5 ms·

This list is a reminder that the work done by researchers and the work done in industry have profoundly little overlap, outside of a handful of high-profile exa

This list is a reminder that the work done by researchers and the work done in industry have profoundly little overlap, outside of a handful of high-profile examples. If the giants would like to do us all a massive favour: pay the IEEE and ACM for worldwide, perpetual, ongoing rights to their libraries. Because right now that vast ocean of literature is basically invisible to practitioners.

hnaccy 8y ago
Just use sci-hub.
robotresearcher 8y ago
Most of those papers’ first authors were in industry shortly afterwards. Most grad students go directly to industry and take their knowledge with them.
- jacques_chester 8y ago
  I don't see how "I can't learn more because they work for ExampleCo on proprietary technology" is an improvement on "I can't learn more because it's behind a paywall, along with everything it refers to and everything that refers to it". Google was founded, quite literally, out of studying the graph of literature. Here's one way they can move that original vision a little closer to reality.
  - QML 8y ago
    Are there any other influential companies that are like Google? I would love to know how well academic research transforms into industry.
    - jacques_chester 8y ago
      Industrial research has a long and influential history -- IBM, AT&T's Bell Labs, MS Research -- all doing pure research with generous budgets. But if their work is published by the IEEE CS or the ACM, you may not be able to read it. This situation has improved a lot in recent years as many authors will post copies on websites they control. But that doesn't account for the decades of work otherwise unavailable for direct reference.
    - chubot 8y ago
      IIRC, VMWare was started by a Stanford professor and directly based on his research in virtualization. I can't find the full story of the transition from academia to industry, but SimOS looks related for sure: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mendel_Rosenblum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mendel_Rosenblum (If anyone has details, please chime in.) - Pixar had a pretty long road to industry, but it has deep academic roots. Co-founder Ed Catmull published significant original research in computer graphics. - Yahoo was also started by 2 Stanford grad students, although it wasn't based on any research that I'm aware of. - Werner Vogels was one of my professors at Cornell, doing work on distributed computing, e.g. on gossip protocols, and he is now CTO of Amazon. - Guido van Rossum worked in Andrew Tanenbaum's lab (a professor whose OS book you might have), and Python was at least partly inspired by that experience. Python now runs much of the industry :) It would indeed be nice to see a list of "papers that companies are based on". The PageRank paper is well known (although Google search no longer resembles it). I suspect you can do the same thing for VMWare and Pixar, at the very least. Those two companies relied on significant technical advances. EDIT: Also Cisco and Stanford: https://www.siliconvalleyhistorical.org/cisco-systems/ https://www.siliconvalleyhistorical.org/cisco-systems/ This goes all the way back to Hewlett Packard, although I'm not sure if they're closer to Yahoo's case (same people) or Google's case (same subject area): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hewlett-Packard#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hewlett-Packard#History
- earthicus 8y ago
  Is that really how research in CS works? Certainly we hear about grad students doing lots of the work in laboratory sciences like biology, but in more analytic subjects like mathematics or theoretical physics its not true at all. Grad students making significant contributions is extremely rare; basically all of the real research is done by tenured professors. Can those of you who did postgrad CS tell us how much of the research is actually done by grad students vs professors?
  - anonymousDan 8y ago
