Slashdot Mirror
Industrial Labs that Still Do Fundamental Research
An anonymous reader asks: "I am a graduate student of Mechanical Engineering at a reputed University in the United States. I have had a lot of fun working towards my PhD. I have published papers and done exciting research. I should be finishing up in the next few months or so, but I would like to continue doing the same kind of work that I am doing now. One option would be to take up a post-doctoral research appointment and find myself a faculty position. I am somehow not attracted to this option because of the tenure and grant pressure. My ideal job would be in something like the Bell Labs of yester-years. Do you know of labs that have that kind of environment? National labs are supposed to have such an atmosphere, but my stint in one of them makes me think otherwise. Google does seem to have such an environment but I am not a CS person. Does Slashdot know of labs where basic research in applied engineering is still done in the US, without the pressure of money and immediate results?"
I don't know, of course, but you shouldn't be surprised at all if there are absolutely no privately-owned (like Bell Labs was. Not talking about private universities here) pure research labs in the U.S. anymore.
The U.S. is run almost entirely by bureaucrats, lawyers, and accountants now. Such people have no interest in anything beyond next quarter's profits and their own stock options. Why would they care about something so "unprofitable" as pure, undirected research?
Worse, I think the rest of the world is following suit. But I could be wrong about that, too.
Either way, it's quite depressing. Actually, most of the current trends are quite depressing. I should probably stop thinking about them, and probably would if it weren't so useful to have some idea of what to expect...
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... can be an interesting place to work. Very much depends what you would get to work on, though. I guess presure on results out is almost always there in industral labs. But still, an interesting problem to pursue for few years can grant you the illusion you seek.
http://ge.com/research/
I would like to die like my grandfather did - sleeping. And not screaming in terror, like his passengers.
You mention that you would like to work for the Bell-labs of old. What makes you think you need a CS degree?
In my limited experience, research labs for technology companies (like IBM, HP and Sun) employ a very diverse group of people from multiple disciplines. The common trait of these people is that they are interested in researching computers, without necessarily having a CS degree. In some ways having a CS degree might not help if you want to do radically innovative stuff (one never knows). I cannot comment on the likes of Google, Ebay or Amazon, but I am sure they have a lot of smart people working on their computing problems that do not have CS degrees. Consider this, if you work for Amazon and research interface design to guide customer decision making, I would *hope* you don't have a CS degree...
If your engineering degree will give you access to any of the research labs, I don't know. Part of it is luck of the draw - having some skills they want. The other part is pure brain power, e.g. are you smart enough to cope and flexible enough to adapt.
If you want to work at a research lab, be prepared to present yourself as a capable candidate.
Really, a lot of advisors do consulting with their associated industry, or were once in such a research lab you are looking for. If that doesn't pan out, e-mail some other professors in the department whom you know. You'll find someone who knows the scene. Another option is to use CiteSeer or Google Scholar to search for papers in areas that you are interested in, and skim them for any that are published by private company labs, and apply there.
If you first do a year or two or real work in real industry, then go back to academia or fundamental research, you're more likely to have a far better appreciation of the industry and more likely to make valuable contributions.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
If you are looking for the kind of place that Xerox used to be, especially as a way to avoid the mindnumbing grind of chasing grants and spending your life in what amounts to temp job, forget it.
First, even at the "golden years" of blue-sky research, the only ones that had a permanent position were people that had already proven themselves by a long grind in the post-doc mill and found to be exceptional. Going from your thesis to a steady research job in a place like that didn't happen even then.
There are places like that today - around here we have NICT and ATR in southern Kyoto, for example. But there too, much of the research is implicitly or explicitly aimed at resulting in something useful, and you are no more free of the grant process than at a university. The people with a permanent position are again few and far between; the head researchers overseeing the groups of post-docs and visiting researchers having some temporary grant.
Really, the difference between university research and research institute or large-company research is in my experience mainly in the need to teach (and the opportunity for a semi-steady income) at a university on one hand; and the greater financial resources for equipment and travel at institutes on the other.
