complete your research.
It's unfortunate that a "lessons learned" paper summarizing a sabbatical in industry doing customer-facing work would not be publishable. Surely it's far more useful to other academics than most papers. It'd definitely be more broadly relevant.
My wife is a professor in a practical field and I'm always sad to hear what counts as a "good" paper or a publishable article. The big journals in these fields drive the notion of what is and isn't legitimate research. That's the point where what constitutes career-advancing "academic output" has to be changed. But I'm not enough of an insider to have any idea of how to go about doing that.
You have mentioned elsewhere that you are looking into how Google can help the academic world focus more on the right industrial questions, and you personally recommend such sabbaticals/internships -- so this seems like a natural step.
Of course, if your goal is that Google adopt your new system in their data centers, then you need to know what they already do. But the problem with that model of research is the initial goal, not the way it's currently executed.
For example, I'd love to improve search relevance, but w/o having access to Google's search engine to build on, it's pretty hard. That's my suggestion. :-)
Also, failure to address the general case is not so bad--it just means that the next part of the general case has to be addressed by the next researcher.
Finally, I think the real issue is academics who have an idea, and cloak it in pseudo-relevance to industry to sell it. A program analysis framework isn't suddenly industry-relevant now that it applied to JavaScript, and we should just be ok with not chasing the latest industry fad.
> It drives me insane to see papers that claim that some problem is "unsolved" when most of the industry players have already solved it, but they didn't happen to write an NSDI or SIGCOMM paper about it.
I've seen many examples of industry "solutions" that aren't documented, aren't published, and aren't even validated. There's a place for papers like these. I'm not quite your typical CS researcher (I do applied math and software for medical imaging), so YMMV, but I think this criticism is too harsh.
"Open" is a different league from proprietary. It doesn't matter that they are behind proprietary. but it matters when they are working on the wrong problems.
Having been bitten by the 'but we already know how to do that' comments, I find this particular aspect of industry to be very irritating. There are 3 possibilities:
The unpublished solution is brilliant.
The solution fits for very limited constraints applicable only to that situation.
The solution is a half-assed hack that only looks like it works.
In only one of those situations is the 'naive' comment valid.
Academics are in an insanely competitive environment, where what is rewarded is bringing in grants/high impact publications. There are a very select few academics that are so brilliant and have such sterling reputations they can afford to not play this game (like Matt Welsh's former advisor) but most young researchers don't have this luxury.
For example, Peter Higgs, the Nobel prize winner who postulated the existence of his namesake Boson, flat out said that: "I wouldn't be productive enough for today's academic system" (http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/06/peter-higgs-b...). He spent several years of quiet research without publishing anything to develop his theory - a young professor doing the same now is unthinkable. The most highly successful young scientists I know now are incredibly career driven and optimize ruthlessly for the kind of output that tenure committees are looking for.
Basically, if you want researchers to incorporate best practices (tests, version control, well commented code, etc) and to actually attempt ambitious longterm research programmes, make sure that's what you reward, and remember you cannot just reward success. By definition, something ambitious has a high possibility of failure - if failing means that your career is destroyed, then people won't do it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10141736
I had heard about BS in academia where only paper output, grants, citations, and so on count. That Anti had to fight to get them to care about his work being implemented speaks wonders about how this works out in practice. Had he only cared about academic success, he could've dropped some light technical details and graphs in the paper then been done with it while the idea collected dust. Many benefited from him fighting the tide on it to produce good papers and an implementation.
I'm not in academic circles but I bet many face the same battle. With the pressure, it might be impossible for them to produce the desired output on their own within their constraints. Or so difficult many give up. Perhaps we should encourage them to have one good line of research they string out over years for quality and ensuring delivery while doing lots of nice papers in between to keep institutions happy. Think that might work?
This couldn't be farther from the truth. Your idea's are generally credited to the company, which in turn is credited to the CEO or some other high up. On collaboration, it's only more collaborative within a given company, and not always even then. Between companies it's outright hostile to collaboration by definition.
Depending on the managers and team leads involved, that kind of thing can also happen when promotions come around. At every place I've worked, a common complaint is that the TL for the project got promoted despite not doing much because they were TL. Of course that's not supposed to happen, but it happens all the time.
The post seems to compare the worst case in academia vs. the best case in industry. You could just as easily flip things around and make industry sound bad.
This is like when Tim Bray mentioned that Amazon is great because he hasn't experienced the same problems that have gotten a lot of press lately. Of course he's treated well! He's Tim Bray!
Matt Welsh is exactly the kind of big name that isn't going to lose credit on something. Of course he gets credit! He's Matt Welsh!
There aren't that many professor jobs out there. It's unbelievably greedy to be taking one up to do industry's dirty work.
You can always take an afternoon off a semester here and there to be an adjunct and teach a SE class or give a guest lecture.
The companies wouldn't have done this work, at least outside of their research labs, because the solution's theory is too far from the need of any one problem. But the result -- a more memory-efficient hash table design -- turns out to be broadly useful.
