In general I agree with the warning in your comment, but I think there's second challenge besides funding at universities. I mean, funding is always hard, but r

In general I agree with the warning in your comment, but I think there's second challenge besides funding at universities. I mean, funding is always hard, but right now it's a decent time for computer science funding. There's the DoD (for things more about AI and security), NIH (for things with some health relevance), industry (ML and topical problems), or NSF which is more generous towards CS than any other field today. But funding isn't as much of a problem for PhD students who should be supported by their advisors, so they have a good several years of solid focused research time. The challenge I'm talking about is papers, specifically the game of publishing. I feel like PhD students spend more time in optimizing for publications than doing actual research. There's an obsession with the number of papers so everyone is trying to eek out a paper for every semi-failed experiment, overfitted model, or unfinished prototype. No one wants to throw away effort on something that basically failed, so they're trying to find the perfect narrative, frame their results just so it looks like they're good, or slice and combine it into something submittable. Every deadline is worth submitting to, the number of selective conferences is growing, and there's incentive to "get on" another paper as a co-author (which means building collaborations, helping out, editing). For each paper, there's months spent writing, giving and receiving feedback, making figures and formatting. Each submission usually requires some change to the format and language, so upon rejection, the paper is edited and targeted towards the next conference. Then there's the submission game of proposing reviewers, choosing the right track or subcommittee, interpreting reviews, writing multi-page rebuttals, editing and getting feedback from co-authors about the rebuttals, and in the best case a month later, preparing the camera-ready version, the back-and-forth with the publisher, and finally preparing and practicing the conference presentation. So before great research can truly come out of universities, I think publications need to be deemphasized. This could be a simple norm like judging researchers on their best 3 papers for faculty hiring and research awards. In turn, that would reduce paper submissions, increase paper acceptance rates, and finally -- leave more time for actual research at universities.