This post begins a series where each CHISEL Group member blogs about their insights and experiences. This will occur on the 1st and 15th of each month, and I (Cassandra) am the first!
I am extremely lucky. I work for an engaging, successful, fun professor, and her group of fabulous students and fellows. And I get paid to do it. After 16 years in Information Technology, much of that spent with start-up companies, it’s a refreshing change — and a culture shock.
When I started here in January 2011, one of the biggest surprises was the disconnect between the research occurring in our building and the products and services coming out of the IT industry. Large, established companies such as Microsoft and IBM are highly invested in academia, as can be seen with Microsoft Research and the IBM Centers for Advanced Studies. But you don’t really hear much from the smaller tech companies. So, where do they get their ideas? Is everything created on a whim?
I read a great comment from one of our alumni, Jorge Aranda, who spent time with local tech companies trying to find solutions to some of their process problems: “Many programmers continue to act as if a couple of pints and a quotation from some self-appointed guru constitute “proof” that one programming language is better than another.”
I thought about that for a minute and had to admit it was true. I spent many an evening (or lunch) drinking beers and talking about how we were going to revolutionize things. Many a failed product was created on the back of a bar napkin, and many a success, too.
While it’s not as lucrative as in years past, IT companies can have some of their “research” paid for by the good ol’ government through the Scientific Research and Experimental Development (SR&ED) Tax Incentive Program. However, I’ve helped prepare these reports and it doesn’t take much for a project to qualify as “research”.
At certain times in my career, researchers asked to work with us, spent many weeks sitting in an office or interviewing people, but the results of their work never reached us (that I could see). They also rarely approached us and asked “what problems are you experiencing” or “can I just sit and watch to see if I can pin-point a problem and then help you solve it”. (Unlike Jorge!)
Just as I was thinking about these things, members of my group were on the same wave length, wondering why academia can’t get uptake from industry. At ICSE 2011, a panel of academics (including CHISEL members) and industry experts presented “What industry wants from research”. You can find the slides from this panel here and here.
A few opinions and stats that came out of this panel really stand out for me:
- Fundamental research questions haven’t changed
- Research isn’t scalable
- Research is dated and biased toward large organizations/projects
- Industry is not willing to change practices for small gains that (they perceive to) come out of academia
- Qualitative results are anecdotal
- Less than 20% of the ICSE2011 attendees (over 1000 in attendance) came from industry
You can read a great summary of the panel here.
So, how do we rid ourselves of this disconnect? How does industry involve academia more, and vice versa?
The University of Victoria has a thriving co-op program. I think “co-op” is important for helping students build needed skills that they don’t normally get in their university education, but also for forging relationships. Many of the start-ups I’ve encountered have dev teams whose visionaries include recent Computer Science or Software Engineering grads. But rarely did they include people who did graduate work and could help bridge the gap between research and industry.
Also, back to the beer: if this is the way to get a relationship started, perhaps academia needs to have a couple pints with these programmers. ;)