And yes, I do consider this to be "industry-relevant" research. I'm not going to solve their problems for them -- but there can be great synergies between industry and academia for having broad impact through adoption.
(full disclosure: I'm an academic on sabbatical at Google for the year. It's likely I'm a little biased in my belief that both have value. But this isn't a bias unique to me; systems as a general area is close to industry, and most of my colleagues rotate in and out of industry periodically via sabbaticals or startups.)
Many capitulate altogether, trying to do industry work from their academic position. It is these last people who should get out.
The creation of the internet worked wonderfully. It was invented by academics based on government grants when it was basic research, and then refined and turned into something practical and workable and, most importantly, profitable, by industry. Exactly as it's supposed to be.
Imagine being someone who thinks that Capital could decide what is a good problem to work on...
But it's not just the hard & expensive stuff that they are resistant to. Even the "easy" stuff (like adopting a programming language designed by the professionals instead of the amateurs) they won't do.
I build interactive proof assistants. But I'm not pushing their applicability to industry, and I don't expect them to be relevant to industry (for a long time at least). Why? Because it's too expensive. Formal verification in type theory MAKES NO ECONOMIC SENSE; ask anyone who's actually ever done any industrial verification, and you will find out what tools they are using, and it has nothing at all to do with the area of research I'm involved in. This is because there are inherent trade-offs in every technique, and industrial use-cases tend to prefer a certain set of trade-offs, and I prefer a different one.
But it's a fascinating topic, and something that I'm preparing to devote the next several years of my life to. And I can safely say that a meteorite will more likely destroy Manhattan than will any of my computer science research be of widespread relevance to industry.
So, no, I totally disagree with everything you have said.
Alternatively: if you are doing work that attempts to have industry relevance you should have some idea of what problems are actually relevant to industry. In particular, just because you think something is an interesting and challenging problem that just has to be affecting industry players does not mean it actually is. It may have been solved already, or you may have made some poor assumptions on conceiving the problem which, if corrected, make the problem disappear entirely (perhaps replaced by a different one that would've been a more valuable research target).
If you're trying to do forward-looking invent things that aren't even a twinkle in industry's eye yet, that's absolutely fine too, and the author explicitly calls out that the only important thing here is to recognize when your work isn't likely to be applicable in the near term. Nowhere does Matt state that this makes this sort of research less valuable, and honestly in many cases academia is the only place it can reasonably happen due to funding incentives.
I also don't feel academia is obliged to any particular promise of delivery, but that's kind of independent.
Instead it's saying roughly: much of the work coming out of academia attempts solve problems applicable to industry, but in actuality industry is not actually suffering from the problems solved (either because underlying assumptions are wrong and industry is plagued by a different problem or because the problem has already be adequately solved by existing work).
"My first piece of advice: do a sabbatical or internship in industry."
"you have to work on a real product team"
"hold yourself to a higher standard"
"keep an open mind"
Over time, fields of study become industrialized. There was a time when doing research in computer vision, machine learning, and speech processing was risky because the field was new, difficult to enter, and the prospects for commercialization were slim. That time has passed. Those 20 people working at Google are the people that helped that time pass. One could argue that the place for this work is now in industry - the motivations are all right and the resources and data are aligned to carry the work forward at a rapid pace.
This happens in other fields. For example, there's some word on the street that DARPA is going to stop funding so much basic research into applied robotics. Industry, they say, has got this covered. You can argue that they're right. The commercial sector is starting to get real thirsty for robots. Amazon talks about automated drone delivery. Everyone talks about self driving cars. The military wants to buy automated planes as a purchase, not as a research project. The time for basic research, it seems, is over.
As far as I can tell, this happened with systems about fifteen years ago, so the academic activity you see in systems is what is left over after all of the researchers that could do things moved into applying their research in industry. You no longer need to have weird hair and be buried in a basement to think about 20 computers talking to each other in parallel - you can go work at any technology company and think about two million computers talking to each other in parallel, and get paid two orders of magnitude more money. So the people doing systems research in academia are the people that cannot take their systems research into industry. If they could get internships, they would, and then they would get jobs. They haven't.
Are there a bunch of protocols that I don't know about?
Are you maybe referring also to centralized path finding algorithms? This would explain the comment.
My PhD advisor never seemed to care particularly about publishing papers; rather, he wanted to move the needle for the field, and he did (multiple times).
Racking up publications is fine, but if you want to have impact on the real world, there's a lot more you can do.
Other academics, for example those doing "stuff going way beyond where industry is focused today" as the author explicitly states, can safely ignore it.
In my experience, this is only true until there is money to be made. Or more specifically, that industry was more than willing to share credit, but ownership was theirs.
Anyone who has ever been through a conference/journal submission process knows this pain. You can usually tell from the comments which of the reviewers is working in your field and wants to shut you out.
Therefore, I don't think Academics should stop doing what they do (i.e. wander around) and have a laser focus on Industry's product-based researches.
Apparently the author was unable to break that habit.
Judging academia from your experience on program committees is like judging the entertainment industry from watching Britain's Got Talent.