Quote:
Originally Posted by jAZ
In the short term, academia can't compete with in-house design teams. That's not the point, and it's not designed to work that way. Academia, even in CS and MIS (my department), we conduct basic research. We provide the tools and understanding that companies use to inform their next level of applications.
I happen to be in a program that commercializes IT research better than many others. Just had one of our top professors have his 8 year old "startup" acquired for the 2nd time. This time by IBM for $1/2 a billion dollars. The research began with DARPA and similar funding and the publications.
But companies typically will license this research after it's done. Not fund it before it gets started.
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Honestly no, academia in computers(especially systems) does not generally do 'primary research'. I've been on both sides of this fence at the very highest levels and I've seen what happens. One of the problems is that academia generally doesn't know what has been done before and so they 'publish' a lot of old work. Now that isn't always bad because it is useful to publish ideas that have been developed before but haven't been published previous. But it isn't really novel and that does make it somewhat disappointing. You don't really get to appreciate this until you actually know what happens behind the curtain to know exactly how far behind academia really is.
There is a real question of who is doing primary research these days. The reality is, big industrial labs aren't, academia generally isn't(there are always exceptions), is it startups then? Not really because once you get funded you're productizing and not really doing research.
Academia should be the place where primary research is done, but really it isn't. Part of the reason is that they don't have the resources to really tackle 'bigish' problems that really have to work. Cute little ideas sure, big problems not as much. Academia also rewards more publications and the best way to get 'more' is to publish a lot of a smallish safeish ideas. Try something big and revolutionary and it doesn't work and your tenure case is screwed(or your thesis etc).
That is one of the real problems in the computer field today and realistically I'm not sure the best way to solve that. It is an important issue because we're really not pushing the envelop like we used to. Everything today is evolutionary. Where did the revolutionary ideas go?