    In my experience it's often (but definitely not always) the case that for new post-grad students the idea or general research direction often comes from the professor (especially if the research is funded by a grant proposal). Most of the heavy lifting is then done by the grad student with guidance and feedback from the professor. As the student matures they start to operate more independently.
  - Ar-Curunir 8y ago
    While the general idea might be professor-inspired, 90% of legwork is carried out by grad students.
  - chrisseaton 8y ago
    > Grad students making significant contributions is extremely rare; basically all of the real research is done by tenured professors. ...but most of these first authors (the people formally credited with doing the real work) are graduate students, so how does that fit in with your theory?
    - earthicus 8y ago
      I specifically made that claim of mathematics and theoretical physics, and requested first hand accounts of how it worked in CS.
      - chrisseaton 8y ago
        So how does it work in your field? Making your own significant contribution is literally the basic standard required for a PhD in most fields.
- deleted 8y ago
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chrisseaton 8y ago
> This list is a reminder that the work done by researchers and the work done in industry have profoundly little overlap, outside of a handful of high-profile examples. I'm not sure what you mean - this list seems to contain a healthy mix of academic and industrial work. Big names like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Oracle, are all represented. And why is it invisible to practitioners? Most tech companies will have a membership of these libraries anyway.
- jacques_chester 8y ago
  > I'm not sure what you mean - this list seems to contain a healthy mix of academic and industrial work. I'm focusing here on access to the publications, not on the email domain of the authors. > And why is it invisible to practitioners? Most tech companies will have a membership of these libraries anyway. Not everyone in tech works for a tech company.
- mindcrime 8y ago
  Most tech companies will have a membership of these libraries anyway. That does not jibe with my experience at all. In fact, I don't think that, in 20 years, I've ever worked at a company that had company-wide access to IEEE / ACM / etc. libraries. Or if any of them did, they didn't try very hard to make it known.
  - infinite8s 8y ago
    From what I've heard Google does.
  - justadudeama 8y ago
    Isn't this what hiring talent is for? I feel like companies who are interested in the best research going on right now, are either going to do it themselves or hire someone who is familiar with the topic. I don't know though.
nickpsecurity 8y ago
Another option is posting them to tech forums more often and/or voting them up for visibility. I was posting CompSci here as submissions and comments. Comments got attention with submissions mostly invisible. We had quite a few of these papers in main article on Lobsters since they upvote CompSci a lot. My default spot for CompSci papers now. There might be sub-Reddits with some of them, too. Gotta get the work out there ourselves instead of hoping the big companies will do it for us. Probably best to straight-up build stuff with it rather than telling people about it. Also, they'll listen more when someone brings data that improves their operations.
currymj 8y ago
most articles from after about 2000 have a version on arxiv, if the conferences and venues aren't already open access. in CS this is almost always substantially the same work as gets published in a conference or journal. Google Scholar the title in quotes and you will almost always find either the arXiv PDF or a version from the author website, conveniently linked along with well-formatted bibliographic information. also re ACM, an unlimited-access subscription to every ACM publication runs $198/year with an ACM professional membership (cheaper for students), if you have a moral objection to just using sci-hub. don't know if there's something similar for IEEE. things are way better in CS than basically any other field. not to say there aren't huge obstacles to connecting researchers and practitioners. but access to journals doesn't have to be one, once you know the same tricks grad students use when not on campus wifi.

