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Mitsubishi Breaks Up Famous Computer Science Lab
Andrew Koyfman writes "Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories is falling apart. Top researchers and scientists are being poached by the competitors, including BAE, Adobe, and others. The lab was responsible for much breakthrough research in the areas of computer vision, computer graphics, AI, and machine learning. They were the first group to develop the Diamond Touch table, an early precursor to Microsoft's Surface Computing. Now it looks like the famous lab will be no more, at least not in their original glory."
Including this.
And this and this.
And this.
This article is a CLASSIC example of why we need academic institutions and government funded research into the great unknown.
A significant number of these types of labs, doing pioneering work under the name of a parent company, have been gutted with the intent of making them more "product focused" with the intent of converting brain power straight into $$$.
Well, here's a news flash - that's not how real research (as opposed to product development) works. With research into new stuff, you DON'T KNOW what you will find or what it will be worth. NO ONE does, BY DEFINITION.
A corporation can only do this type of work when a) they have a decades long focus and b) have sufficient profit margins to soak up the cost of research without immediate returns. That's a rare situation, and it's becoming rarer in a more competitive world economy.
Rather than bemoan this behavior (after all, money making is at the heart of commerce) we should be funding basic research at universities at much higher levels. Funding at universities has gotten tough enough that they will undertake a wide variety of investigations for commercial companies just to pay the bills. This makes them de-facto corporate research labs, and takes away time from their exploration into the unknown. Grad students become extremely cheap labor for companies, just indirectly.
Right now, it won't matter commercially. Product cycles don't get impacted by long term research for years or decades, so for a while we won't see this problem. But it's going to hurt us in the end. As products stagnate, foreign plants will catch up and learn how to produce at higher quality. They will begin to match or even exceed the performance of existing outputs domestically, and we will not be able to compete because there will be nothing in the long term pipeline that might convince people to stay with us.
Pure Research HAS A POINT. Even if the profound social and philosophical questions surrounding the pursuit of knowledge for its own stake don't register, it can also be viewed as a long term investment in our future. Balance sheets and profit statements do not define the whole of human existence, nor do the look far enough ahead to see long term consequences.
Again, it is unrealistic to expect this of businesses - that is not how the system is encouraged to behave. However, the government SHOULD be thinking about these issues. They need to be funding a LOT of basic research into all manner of alternative energy science, and the more basic science behind it - and thats actually a more practically centered goal. Truly BASIC research into the unknown, with no end game in mind, seems to be a tough sell nowadays.
Corporate research works ONLY when the long term is viewed as Very Important. It's dangerous to trust to that in an uncertain amd extremely competitive market.