Research is meant to make impact, not "career on papers"
I was listening to Ed Catmull interview on This Week in Startups. Ed is a pioneer in Computer Animation. He started the career at the University of Utah, when computer was portrayed as a "threat" that will replace humans, and ARPA (now DARPA) was funding computer science researchers. He shared the early day stories at LucasFilm and then Pixar.
Ed and his colleagues did a huge amount of pioneering research but they were "waiting" for computers to be faster to realize the vision they had – making animated figures using computers (which is more than obvious today). They waited MANY years: 20+.
It usually takes long time for anything to make an impact, doesn't it? Just like startups, being persistent in research is the key to make an impact. In order to make an impact, therefore, researchers have to keep their heads down and dig very, very deeply.
But it's not happening in today's academic research. I won't generalize. Just my own experience because I was there. Today, researchers tend to be driven by "papers", not real-world impact. Maybe it's not their fault, because the academic system is framed in the way that the performance, hence the tenure-ship, is tied to the number of papers they publish.
As a result, the attention span on a research problem is floored. Professors and students don't spend 10 years on solving one huge problem and making huge impact. Rather, we jump on a "publishable" research problem, spend a few months on it, churn out a paper just in time for submitting to a premier conference, and move on to the next one. Paper rejected? No worries. Rewrote it and submit to a lesser conference. At least one line item on the CV.
How possibly will anyone make a meaningful impact spending a few months on a problem? And, you bet, lots of problems are created for the sake of finding a problem to write a paper about. No one cares about the problem.
I was a computer science & human-computer interaction researcher and I was a prolific author – I have a good track record publishing papers on high quality conferences and journals. I loved it, but I also felt the itch of moving from projects to projects too fast, while not focusing on one thing for long time. There are really, really smart researchers and I highly admire and respect them. I hope more will see the problem and start to make a change.
Research is meant to be impact driven. Not paper / career driven.
Ed and his colleagues did a huge amount of pioneering research but they were "waiting" for computers to be faster to realize the vision they had – making animated figures using computers (which is more than obvious today). They waited MANY years: 20+.
It usually takes long time for anything to make an impact, doesn't it? Just like startups, being persistent in research is the key to make an impact. In order to make an impact, therefore, researchers have to keep their heads down and dig very, very deeply.
But it's not happening in today's academic research. I won't generalize. Just my own experience because I was there. Today, researchers tend to be driven by "papers", not real-world impact. Maybe it's not their fault, because the academic system is framed in the way that the performance, hence the tenure-ship, is tied to the number of papers they publish.
As a result, the attention span on a research problem is floored. Professors and students don't spend 10 years on solving one huge problem and making huge impact. Rather, we jump on a "publishable" research problem, spend a few months on it, churn out a paper just in time for submitting to a premier conference, and move on to the next one. Paper rejected? No worries. Rewrote it and submit to a lesser conference. At least one line item on the CV.
How possibly will anyone make a meaningful impact spending a few months on a problem? And, you bet, lots of problems are created for the sake of finding a problem to write a paper about. No one cares about the problem.
I was a computer science & human-computer interaction researcher and I was a prolific author – I have a good track record publishing papers on high quality conferences and journals. I loved it, but I also felt the itch of moving from projects to projects too fast, while not focusing on one thing for long time. There are really, really smart researchers and I highly admire and respect them. I hope more will see the problem and start to make a change.
Research is meant to be impact driven. Not paper / career driven.
