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As a computer science researcher working toward a PhD, I've been very interested in learning about the history of funding and also thinking about alternative fu

As a computer science researcher working toward a PhD, I've been very interested in learning about the history of funding and also thinking about alternative funding models. Speaking from the standpoint of computer science, I believe the golden age of scientific funding was between WWII through the early 1990s. Bell Labs and Xerox PARC invented a lot of the technologies that we rely on today, and there is still an untapped reservoir of research that has yet to be fully applied (I still believe that Smalltalk80 is quite futuristic in many ways despite its being 40 years old). DARPA and its predecessor ARPA was key for funding a lot of fundamental computer science work. Back in the 1960s ARPA had a funding model that emphasized "funding people, not projects." Alan Kay discusses this more at http://worrydream.com/2017-12-30-alan/ http://worrydream.com/2017-12-30-alan/. Unfortunately, since the 1990s (and possibly before then), both industry and government have shifted to the model of "funding projects, not people," and there's a greater emphasis on delivering short-term results instead of funding medium- and long-term research efforts. There is also the PhD production problem, where more PhDs are being produced than there are research jobs available for them, whether they are in academia, government, or industry. This results in plenty of computer science PhDs working as software engineers in non-research environments. For a few years I've been considering becoming a professor at a teaching-oriented university; computer science professors have been in high demand at teaching universities for the past few years, and there are fewer "publish-or-perish" and funding pressures for teaching-oriented professors than for professors at research universities. But now with the COVID-19 pandemic and the sudden shift to online education, I am concerned that this shift to online education, as well as the economic fallout of COVID-19, may dry up opportunities at teaching universities. Because I still want to pursue a career in research even if traditional opportunities dry up, I am interested in alternative funding models that will ensure that researchers could still make a living in a world that demands instant results.

btrettel 7y ago
> Because I still want to pursue a career in research even if traditional opportunities dry up, I am interested in alternative funding models that will ensure that researchers could still make a living in a world that demands instant results. I too am interested in alternative funding models for research. I've looked at the teaching faculty jobs you mentioned, but there aren't too many of them in my field as-is, so I don't consider those to be a good option for most. The model I'm currently looking at uses ideas from the financial independence/early retirement community. Basically, I'll do research independently and live as cheaply as possible so that what money I do get goes farther. (It helps that grad school has made me live very cheaply already...) I don't require expensive equipment to do my research, so I think this is doable. As for how to make money, I'm looking at multiple options including working a full time job for a while to build capital, starting a small business, grants, getting money from patrons, etc. While adjunct pay isn't good, working as an adjunct every once in a while might not be a bad idea to find new collaborators and get library access. I'm also told that the UT Austin engineering schools pays about $10K per class for an adjunct, which again, isn't fantastic, but would actually cover about half of my estimated yearly costs. Ultimately I think I can spend much less time raising funds than tenured professors do, which I've seen estimated at around 40% of their time! https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2011/04/25/chasing-grants/ https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2011/04/25/chasing-grants/ For starting a small business, I'd expect many to require a lot of time up front, but I'm willing to do that if it means that longer-term I can make reliable income with minimal investment on my part. I'm starting with consulting, which I don't expect will be a huge source of income for me, but I'll take what I can get. Ultimately I'll probably have to have multiple income sources, which isn't entirely bad. If any one source dries up then I shouldn't be much worse off. This seems to be the largest online meeting place for independent researchers: https://forum.igdore.org/ https://forum.igdore.org/
auggierose 7y ago
I don't have solid advice on that, but if you are leaning towards a higher-risk approach you can do what I am doing: Work as a freelancer about 50% of your time, do research in the spare 50%. The problem with that approach is that as a freelancer you usually need to constantly look for work, which I currently don't have to do, but that may change. The advantage of that approach is that your research is as free at it can possibly be: you are only accountable to yourself and your own goals. And you own your IP.
sytelus 7y ago
Our biggest problem is that research is expected to be in Academia. Not withstanding few exceptions such as DeepMind and FAIR, vast majority of industrial research is by definition short term. For example, the founding document of Microsoft Research asserted that they only want to hire researchers who are willing to work on relevant problems with 2 year horizon with emphasis on product integrations. Similarly, even at Bell Labs research was expected to help phone lines (a fun story being C/Unix were underground projects, borderline "unapproved"). All these while, investment in science and research have had returns that blows up any other investments you can possibly imagine. So why are companies so relunctant at even putting in 1% of their revenues in research? Why we as nations put less than 1% of GDP in research? Why true exploratory research is only expected to happen in academia? These are obvious and massive gaps in our economic story and progress. But anytime you have gaps, you have opportunity! One of my favorite funding models to play around is a slight variation of Y-Combinator model. Instead of giving $120K to teens who can whip out websites that you can later offload to trillion dollar stupid gorillas in 5 years, imagine you do this: You hire researchers who are passionate and give them $0.5M grant to have 3 year runway. They need not build companies, do pitches or generate revenues. They just do their own curiocity driven exploration, they set their own agenda. Bunch of these folks even perhaps work in same buildings so they can collaborate and may be spend some money to hire students/post-docs/engineers. After 3 years, VC looks at their ideas, prototypes, demos and funds a teen with massive enterprenuerial spirit to build products off of those ideas. In other words, we create pool of innovations and pool of people who can build companies. We decouple short term determinisitc execution from long term randomized innovations. It's like having brain with parts that think fast and slow. How will this work out? I would expect 99% of funded researchers producing nothing useful in terms of business. From the rest 1%, possibly 9 out of 10 are minor things and may be 1 is significant breakthrough leading to $10B company. But more importantly, there is 1 in 10,000 chance that breakthrough leads to something of the order of $100B. This would result in expected return of 20X. More importantly, these companies will be cumulative, so your expected return grows over time with same continued investment! If done right, I think this version of YC could become first $10 trillion company because it will be sort of a meta-company whoes product is long lasting companies built on big breakthroughts. There are obviously several issues in this idea that I haven't worked out yet: (1) why VC should fund academia like labs when government is already doing it? (2) researchers want to open up their ideas so what moat do you really have? (3) how does collaborations happen? (4) why any enterprenuer wants to execute on someone else's ideas? etc. PS: Loonshots is a must read anyone interested in this area.

