Thursday, July 11, 2013

Does the academic process slow innovation?

I've been wondering recently whether the extended, baroque process of doing research in an academic setting (by which I mean either a university or an "academic style" research lab in industry) is doing more harm than good when it comes to the pace of innovation.

From http://academicnegativity.tumblr.com/
Prior to moving to industry, I spent my whole career as an academic. It took me a while to get used to how fast things happen in industry. My team, which is part of Chrome, does a new major release every six weeks. This is head-spinningly fast compared to academic projects. Important decisions are made on the order of days, not months. Projects are started up and executed an order of magnitude faster than it would take a similarly-sized academic research group to get up to speed.

This is not just about having plenty of funding (although that is part of it). It is also about what happens when you abandon the trappings of the academic process, for which the timelines are glacial:
  • A three month wait (typically) to get a decision on a conference submission, during which time you are not allowed to submit similar work elsewhere.
  • A six month wait on hearing back on a grant proposal submission.
  • A year or more wait for a journal publication, with a similar restriction on parallel submissions.
  • Five plus years to get a PhD.
  • Possibly one or two years as a postdoc.
  • Six to eight years to get tenure.
  • A lifetime of scarring as the result of the above. (Okay, I'm kidding. Sort of.)
This is not a problem unique to computer science of course. In the medical field, the average age at which a PI receives their first NIH R01 grant is 44 years. Think about that for a minute. That's 23-some-odd years after graduation before an investigator is considered an "independent" contributor to the research field. Is this good for innovation?

Overhead

Part of the problem is that the academic process is full of overheads. Take a typical conference program committee for example. Let's say the committee has 15 members, each of whom has 30 papers to review (this is pretty average, for good conferences at least). Each paper takes at least an hour to review (often more) - that's the equivalent of at least 4 work days (that is, assuming academics work only 8 hours a day ... ha ha!). Add on two more full days (minimum) for the program committee meeting and travel, and you're averaging about a full week of work for each PC member. Multiply by 15 -- double it for the two program co-chairs -- and you're talking about around 870 person-hours combined effort to decide on the 25 or so papers that will appear in the conference. That's 34 person-hours of overhead per paper. This doesn't count any of the overheads associated with actually organizing the conference -- making the budget, choosing the hotel, raising funds, setting up the website, publishing the proceedings, organizing the meals and poster sessions, renting the projectors ... you get my point.

The question is, does all of this time and effort produce (a) better science or (b) lead to greater understanding or impact? I want to posit that the answer is no. This process was developed decades ago in a pre-digital era where we had no other way to disseminate research results. (Hell, it's gotten much easier to run a program committee now that submissions are done via the web -- it used to be you had to print out 20 copies of your paper and mail them to the program chair who would mail out large packets to each of the committee members.)

But still, we cling to this process because it's the only way we know how to get PhD students hired as professors and get junior faculty tenured -- any attempt to buck the trend would no doubt jeopardize the career of some young academic. It's sad.

How did we get here?

Why do we have these processes in the first place? The main reason is competition for scarce resources. Put simply, there are too many academics, and not enough funding and not enough paper-slots in good conference venues. Much has been said about the sad state of public funding for science research. Too many academics competing for the same pool of money means longer processes for proposal reviews and more time re-submitting proposals when they get rejected.

As far as the limitation on conferences goes, you can't create more conferences out of thin air, because people wouldn't have time to sit on the program committees and travel to all of them (ironic, isn't it?). Whenever someone proposes a new conference venue there are groans of "but how will we schedule it around SOSP and OSDI and NSDI and SIGCOMM?!?" - so forget about that. Actually, I think the best model would be to adopt the practice of some research communities and have one big mongo conference every year that everybody goes to (ideally in Mexico) and have USENIX run it so the scientists can focus on doing science and leave the conference organization to the experts. But I digress.

The industrial research labs don't have the same kind of funding problem, but they still compete for paper-slots. And I believe this inherently slows everything down because you can't do new research when you have to keep backtracking to get that paper you spent so many precious hours on finally published after the third round of rejections with "a strong accept, two weak accepts, and a weak reject" reviews. It sucks.

Innovative != Publishable

My inspiration for writing this post came from the amazing pace at which innovation is happening in industry these days. The most high-profile of these are crazy "moon shot" projects like SpaceX23andme, and Google's high-altitude balloons to deliver Internet access to entire cities. But there are countless other, not-as-sexy innovations happening every day at companies big and small, just focused on changing the world, rather than writing papers about it.

I want to claim that even with all of their resources, had these projects gone down the conventional academic route -- writing papers and the like -- they would have never happened. No doubt if a university had done the equivalent of, say, Google Glass and submitted a MobiSys paper on it, it would have been rejected as "not novel enough" since Thad Starner has been wearing a computer on his head for 20 years. And high-altitude Internet balloons? What's new about that? It's just a different form of WiFi, essentially. Nothing new there.

We still need to publish research, though, which is important for driving innovation. But we should shift to an open, online publication model -- like arXiv -- where everything is "accepted" and papers are reviewed and scored informally after the fact. Work can get published much more rapidly and good work won't be stuck in the endless resubmission cycle. Scientists can stop wasting so much time and energy on program committees and conference organization. (We should still have one big conference every year so people still get to meet and drink and bounce ideas around.)  This model is also much more amenable to publications from industry, who currently have little incentive to run the conference submission gauntlet, unless publishing papers is part of their job description. And academics can still use citation counts or "paper ratings" as the measure by which hiring and promotion decisions are made.

Startup Life: Three Months In

I've posted a story to Medium on what it's been like to work at a startup, after years at Google. Check it out here.