[Homunculiheaded]

That should be the case but it is not primarily for 2 rather related reasons: tenure & funding.

Everything you do as university research is towards the aim of getting publications to progress either you or your adviser towards tenure. The problem is that things that don't work are not usually publishable. This leads to 'fluffing' up results (read enough academic papers and you'll find some hilarity there) and avoiding anything that might not pan out.

Just as important is funding, even a small lab with a few computers and one or two grad students needs funding. And in CS that largely means DARPA or a handful of other government agencies. If your particular research interest involves eventually killing someone, you'll do fantastic. There are of course other sources of funding but they typically have much smaller wallets, especially the further you go on the 'for the good of humanity' scale.

I've seen countless times were grad students are doing something really interesting, but because it's not going to help anyone get tenure and not going to bring in any funding, these students are strongly encourage to 'get back on track'.

[_delirium]

If your particular research interest involves eventually killing someone, you'll do fantastic. There are of course other sources of funding but they typically have much smaller wallets, especially the further you go on the 'for the good of humanity' scale.

Unfortunately, being in the EU, I don't think changing this part fixes that many of the problems. EU grants are not about killing people, but typically about cooperation, building understanding between nations, reducing violence, integration of immigrants, that kind of thing. Goals I like more, in principle, than DARPA's. But the actual administration is if anything worse: 100-page proposals via hugely bureaucratic processes (NSF's are at least only 15 pages), unwieldy multi-country consortia, periodic mandatory status update meetings in Brussels, the works. If you can sell what you're doing within that framework and work with it, it's good, but it's still very much about being on the right track to impress the purse-string holders.

[xtracto]

But the actual administration is if anything worse: 100-page proposals via hugely bureaucratic processes (NSF's are at least only 15 pages), unwieldy multi-country consortia, periodic mandatory status update meetings in Brussels, the works.

Tell me about it. I was 7 years in "academia" in the EU and 4 of those years was working in a FP7 (Seventh Framework Programme) project. Man, the amount of administrative baggage we have to do is amazing. "Libre research" is a myth, between monthly deliverables, 6-month review, half-way Brussels project review, you could not make a lot of research.

And then you have all the administrative controls, I kid you not, I had to log what I did every day in two places (one in EU FP7 timesheets (in Excel), and another one in my institute's own software (a terrible java program)). Sure, the upside was that I got to travel a lot (the project had about 7 participant countries).

Now I returned to the industry, I am in a company from the Silicon Valey as a "simple" software engineer (even though I have a PhD) and I could not be happier. Moreover, after a couple of months in the position I have made several contacts which are bringing new opportunities.

I am happier at my current "fast paced" job now as I was while I was in academia doing papers just trying to publish papers for the sake of it (that is how I felt).

[tikhonj]

Don't some of the large software and hardware companies also support research at universities? I think that some of the research labs at my university get supported heavily by companies like Google, Microsoft, Intel and Qualcomm. However, I don't really know the specifics.

[Homunculiheaded]

They definitely do, I didn't mean to imply that DARPA is the only source of funding. Usually for most universities you can look at Large Company X, that operates locally and find them contributing to any department that does the kind of work they need. For example I believe Microsoft heavily funds the CS department at the University of Washington.

Of course this doesn't get you out of the trap of having to do research in the area of interest to whatever large company is funding you. You can do research that isn't indirectly getting people killed ;) but it usually has to be pretty clearly aligned with the business interests of companies funding the research

[tikhonj]

Heh, I guess being in the Bay Area really helps with getting a really wide range of companies to sponsor research :P. Looking through some of the bigger research labs, it seems most big companies represented at some point.

I was just curious because my impression is that CS is rather well funded, especially for having far lower expenses than anybody else in college of engineering.