I know of only two ways to get to do free research without the teeth-grinding pain of grant-chasing and temporary job upon temporary job:
* Get a steady part-time job you can live on, and do research in your spare time. Teaching is not a bad option if you're reasonably good at it; you have access to the university, with seminars, labs and people, and teaching your subject forces you to pay attention to areas you perhaps would tend to ignore if left to your own devices.
* Make a fortune, retire and do research as a hobby, perhaps form and finance a small group with a couple of colleagues you like and work well with. Hey, we can all dream, right?
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
In my own experience as an undergraduate student in psychology at UC Davis, quite a few professors make regular use of actual research papers in place of textbooks. I think it is a great technique since it exposes me to both classic studies and cutting edge research. Furthermore, it allows me to judge the research on its merits. Textbooks to often just cite the results of a research paper, which amounts to a bunch of uncritical fact learning. Another challenge of reading cutting edge research is that a lot of prior knowledge is required to comprehend it.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
"National labs are supposed to have such an atmosphere, but my stint in one of them makes me think otherwise. " ...labs where basic research in applied engineering is still done in the US, without the pressure of money and immediate results?"
If the national lab environment wasn't for you... the corporate environment may be even worse. As a PhD in chemical engineering working at an R&D lab in one of the biggest 'tech companies' in the US that still does physical sciences reseach... I can say this from first hand experience. And, by the way, we employ a LOT of PhD mechanical engineers (mostly with materials science expertise).
At one of the conferences I've attended, I talked with one of the pioneers in my area of research (organic electronics) that works at TJ Watson Lab. Even he complains at how 'managed' the research is at Watson. Actually - his particular project got shelved. All my friends (other PhDs) at Watson do seem to have this cloud of doubt looming over their head regarding the longevity of their positions.
"
As you know - physical sciences research (of which I suspect you are a part of) is extremely expensive. (~$4000 barely gets me an electronic weighing balance that allows me to weigh out the chemicals that I use, much less do anything with it) Someone's got to pay for this. The return on investment for research has gained huge scrutiny in the past several years since it's typically so bad. Many company's don't have such efforts (e.g. Apple, Dell) and are still successful as they concentrate on industrial design and business execution. They simply BUY this technology from smaller companies (or acquire them). And as far as working for those 'smaller companies'... this is even more stressful since it is really sink or swim.. so the 'pressure of money and immediate results' is even greater.
My best advice is this... on your interviews - ask as many questions as possible to learn about how serious the company is in making the appropriate investments for whatever project they are hiring you for. Talk to your would-be peers and ask them frank questions about the work environment.
Lastly - one of my close collegues at work left a senior scientist position at a national lab to work where we do now and he regrets it deeply. If you are really, truly into research and learning the nature of things, and have low tolerance for corporate bullshit - then stay in academina/national lab. If you can stomach it - as I can - there are definitely perks to working for a big company's reseach lab (e.g. the pockets are deep).
I would actually say a lot of the R&D a lot of companies did back in the day did not help them as much as it should have. They would invent great things, but some other company would usually profit off of it. R&D is expensive and needs to be well-justified.
...... I could go on and on and on.
Your memory is not as long as mine then. HP became huge by investing in R&D. Apple and Adobe arguably became who they are because of investments in fonts and laser printers (not to mention software and industrial design). Yahoo and Google are who they are almost exclusively because of R&D. Before that we can certainly look back to GE, Siemens, Boeing, Corning etc...etc...etc.... All of these companies profited quite handsomely because of R&D, but I suspect you are thinking of companies who at some point in their management cycle started to focus on the short term rather than the long term and it cost 'em.
Today, computer science has plenty of R&D in industry, but mechanical engineering has to turn to defense simply because of the huge cost in making anything interesting.