hnaccy 8y ago

Just use sci-hub.

robotresearcher 8y ago

Most of those papers’ first authors were in industry shortly afterwards. Most grad students go directly to industry and take their knowledge with them.

jacques_chester 8y ago
I don't see how "I can't learn more because they work for ExampleCo on proprietary technology" is an improvement on "I can't learn more because it's behind a paywall, along with everything it refers to and everything that refers to it". Google was founded, quite literally, out of studying the graph of literature. Here's one way they can move that original vision a little closer to reality.
- QML 8y ago
  Are there any other influential companies that are like Google? I would love to know how well academic research transforms into industry.
  - jacques_chester 8y ago
    Industrial research has a long and influential history -- IBM, AT&T's Bell Labs, MS Research -- all doing pure research with generous budgets. But if their work is published by the IEEE CS or the ACM, you may not be able to read it. This situation has improved a lot in recent years as many authors will post copies on websites they control. But that doesn't account for the decades of work otherwise unavailable for direct reference.
  - chubot 8y ago
    IIRC, VMWare was started by a Stanford professor and directly based on his research in virtualization. I can't find the full story of the transition from academia to industry, but SimOS looks related for sure: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mendel_Rosenblum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mendel_Rosenblum (If anyone has details, please chime in.) - Pixar had a pretty long road to industry, but it has deep academic roots. Co-founder Ed Catmull published significant original research in computer graphics. - Yahoo was also started by 2 Stanford grad students, although it wasn't based on any research that I'm aware of. - Werner Vogels was one of my professors at Cornell, doing work on distributed computing, e.g. on gossip protocols, and he is now CTO of Amazon. - Guido van Rossum worked in Andrew Tanenbaum's lab (a professor whose OS book you might have), and Python was at least partly inspired by that experience. Python now runs much of the industry :) It would indeed be nice to see a list of "papers that companies are based on". The PageRank paper is well known (although Google search no longer resembles it). I suspect you can do the same thing for VMWare and Pixar, at the very least. Those two companies relied on significant technical advances. EDIT: Also Cisco and Stanford: https://www.siliconvalleyhistorical.org/cisco-systems/ https://www.siliconvalleyhistorical.org/cisco-systems/ This goes all the way back to Hewlett Packard, although I'm not sure if they're closer to Yahoo's case (same people) or Google's case (same subject area): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hewlett-Packard#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hewlett-Packard#History
earthicus 8y ago
Is that really how research in CS works? Certainly we hear about grad students doing lots of the work in laboratory sciences like biology, but in more analytic subjects like mathematics or theoretical physics its not true at all. Grad students making significant contributions is extremely rare; basically all of the real research is done by tenured professors. Can those of you who did postgrad CS tell us how much of the research is actually done by grad students vs professors?
- anonymousDan 8y ago
  In my experience it's often (but definitely not always) the case that for new post-grad students the idea or general research direction often comes from the professor (especially if the research is funded by a grant proposal). Most of the heavy lifting is then done by the grad student with guidance and feedback from the professor. As the student matures they start to operate more independently.
- Ar-Curunir 8y ago
  While the general idea might be professor-inspired, 90% of legwork is carried out by grad students.
- chrisseaton 8y ago
  > Grad students making significant contributions is extremely rare; basically all of the real research is done by tenured professors. ...but most of these first authors (the people formally credited with doing the real work) are graduate students, so how does that fit in with your theory?
  - earthicus 8y ago
    I specifically made that claim of mathematics and theoretical physics, and requested first hand accounts of how it worked in CS.
    - chrisseaton 8y ago
      So how does it work in your field? Making your own significant contribution is literally the basic standard required for a PhD in most fields.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

chrisseaton 8y ago

> This list is a reminder that the work done by researchers and the work done in industry have profoundly little overlap, outside of a handful of high-profile examples. I'm not sure what you mean - this list seems to contain a healthy mix of academic and industrial work. Big names like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Oracle, are all represented. And why is it invisible to practitioners? Most tech companies will have a membership of these libraries anyway.

jacques_chester 8y ago
> I'm not sure what you mean - this list seems to contain a healthy mix of academic and industrial work. I'm focusing here on access to the publications, not on the email domain of the authors. > And why is it invisible to practitioners? Most tech companies will have a membership of these libraries anyway. Not everyone in tech works for a tech company.
mindcrime 8y ago
Most tech companies will have a membership of these libraries anyway. That does not jibe with my experience at all. In fact, I don't think that, in 20 years, I've ever worked at a company that had company-wide access to IEEE / ACM / etc. libraries. Or if any of them did, they didn't try very hard to make it known.
- infinite8s 8y ago
  From what I've heard Google does.
- justadudeama 8y ago
  Isn't this what hiring talent is for? I feel like companies who are interested in the best research going on right now, are either going to do it themselves or hire someone who is familiar with the topic. I don't know though.

nickpsecurity 8y ago

Another option is posting them to tech forums more often and/or voting them up for visibility. I was posting CompSci here as submissions and comments. Comments got attention with submissions mostly invisible. We had quite a few of these papers in main article on Lobsters since they upvote CompSci a lot. My default spot for CompSci papers now. There might be sub-Reddits with some of them, too. Gotta get the work out there ourselves instead of hoping the big companies will do it for us. Probably best to straight-up build stuff with it rather than telling people about it. Also, they'll listen more when someone brings data that improves their operations.

currymj 8y ago

most articles from after about 2000 have a version on arxiv, if the conferences and venues aren't already open access. in CS this is almost always substantially the same work as gets published in a conference or journal. Google Scholar the title in quotes and you will almost always find either the arXiv PDF or a version from the author website, conveniently linked along with well-formatted bibliographic information. also re ACM, an unlimited-access subscription to every ACM publication runs $198/year with an ACM professional membership (cheaper for students), if you have a moral objection to just using sci-hub. don't know if there's something similar for IEEE. things are way better in CS than basically any other field. not to say there aren't huge obstacles to connecting researchers and practitioners. but access to journals doesn't have to be one, once you know the same tricks grad students use when not on campus wifi.