GEORGE KESIDISTHE PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY

KESIDIS@ENGR.PSU.EDU

Obvious Ways to Translate Research to Impact

Industrial/Gov’t-Lab Outreach – Short Term

To determine specifically what is of interest: Faculty talks, faculty and grad student internships – trust,

teach Learn relevant technology, needs, and market – talk the talk Arrange supplemental research funding, contracts, seed $ Patience, perseverance and … salesmanship

Industrial problems may not align with (or may have a gulf between) current academic trends

Surprising interest in theory: complex networks are hard to thoroughly simulate, and assumptions leading to concise theoretical insights are the “devil you know”

When selling empirical results: reproducibility involving realistic data, realistic emulations, prototypical deployment, open sourcing

Cross-Disciplinary Research in Complex Networks

Proliferation of for-profit conferences and journals associated with enormous volume of published research articles from a large researcher population

Need focus through new books, surveys, course notes, and labs on trending subject matter (even targeting laymen esp. highschoolers)

Such “educational” activity: is crucial for research in complex networks as they are cross-

disciplinary should be rewarded, but not mistaken for hard-fought core

(incremental) research advances - protect core curricula and don’t just use H-index and other such bogus “research metrics”

Exploit interest in, e.g., multidisciplinary online social networking technology to recruit students from under-represented minority groups

Long-Term Research

Past history indicates that it’s very difficult to predict what will be important long term – motivates principle of “curiosity driven” research by the many in quest for breakthroughs

Though NSF’s long-term/basic research mission is not as interesting to industry and gov’t labs, outreach still worthwhile as some folks there are trying to plan long-term

Cross-disciplinary work is high-risk/high-reward but: its true quality is hard to assess in the short term – some breakthroughs

not recognized for some years, while short-lived fads (of often simply recycled old ideas published in new venues) proliferate

need to navigate significant academic xenophobia and turf-wars on the ground

The quality of research you get is what you incent Again, core incremental research attacking historically hard

problems needs continued support in terms of both research funding and curriculum