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TLDR; some research requires couple of decades to bear the fruit but people in power, especially in industrial labs don’t have much patience. I don’t see any n

TLDR; some research requires couple of decades to bear the fruit but people in power, especially in industrial labs don’t have much patience. I don’t see any new insights. This is very well known fact. Typically industrial labs starts with lot of fan fare about long term view, big bets, blue sky research, don’t worry about business impact etc. Eventually after few years or decades, people starts counting money spent vs money earned. Then suddenly you have research evaluation meetings where you have to justify everything in terms of business impact. I think this is the life cycle of industrial labs.

mattkrause 7y ago
I'm not sure academic labs are in any better shape. Outside of a few very rarified places (NIH intramural research, HHMI-funded labs, etc), the incentives are such that most projects need to be such that 1-2 main people can produce a publishable result every 1-2 years. You get a bit of a grace period when starting grad school, and shorter ones when starting a postdoc or a faculty position, but the ability to stumble around a problem and explore it from multiple angles has become an incredible luxury.
- abdullahkhalids 7y ago
  > You get a bit of a grace period when starting grad school, and shorter ones when starting a postdoc or a faculty position, but the ability to stumble around a problem and explore it from multiple angles has become an incredible luxury. I don't think you are overstating or misstating the problem. The economic incentives do prevent certain kinds of long term research programs, but they only slow down other kinds. What grants demand is that research publish often. So researchers have to plan ahead and mostly only pursue avenues that can lead to publication with a year or so of work. If they can break down a big research goal into small yearly chunks, some of which can happen in parallel even, that big goal will eventually be reached. Of course, what slows down things is that a lot of effort have to be repeated per paper. Part of it is new grad students that have to learn everything from scratch, part of it is just the writing down of the paper and going through the review process, etc. But if the research program can't be broken down, then its some prof working on it on the side while they scramble to publish enough to keep their job/funding. Usually, they don't make much progress and for all intents and purposes the research goal has been prevented by the system's incentive structure.
linguae 7y ago
I wonder what the future is going to be like for research within the next few decades? Since working in industry for the past five years largely in research environments, I've noticed a profound shift away from research labs run by companies like IBM, HP, Intel, and Sun/Oracle that focused on medium-term research ideas and emphasized publications and prototypes, to a hybrid model of research and product development, pioneered by Google (see "Google's Hybrid Approach to Research" [https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//pubs/archive/38149.pdf] https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...) and has since become widespread among Silicon Valley's largest and most successful companies. This hybrid research model is more short-term driven compared to the medium-term approaches of the labs of the 1990s and 2000s, and especially compared to the long-term visions of the legendary Bell Labs and Xerox PARC of the 1970s and 1980s. I have no doubt that this hybrid research model has been successful for companies like Google and Facebook from a business standpoint. However, there is still a need for medium-term and long-term research, for the sake of our field and also for the sake of providing future inventions that industry can sell. There is also still a need for theoretical and explorative types of research that may not immediately have commercial applications. Academia would appear to be a great fit for pursuing medium- and long-term research, but the realities of fund-raising and competing for tenure in academia makes it difficult for academics to pursue risky medium- and long-term projects. I've been thinking a lot about this regarding my career. I'd love to work on medium- and long-term projects and aim for expanding scientific knowledge, but industry is increasingly focused on short-term gains, and academia is very competitive, from trying to obtain a tenure-track assistant professorship to trying to earn tenure.
- sgt101 7y ago
  There is a big problem of feedback with respect to longer term ideas and technology development. In my experience folks at the coal-face (doing delivery, operating the machines) have vital information that would save a huge amount of time in research efforts - not bothering to even investigate certain approaches for example. Sadly this information is often discovered post-hoc! I think that this is what hybrid research taps into, and is the right way to tackle things that will be delivered to market in 5 years or less. Interestingly there is very little effort in research in general in creating and discovering that qualifying information because there isn't much short or medium term reward in ruling things out - creating negative results. Academia is now very remote from industry in EU/UK comp sci at least, there are entire communities of work that appear and run and from almost the beginning are known to be very unlikely to create any real or practical result. The poster child for this is the Human Brain Project, but it was apparent that Semantic Web was essentially an open question in computer science very early on, and yet it was sold to the commission and many other funding bodies as incremental technology development. There are other big examples. The problem is that no one is interested in derailing the gravy train and the funding agencies seem to either be under political influence or not to have any critical facilities or institutional memory.
Jaxan 7y ago
Maybe this is well known, but it's still worth repeating (like many things which are true are worth repeating). As a young researcher, I like Vardi's short essays a lot. He has some historical perspective which many of my peers don't have.

