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Academics, we need to talk

matt-welsh.blogspot.com

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Re: Academics, we need to talk

#31

Post by kenjackson »

mdwelsh wrote: post #19
samth wrote: post #5

Academic research that unknowingly (or sometimes even knowingly) duplicates secret industry work is much more valuable than this discussion indicates. Sure, it's not valuable _to Google_ for someone to publish things they already know. But everyone else benefits. If people at Google want their research to stop being duplicated, they should publish it. Of course, if your goal is that Google adopt your new system in th…

I'm not so worried about duplication by academics -- that does not happen often -- but rather about academic research that's just wrong: makes bad assumptions, uses a flawed methodology, fails to address the general case.

If industry could provide better platforms (up to date, not hand me downs or neutered versions of their real product) then I think you might see better forms of this research.

For example, I'd love to improve search relevance, but w/o having access to Google's search engine to build on, it's pretty hard. That's my suggestion. :-)

Re: Academics, we need to talk

#32

Post by NotOscarWilde »

mdwelsh wrote: post #17
skywhopper wrote: post #3

> I know this sounds like a waste of time because you probably won't get a paper out of it It's unfortunate that a "lessons learned" paper summarizing a sabbatical in industry doing customer-facing work would not be publishable. Surely it's far more useful to other academics than most papers. It'd definitely be more broadly relevant. My wife is a professor in a practical field and I'm always sad to hear what counts a…

The issue is that when doing a sabbatical/internship at a company, it's often not possible to write a paper - either because there's not time, or the company may not want to publish the work (which could be confidential). I wouldn't go to a company expecting to be able to publish about the project.

But if a company wanted to make sabbaticals or science-focused internships more interesting for people on the academic career tracks, it probably could ease their confidential policies and design such internships so that said academics can publish, right?

You have mentioned elsewhere that you are looking into how Google can help the academic world focus more on the right industrial questions, and you personally recommend such sabbaticals/internships -- so this seems like a natural step.

Re: Academics, we need to talk

#33

Post by accountatwork »

tensor wrote: post #10

> Industry is far more collaborative and credit is widely shared. This couldn't be farther from the truth. Your idea's are generally credited to the company, which in turn is credited to the CEO or some other high up. On collaboration, it's only more collaborative within a given company , and not always even then. Between companies it's outright hostile to collaboration by definition.

Something I've seen at every large tech company I've worked at (which includes the author's company), is that some people do the work for something cool. The next step for them will be to prepare a slide deck so that some big name can give a talk at a conference. That doesn't always happen, but it's common.

Depending on the managers and team leads involved, that kind of thing can also happen when promotions come around. At every place I've worked, a common complaint is that the TL for the project got promoted despite not doing much because they were TL. Of course that's not supposed to happen, but it happens all the time.

The post seems to compare the worst case in academia vs. the best case in industry. You could just as easily flip things around and make industry sound bad.

Re: Academics, we need to talk

#34

Post by mdwelsh »

irremediable wrote: post #24

I agree with some of this, but I wonder... > It drives me insane to see papers that claim that some problem is "unsolved" when most of the industry players have already solved it, but they didn't happen to write an NSDI or SIGCOMM paper about it. I've seen many examples of industry "solutions" that aren't documented, aren't published, and aren't even validated. There's a place for papers like these. I'm not quite you…

That's a fair point. The issue is that many of these papers don't seem to acknowledge that industry has (unpublished) solutions, and are somewhat naive as a result.

Re: Academics, we need to talk

#35

Post by jff »

> Coming from academia, I was trained to fiercely defend my intellectual territory, pissing all over anything that seemed remotely close to my area of interest.

Anyone who has ever been through a conference/journal submission process knows this pain. You can usually tell from the comments which of the reviewers is working in your field and wants to shut you out.

