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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 en

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.
semi-extrinsic 7y ago
FYI, you should add a space before the closing ], otherwise HN formatting makes it part of the URL. Currently clicking your link returns a 404 due to this.

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.

semi-extrinsic 7y ago

FYI, you should add a space before the closing ], otherwise HN formatting makes it part of the URL. Currently clicking your link returns a 404 due to this.