mattkrause 7y ago

I'm not sure academic labs are in any better shape. Outside of a few very rarified places (NIH intramural research, HHMI-funded labs, etc), the incentives are such that most projects need to be such that 1-2 main people can produce a publishable result every 1-2 years. You get a bit of a grace period when starting grad school, and shorter ones when starting a postdoc or a faculty position, but the ability to stumble around a problem and explore it from multiple angles has become an incredible luxury.

abdullahkhalids 7y ago
> You get a bit of a grace period when starting grad school, and shorter ones when starting a postdoc or a faculty position, but the ability to stumble around a problem and explore it from multiple angles has become an incredible luxury. I don't think you are overstating or misstating the problem. The economic incentives do prevent certain kinds of long term research programs, but they only slow down other kinds. What grants demand is that research publish often. So researchers have to plan ahead and mostly only pursue avenues that can lead to publication with a year or so of work. If they can break down a big research goal into small yearly chunks, some of which can happen in parallel even, that big goal will eventually be reached. Of course, what slows down things is that a lot of effort have to be repeated per paper. Part of it is new grad students that have to learn everything from scratch, part of it is just the writing down of the paper and going through the review process, etc. But if the research program can't be broken down, then its some prof working on it on the side while they scramble to publish enough to keep their job/funding. Usually, they don't make much progress and for all intents and purposes the research goal has been prevented by the system's incentive structure.

linguae 7y ago

I wonder what the future is going to be like for research within the next few decades? Since working in industry for the past five years largely in research environments, I've noticed a profound shift away from research labs run by companies like IBM, HP, Intel, and Sun/Oracle that focused on medium-term research ideas and emphasized publications and prototypes, to a hybrid model of research and product development, pioneered by Google (see "Google's Hybrid Approach to Research" [https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//pubs/archive/38149.pdf] https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...) and has since become widespread among Silicon Valley's largest and most successful companies. This hybrid research model is more short-term driven compared to the medium-term approaches of the labs of the 1990s and 2000s, and especially compared to the long-term visions of the legendary Bell Labs and Xerox PARC of the 1970s and 1980s. I have no doubt that this hybrid research model has been successful for companies like Google and Facebook from a business standpoint. However, there is still a need for medium-term and long-term research, for the sake of our field and also for the sake of providing future inventions that industry can sell. There is also still a need for theoretical and explorative types of research that may not immediately have commercial applications. Academia would appear to be a great fit for pursuing medium- and long-term research, but the realities of fund-raising and competing for tenure in academia makes it difficult for academics to pursue risky medium- and long-term projects. I've been thinking a lot about this regarding my career. I'd love to work on medium- and long-term projects and aim for expanding scientific knowledge, but industry is increasingly focused on short-term gains, and academia is very competitive, from trying to obtain a tenure-track assistant professorship to trying to earn tenure.

sgt101 7y ago
There is a big problem of feedback with respect to longer term ideas and technology development. In my experience folks at the coal-face (doing delivery, operating the machines) have vital information that would save a huge amount of time in research efforts - not bothering to even investigate certain approaches for example. Sadly this information is often discovered post-hoc! I think that this is what hybrid research taps into, and is the right way to tackle things that will be delivered to market in 5 years or less. Interestingly there is very little effort in research in general in creating and discovering that qualifying information because there isn't much short or medium term reward in ruling things out - creating negative results. Academia is now very remote from industry in EU/UK comp sci at least, there are entire communities of work that appear and run and from almost the beginning are known to be very unlikely to create any real or practical result. The poster child for this is the Human Brain Project, but it was apparent that Semantic Web was essentially an open question in computer science very early on, and yet it was sold to the commission and many other funding bodies as incremental technology development. There are other big examples. The problem is that no one is interested in derailing the gravy train and the funding agencies seem to either be under political influence or not to have any critical facilities or institutional memory.

Jaxan 7y ago

Maybe this is well known, but it's still worth repeating (like many things which are true are worth repeating). As a young researcher, I like Vardi's short essays a lot. He has some historical perspective which many of my peers don't have.