How best to foster academic-industry collaboration is a hot topic. The National Strategic Computing Initiative calls it out as one of five imperatives. The Department of Energy’s HPC4Mfg program has been liberally doling project grants. Now, Community Computing Consortium has issued a report, The Future of Computing Research: Industry-Academic Collaborations, which likewise underscores the success of past efforts and the need for more.
CCC, of course, is an NSF created entity (2006) to explore and stimulate debate around critical computer issues. It’s run in conjunction with the Computer Research Association. This latest report bullets out four action items:
- Establish a means of measuring and benchmarking industry/academic interactions. It is hard to assess or improve something that cannot be measured. Create a repository of best- practices for industry/ university interactions.
- Recognize that there is a need for career paths that may combine elements of a traditional academic career in a university research and education setting with career paths that involve significant time within a new or established company, and create mechanisms that support such career paths.
- Consider ways that advanced infrastructure can be made widely available to the research community. Finding ways to make advanced computing and devices, large data sets, and unique facilities more widely available will benefit industry (it will create “power-users” for their infrastructure), academic research (avoiding wasted time and resources replicating capabilities already in existence), and education (students will learn on the latest and greatest).
- Convene a long-term forum or body around industry academic interaction. Collaborations between academia and industry will continue to play a central role in the transfer of long-term and fundamental research into the US economy. Recognizing and supporting this transfer will provide mutual benefits to all stakeholders.
“IT-driven innovation is an enormous factor in the worldwide economic leadership of the United States. It is larger than finance, construction, or transportation1, and it employs nearly 6% of the US workforce. The top three companies, as measured by market capitalization, are IT companies – Apple, Google (now Alphabet), and Microsoft. Facebook, a relatively recent entry in the top 10 list by market capitalization has surpassed Walmart, the nation’s largest retailer, and the largest employer in the world. The net income of just the top three exceeds $80 billion – roughly 100 times the total budget of the NSF CISE directorate which funds 87% of computing research. In short, the direct return on federal research investments in IT research has been enormously profitable to the nation,” according to the report.
Perhaps not surprising, staffing is a substantial topic in the report (click on the report for and industry look at some of the numbers which though a couple of years old remain relevant.)
Link to blog written Helen Wright, CCC senior program associate: http://www.cccblog.org/2016/09/21/the-future-of-computing-research-industry-academic-collaborations/
Link to report: http://cra.org/ccc/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/06/15125-CCC-Industry-Whitepaper-v4-1.pdf