btrettel 7y ago

> Because I still want to pursue a career in research even if traditional opportunities dry up, I am interested in alternative funding models that will ensure that researchers could still make a living in a world that demands instant results. I too am interested in alternative funding models for research. I've looked at the teaching faculty jobs you mentioned, but there aren't too many of them in my field as-is, so I don't consider those to be a good option for most. The model I'm currently looking at uses ideas from the financial independence/early retirement community. Basically, I'll do research independently and live as cheaply as possible so that what money I do get goes farther. (It helps that grad school has made me live very cheaply already...) I don't require expensive equipment to do my research, so I think this is doable. As for how to make money, I'm looking at multiple options including working a full time job for a while to build capital, starting a small business, grants, getting money from patrons, etc. While adjunct pay isn't good, working as an adjunct every once in a while might not be a bad idea to find new collaborators and get library access. I'm also told that the UT Austin engineering schools pays about $10K per class for an adjunct, which again, isn't fantastic, but would actually cover about half of my estimated yearly costs. Ultimately I think I can spend much less time raising funds than tenured professors do, which I've seen estimated at around 40% of their time! https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2011/04/25/chasing-grants/ https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2011/04/25/chasing-grants/ For starting a small business, I'd expect many to require a lot of time up front, but I'm willing to do that if it means that longer-term I can make reliable income with minimal investment on my part. I'm starting with consulting, which I don't expect will be a huge source of income for me, but I'll take what I can get. Ultimately I'll probably have to have multiple income sources, which isn't entirely bad. If any one source dries up then I shouldn't be much worse off. This seems to be the largest online meeting place for independent researchers: https://forum.igdore.org/ https://forum.igdore.org/

auggierose 7y ago

I don't have solid advice on that, but if you are leaning towards a higher-risk approach you can do what I am doing: Work as a freelancer about 50% of your time, do research in the spare 50%. The problem with that approach is that as a freelancer you usually need to constantly look for work, which I currently don't have to do, but that may change. The advantage of that approach is that your research is as free at it can possibly be: you are only accountable to yourself and your own goals. And you own your IP.

sytelus 7y ago

Our biggest problem is that research is expected to be in Academia. Not withstanding few exceptions such as DeepMind and FAIR, vast majority of industrial research is by definition short term. For example, the founding document of Microsoft Research asserted that they only want to hire researchers who are willing to work on relevant problems with 2 year horizon with emphasis on product integrations. Similarly, even at Bell Labs research was expected to help phone lines (a fun story being C/Unix were underground projects, borderline "unapproved"). All these while, investment in science and research have had returns that blows up any other investments you can possibly imagine. So why are companies so relunctant at even putting in 1% of their revenues in research? Why we as nations put less than 1% of GDP in research? Why true exploratory research is only expected to happen in academia? These are obvious and massive gaps in our economic story and progress. But anytime you have gaps, you have opportunity! One of my favorite funding models to play around is a slight variation of Y-Combinator model. Instead of giving $120K to teens who can whip out websites that you can later offload to trillion dollar stupid gorillas in 5 years, imagine you do this: You hire researchers who are passionate and give them $0.5M grant to have 3 year runway. They need not build companies, do pitches or generate revenues. They just do their own curiocity driven exploration, they set their own agenda. Bunch of these folks even perhaps work in same buildings so they can collaborate and may be spend some money to hire students/post-docs/engineers. After 3 years, VC looks at their ideas, prototypes, demos and funds a teen with massive enterprenuerial spirit to build products off of those ideas. In other words, we create pool of innovations and pool of people who can build companies. We decouple short term determinisitc execution from long term randomized innovations. It's like having brain with parts that think fast and slow. How will this work out? I would expect 99% of funded researchers producing nothing useful in terms of business. From the rest 1%, possibly 9 out of 10 are minor things and may be 1 is significant breakthrough leading to $10B company. But more importantly, there is 1 in 10,000 chance that breakthrough leads to something of the order of $100B. This would result in expected return of 20X. More importantly, these companies will be cumulative, so your expected return grows over time with same continued investment! If done right, I think this version of YC could become first $10 trillion company because it will be sort of a meta-company whoes product is long lasting companies built on big breakthroughts. There are obviously several issues in this idea that I haven't worked out yet: (1) why VC should fund academia like labs when government is already doing it? (2) researchers want to open up their ideas so what moat do you really have? (3) how does collaborations happen? (4) why any enterprenuer wants to execute on someone else's ideas? etc. PS: Loonshots is a must read anyone interested in this area.