Re: Academics, we need to talk

#36

Post by cushychicken »

mdwelsh wrote: post #12
forgottenpass wrote: post #9

Now, I don't think all academic research has to be relevant to industry. I'm getting kind of sick of this tactic, where this fake concession is made before going on about how academia isn't designed well enough to deliver to industry. If authors of articles like this didn't care about the efficiency of academia to deliver them research, what's the big deal if there are a bunch of people somewhere running around in ci…

(I'm the author of the original blog post.) Ad hominem attacks aside, I do think it's a big deal if a bunch of academics are spending time working on the wrong things, if for no better reason than maximizing efficiency: Don't forget that most academic research is funded by the government. Since I also happen to help decide which research proposals Google funds, I also care that academics are well-aligned with the pro…

>it's a big deal if a bunch of academics are spending time working on the wrong things

At the risk of sounding a little prickly with my comment - isn't it a little presumptuous to write off a certain amount of research as "wrong"? There are plenty of examples of research that didn't have a clear purpose leading to breakthroughs - safety glass, microwave ovens, and Teflon all spring to mind.

Also, focusing on efficiency doesn't really align with academia's purpose, which (to my mind) has more to do with fundamental research. This article about Xerox PARC springs to mind:

http://www.fastcodesign.com/3046437/5-steps-to-recreate-xero...

Re: Academics, we need to talk

#37

Post by js8 »

mdwelsh wrote: post #19
samth wrote: post #5

Academic research that unknowingly (or sometimes even knowingly) duplicates secret industry work is much more valuable than this discussion indicates. Sure, it's not valuable _to Google_ for someone to publish things they already know. But everyone else benefits. If people at Google want their research to stop being duplicated, they should publish it. Of course, if your goal is that Google adopt your new system in th…

I'm not so worried about duplication by academics -- that does not happen often -- but rather about academic research that's just wrong: makes bad assumptions, uses a flawed methodology, fails to address the general case.

I think I agree with samth - it's not the academia, but the industry who needs to open up. Especially Google has a reputation of being very secretive.

Re: Academics, we need to talk

#38

Post by mdwelsh »

NotOscarWilde wrote: post #32
mdwelsh wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is that when doing a sabbatical/internship at a company, it's often not possible to write a paper - either because there's not time, or the company may not want to publish the work (which could be confidential). I wouldn't go to a company expecting to be able to publish about the project.

But if a company wanted to make sabbaticals or science-focused internships more interesting for people on the academic career tracks, it probably could ease their confidential policies and design such internships so that said academics can publish, right? You have mentioned elsewhere that you are looking into how Google can help the academic world focus more on the right industrial questions, and you personally recom…

It's a good idea but fairly challenging in practice. The amount of information you need to reveal in a scientific publication may make many companies uncomfortable. My view is that academics should not just be focused on getting another paper on their CV -- there is value in having the industry experience even if no papers come out of it.

Re: Academics, we need to talk

#39

Post by swehner »

jsolson wrote: post #25
swehner wrote: post #18

When you're telling other people what they should do, you're already lost. I also don't feel academia is obliged to any particular promise of delivery, but that's kind of independent.

That's not really what the article is doing, though... Instead it's saying roughly: much of the work coming out of academia attempts solve problems applicable to industry, but in actuality industry is not actually suffering from the problems solved (either because underlying assumptions are wrong and industry is plagued by a different problem or because the problem has already be adequately solved by existing work).

Some quotes from the article:

  "My first piece of advice: do a sabbatical or internship in industry."

  "you have to work on a real product team"

  "hold yourself to a higher standard"

  "keep an open mind"
Kind of painful to reread it, actually.

Re: Academics, we need to talk

#40

Post by irremediable »

mdwelsh wrote: post #34
irremediable wrote: post #24

I agree with some of this, but I wonder... > It drives me insane to see papers that claim that some problem is "unsolved" when most of the industry players have already solved it, but they didn't happen to write an NSDI or SIGCOMM paper about it. I've seen many examples of industry "solutions" that aren't documented, aren't published, and aren't even validated. There's a place for papers like these. I'm not quite you…

That's a fair point. The issue is that many of these papers don't seem to acknowledge that industry has (unpublished) solutions, and are somewhat naive as a result.

Fair. This happens less in my field, but a lot of that could be because, for medical applications, people are far less willing to certify without published validation.
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