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Academics, we need to talk

matt-welsh.blogspot.com

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Re: Academics, we need to talk

#81

Post by scott_s »

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…

The author is on the program committee for some academic conferences, so he is not just an observer, but a participant. It is also common for academic computer science papers to use industry applications as motivation for their research - and, similar to the author, I often find some of these motivations misguided.

(I work in an industry research lab, write code for a real product, and publish academic computer science papers.)

Re: Academics, we need to talk

#82

Post by Fomite »

"Second: don't get hung up on who invents what. 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. Industry is far more collaborative and credit is widely shared."

In my experience, this is only true until there is money to be made. Or more specifically, that industry was more than willing to share credit, but ownership was theirs.

Re: Academics, we need to talk

#83

Post by gluggymug »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #69
js8 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You and samth seem to be missing the point: academic research is often built using methods that will ensure no real-world success while aiming to achieve real-world success. Factoring in real-world constraints, best practices, and existing work-arounds will let academics achieve better results on average. Baseline of practicality goes up. And again, these are all academic projects that aim at being practical. The poi…

I don't think the RISC-V work is a good example. It suffers from some of the problems that mdwelsh is worried about.

It's aimed at a real world problem but their solution is not good.

A couple of days ago, someone asked where the verification infrastructure was on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10831601 . So I took another look around and found it was pretty much unchanged from when I looked last time. There is almost nothing there. It is not up to industry standards, to put it lightly.

It's not just the verification aspect that is weak either. On the design side, they only have docs on the ISA. For SOC work, you are essentially given no docs. Then in another slap in the face, the alternative is to look for code to read but the code is in Scala. Basically only helping those who went to Berkley or something.

It is something that seems relevant but if you were to try using it most engineers would have a pretty hard time.

Re: Academics, we need to talk

#84

Post by s986s »

mdwelsh wrote: post #53
cushychicken wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 efficien…

That's a fair point. I'm trying to draw a distinction between "speculative" research (which might pan out long term) and "industry-focused" research (which tries to solve problems we have today). My concern is not with speculative research -- that's great -- but rather flawed industry-focused research: making incorrect assumptions, failing to deal with the general case, not considering real-world constraints.

Honestly, if the academics didnt choose their research the private industry wouldnt have to hire r and d. This sounds more of a ploy to save costs by having academics build for the industry on government money than to hire people to further a companies interests.

Re: Academics, we need to talk

#85

Post by nitinics »

I think Industry Research is mostly driven by some constraints that applies to their architecture, their business use-cases and how much the company is willing to spend $$$ on research that adds value to their products or services. Academics on the other hand thinks beyond the box and researches and gives clues to upcoming industries on where the problem might be and how it could be solved, therefore eventually helping Industry grow with validation from the researches and allowing them to put them into "products" and "services".

Therefore, I don't think Academics should stop doing what they do (i.e. wander around) and have a laser focus on Industry's product-based researches.

Re: Academics, we need to talk

#86

Post by samth »

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.

Of course, there's tons of academic research that does all of those things. And I of course agree that too much academic software is "works on my grad students machine"--an enormous amount of my time on Racket is spent on real-world works-in-practice issues. But this doesn't seem like it's a particular issue of industry-relevant systems work, just Sturgeon's Law.

Also, failure to address the general case is not so bad--it just means that the next part of the general case has to be addressed by the next researcher.

Finally, I think the real issue is academics who have an idea, and cloak it in pseudo-relevance to industry to sell it. A program analysis framework isn't suddenly industry-relevant now that it applied to JavaScript, and we should just be ok with not chasing the latest industry fad.

Re: Academics, we need to talk

#87

Post by accountatwork »

accountatwork wrote: post #33
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 arou…

In case it wasn't clear in the original comment, the big name is usually someone who was only tangentially involved in the project, if at all. Sometimes it's the head of the org the project took place in. They may have approved the budget for the project, but it's rare that the big name did any of the work.

This is like when Tim Bray mentioned that Amazon is great because he hasn't experienced the same problems that have gotten a lot of press lately. Of course he's treated well! He's Tim Bray!

Matt Welsh is exactly the kind of big name that isn't going to lose credit on something. Of course he gets credit! He's Matt Welsh!

Re: Academics, we need to talk

#88

Post by nickpsecurity »

gluggymug wrote: post #83
nickpsecurity wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You and samth seem to be missing the point: academic research is often built using methods that will ensure no real-world success while aiming to achieve real-world success. Factoring in real-world constraints, best practices, and existing work-arounds will let academics achieve better results on average. Baseline of practicality goes up. And again, these are all academic projects that aim at being practical. The poi…

I don't think the RISC-V work is a good example. It suffers from some of the problems that mdwelsh is worried about. It's aimed at a real world problem but their solution is not good. A couple of days ago, someone asked where the verification infrastructure was on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10831601 . So I took another look around and found it was pretty much unchanged from when I looked last time. There is…

That I recall, the RISC-V instruction set was created by looking at existing RISC instructions, industry demands, and so on. The result was a pretty good baseline that was unencumbered by patents or I.P. restrictions. From there, simulators and reference hardware emerged. Unlike many toys, the Rocket CPU was designed and prototyped with a reasonable flow on 45nm and 28nm. Many others followed through with variants for embedded and server applications with prior MIPS and SPARC work showing security mods will be next.

Them not having every industrial tool available doesn't change the fact that the research, from ISA design to tools developed, was quite practical and with high potential for adoption in industry. An industry that rejects almost everything out of academia if we're talking replacing x86 or ARM. Some support for my hypothesis comes from the fact that all kinds of academics are building on it and major industry players just committed support.

Is it ideal? No. I usually recommend Gaisler's SPARC work, Oracle/Fujitsu/IBM for high-end, Cavium's Octeons for RISC + accelerators, and some others as more ideal. Yet, it was a smart start that could easily become those and with some components made already. Also progressing faster on that than anything else.

Re: Academics, we need to talk

#89

Post by effie »

adenadel wrote: post #67
zouhair wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are focusing on the wrong problem. The real problem of academics is not what people research, the huge elephant in the room is the "publish or die" dogma. This dogma is one of worst thing happening to research.

I agree that "publish or perish" is not a good model for research. What are alternative models that are potentially viable?

It is absurd model for evaluation of people that solves only one problem: how to make evaluation easy for the administrators and soft on researchers. We should rather find and implement a model that leads to best research results possible. I think one such model would be this: give tax money only to people whose results of their last work have proven to be beneficial to society (for other people outside their interest group, not only colleagues in the same field). Impose reasonable set of practical goals and supervision (roadmap) on people who want their work financed and periodically re-evaluate. Leave basic, speculative and other research of unclear significance to be financed privately, by patrons, no tax-based financial support.

Re: Academics, we need to talk

#90

Post by adenadel »

effie wrote: post #89
adenadel wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that "publish or perish" is not a good model for research. What are alternative models that are potentially viable?

It is absurd model for evaluation of people that solves only one problem: how to make evaluation easy for the administrators and soft on researchers. We should rather find and implement a model that leads to best research results possible. I think one such model would be this: give tax money only to people whose results of their last work have proven to be beneficial to society (for other people outside their interes…

I really think you have it backwards on basic and speculative research to lose financing from the public. How would you propose "proving that results are beneficial to society"? And how is this different from the current funding proposal process? Committees that fund proposals certainly look at the success of prior research by the group.

I don't think anyone would disagree with you when you say "We should rather find and implement a model that leads to best research results possible." Viable alternative models are what I am looking for.

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