Oh, please. I can think of a ton of things that do not cost a tremendous amount of money to engineer, yet are big money makers in their individual markets. Think glass and composites for a variety of things from buildings to aircraft to bicycles to skateboards. Think ceramics for many of the same structural applications and more (acoustics and many others). Think automobiles or hell, even bicycles. The last downhill mountain bike race (linked here) I attended had Honda downhill mountain bikes with automatic transmissions. Think applications in home construction. Think about
The technology that goes into modern warfare will trickle down into society in several years, similar to the way NASA worked 30 years ago. o. It's not an entirely terrible system, because no one but defense is really willing to spend the amount of money and defense is pretty universally agreed on as neccesary.
I have no doubt about that, but after working with some folks in defense, I can tell you it is an inefficient system littered with middle managers and other parasites that each need the hard work of others to justify an existence. Furthermore, completely idiosyncratic and political decisions go into many defense related projects that end up on the cutting room floor for reasons completely unrelated to the performance of the defense project. Read about the XM-8 rifle system to understand what I mean. The dollars that go into black projects invest in technologies that are tied up for years, sometimes decades before ever being made available to the general public and often result in environmental and economic consequences that would be better managed in open, competitive environments. All told, I would much rather see those dollars go into education, basic science and open competition for even defense related projects.
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You should read a couple of books. 1) The World is Flat. 2) The Pentagon's New Map.
You are correct in thinking that the race for the Cold War is over. However, what you need to consider is that we are now in a global market competition for goods and services that will require innovation to stay on top. In fact, it could be argued that the Cold War was in reality an economic war that Communism lost (is still losing) because they cannot maintain the technology and information lead. Their infrastructure simply could not compete.
So, getting back on point: If we focus just on applied engineering, we will end up being the country where work is simply outsourced to because of cheaper labor. This is already happening to a great extent with the European and Japanese automobile companies who are building more of their products here because Americans work for less money than their counterparts in Germany and Japan. So, if you paid attention in history, economics and world history you would find that history has shown that those countries that define and maintain the technological edge will lead economically. Those countries that cease or fail to invest in long term strategies and educational investment wither away or at least fade to some extent behind another group/country that invests more in "brains".
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I think you miss a key part of research... The scope of it. 50 years ago the scope of engineering research was a lot more broad than it was today. In the computer industry, we can go back 30 years and see it. A computer architect 30 years ago likely knew more about electrical signals than todays. However the work on it could be started right after finishing an undergraduate degree. After an undergraduate degree you could undestand how transistors work, understand boolean logic, and put together a few thousand transistors to create a processor. State of the art research would have been in ALU design, datapaths, etc. Advance a few years and the research is focusing more on pipelining processors, parallelization, branch prediction etc. Granted much of this work had been done priorly with supercomputers, but going back even further similar progress had been made.
A little further down the road more work is being done in cache structures and deep pipelining, multiprocessor memory concurrency etc. The amount of knowledge needed is immense. In order to work on any of these features researchers needed a background in electrical engineering (although, they have cut back some of the detailed analog work necessary), they need to understand the workings of boolean logic, take the basic circuits courses, understand computer programming, know how to fully design "simple" processors, know how all the advanced features in the processor work, and then concentrate on a single component, and try to improve upon it. Much of this knowledge isn't obtained until their graduate career. Only then can they start reading papers on their specialization, and later they can hopefully contribute papers to the field.
The low hanging fruit just isn't as available in well established fields. Granted there are fields (even within computer engineering thankfully) where little work has been done, and large gains can be had. However even these fields all require significant background knowledge of all the complex systems involved.
Phil
>> Defense Labs and National Labs: the political forces are too strong for blue-sky research to happen there.
Definately take the politics out - I once worked in defence research lab, specialising in weapons technology. My pet area is killing groups of people as quickly as possible (outdoor specialist). My team came up with some breakthrough ideas, but the g-men said it was too abstract, too blue sky, too arty-farty.
It pretty much came down to "it can kill lots of people, but unless it can start production in my state next quarter and be killing brown people within the year, it's a no-go.", my favourite excuse (shot down because the office favourite's conventional design had a cool looking model): "Your laser is great, the people are out of the way, but now the oil fields on fire.".
Get politics out of war!