Publishing Research in Academia (ReLooper)

Like any institution, universities struggle to establish a meritocracy, to offer staff recognition correspondent to their academic success.  This challenge takes two forms: how do you reward success, and how do you recognize it?  While the former is an interesting institutional question, the latter I am far more concerned with.  The criteria they establish for determining staff's contributions became a key focus for the staff itself.

The method you use to evaluate professors determines what they will do.  When a university prioritizes the number of publications made, then researchers will adjust their approach to publish a maximum amount of papers.  When a university prioritizes impactful contributions, researchers will try to maximize impact.

Each discipline faces its own challenges of publication and reward, but few are as damaging and avoidable as those in computer science.  The accusation?  Disposable projects.  Effort that could easily become something, but don't.  Great ideas that go nowhere, because there is no incentive to make them go anywhere.  Computer science is still struggling to adapt to its own power, and many inefficient institutional constructs have yet to be replaced by better ones.

In order to help shepherd along this progress, I've decided to bring some ideas back from the not-so-distant future, interviewing Alice Feldman, Public Relations and Research Promotion (PRRP) Officer for the University of Illinois department of Computer Sciences in the late 2010s.

Kurt: It's great to be speaking with you, Alice.
Feldman: It's always great to have an opportunity to be heard.
Kurt: So can you briefly discuss the scope of your position?
Feldman: Certainly.  I'm in charge of the PRRP office at the university's CS department.  Basically, I help get the work done here at the university out in the open.  I keep businesses up-to-date on our research, find collaborators, research online communities, just try to be sure that our efforts propagate as thoroughly and widely as possible.
Kurt: So how old is this position, and when did it come into being?
Feldman: Our office has been open now for 5 years, me being the second officer.  The University recognized that Computer Science simply had many opportunities not found in other disciplines, and was being held back by traditional publishing.  In science, you spend your hours gathering data, and though others may try to verify your experiment, very rarely does the data itself see a second functional life.  But the work our professors do here--their effort, their research, effectively is completely reusable.
Kurt: Your referring to programs, proofs-of-concept?
Feldman: Exactly.  So much of the effort done in this discipline can be immediately applied, and built off of.  We found that too often, we'd have some fascinating research papers or dissertations that would simply be thrown out once it was finished.   Not only were we limiting our ability to impact the discipline, but we were limiting our opportunities to get the University's name out.
Kurt: Any examples?
Feldman: Well, any time someone thinks "Java concurrency" now, they immediately think University of Illinois.  Prof. Danny Dig has done some fascinating work in this area.  For years, that work was severely impaired in its impact... some ideas made their way into the language or its tools, but most simply faded away, made irrelevant as soon as the platform took a step forward.  So we make sure that his work is incorporated into well-known public libraries, and make sure to commit the manpower to maintain that work.  We make sure all our faculty's research is as accessible as possible, and consequently, people use it.  Professors get their names out, the University gets its name out, the field advances.
Kurt: Computer science has been around for many, many decades now.  Why do you think your type of work took so long to take off?
Feldman: Part of that is tradition--it takes time to change the way people think.  But, more importantly, it strongly correlated with the growth of the open source community.  Researchers needed a platform into which to integrate their work, users to use it, developers to improve upon it, and projects with enough respect to give the effort significance, pride.  At this point, there are enough users of this kind of software to make contributing worth the time, to give the University numbers worth bragging about.
Kurt: Numbers?
Feldman: We have hundreds of thousands of developers using hundreds of contributions from our professors, running collectively on billions of dollars of equipment.  There's no reason to wait for someone else to implement your idea any more, when its so easy to let them improve it instead.
Kurt: Interesting stuff.  We're about out of time, but thank you for taking the time to talk to me.
Feldman: It's my job.  And it's technically your job, too, you know?