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2 An Academic Career in ECSE
Pages 34-55

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From page 34...
... Although the academic setting provides enormous intellectual freedom to choose problems and the independence to follow one's curiosity, an academic career in ECSE demands not so much the traits of a dreamer as it does the skills of the entrepreneur. One must organize implementation efforts, formulate goals, build a team, find funding (Box 2.1)
From page 36...
... When Fraser's peephole optimizer saved more in linkage editing time than it cost in added code generation time, quantities that were measured in seconds, the optimizer was self-evidently better. In the proof-of-performance context, better can also mean more functional.
From page 37...
... In contrast to the instances above, in which the purpose of experimentation is often to demonstrate the superiority of the experimental artifact over some other artifact, the value of the experimental artifact is accepted as a premise and the research goal is to understand specific properties of it. For example, networks are ubiquitous and their value is indisputable, but careful study of the behavior of different networks (e.g., load-balancing on the Arpanet or the fairness of Ethernet's exponential back-off protocol)
From page 38...
... It should be obvious that creating a computational artifact, be it a program, digital hardware, graphic image, or the like, is not synonymous with conducting experimental computer science research. ECSE researchers often program, but programming (even programming of a system that has never before been written5)
From page 39...
... The above questions have little to do with whether or not the researcher has a particular application in mind when he or she undertakes the research. Put differently, the traditional distinction between "basic" and "applied" research does not hold up under close examination.6 However, efforts devoted solely to making an innovative artifact usable by others not in the research team (e.g., writing documentation)
From page 40...
... Examples of less ubiquitous, but nevertheless widely used, software include CAD tools for chip design, 7 While the committee is most familiar with the demands of ECSE, it does not wish to claim that the field's requirements for resources are necessarily greater than those of other fields with defining characteristics similar to those used to describe ECSE in Chapter 1. Such fields include, for example, biotechnology and materials science.
From page 41...
... To this list can be added specific tools and systems specialized for a particular research area, which are typically exchanged gratis and unsupported. Dedicated Computing Systems Experimental software research often requires dedicated systems (and, on occasion, special-purpose systems)
From page 42...
... In some instances, this is simply a consequence of the rapid growth of the field, and in other cases it is the result of historical accident, in which computer science departments growing out of mathematics had no laboratory tradition. Project-specific laboratory space is essential: it provides a location for shared laboratory equipment, a site for constructing physical artifacts, and the meeting site or "community" where the corporate knowledge of the implementation effort is disseminated.
From page 43...
... Providing such space and perhaps other auxiliary services for equipment may provide an additional advantage with respect to tundra~s~ng: such facilities and services are often regarded as significant evidence of a department's or university's commitment to a research project by potential industry or government sponsors who may fund equipment grants or donations. Maintaining the Research Environment A research laboratory requires more than state-of-the-art workstations and air conditioning to be a productive environment.
From page 44...
... Staff Support Although graduate students are an important component of infrastructure without which ECSE faculty cannot be productive, many experimental systems projects reach a point at which it is difficult to make progress on the basis of graduate student labor alone. When such a point is reached, technical support staff (including technicians and other paraprofessionals)
From page 45...
... Such support coordinates and manages communications and information flow between collaborators, between the research team and other institutions, and among vendors, technicians, and the research team itself. Access to Collaborators and Other Experimental Systems Although faculty collaborators are not essential to all experimental research, and a single investigator with graduate students may be sufficient for many projects, especially those of modest scale, largerscale systems research is rarely done in isolation; junior faculty members undertaking large-scale systems research are poorly served when they are advised to refrain from collaboration.
From page 46...
... Faculty can save valuable time and resources by using public domain and even commercial system components, even though such use may result in an increased dependence on access to the most current research (and sometimes commercial) software and hardware components and the people that create them.
From page 47...
... As an associate professor at a public university commented: The NSF "small science" model does not work for my kind of research. I need to replace equipment more often, my work cries for staff programmer support, I need more like 6 to 8 graduate students rather than 1....
From page 48...
... program.13 Whereas the former is a foundation-wide program, the RIA is special to the CISE directorate and to engineering. The NYI/PYI program has allowed junior ECSE faculty to support several graduate students and rudimentary equipment for a long enough time that significant work can be accomplished, and the RIA program has provided summer salary or support for one or two graduate students.
From page 49...
... The three primary research divisions of CISE responsible for monitoring PYI and RIA funding are the divisions for Microelectronics Information Processing Systems (MIPS) ; Information, Robotics, and Intelligent Systems (IRIS)
From page 50...
... This presents them with a major challenge to find the equipment, graduate student funding, and infrastructure support needed to conduct a credible experimental research program. 16 Informal inquiries by the committee among potential donors of software suggest that the underlying reason for the paucity of software donations is related, at least in part, to the lack of tax incentives for such donations.
From page 51...
... One solution to this problem would be to extend the probationary period for ECSE faculty members. However, a serious exploration of that solution would have required the committee to address larger political issues beyond the scope of its charge or resources.
From page 52...
... It takes a long time to develop industrial contacts because, in general, industry prefers to work with a few well-known people at well-established schools, and in some cases, industrial laboratory managers are quite intolerant of academic research. Consider the following comment from an assistant professor at a public university: After I am tenured I will be willing to work on longer-term projects.
From page 53...
... Recoveringfrom Wrong Turns and Dead Ends, andfrom Being Scooped It is a natural consequence of any research that occasionally a dead-end path is pursued or an unfortunate trade-off is made. A mistake may well be the result of one of several "nontechnical" factors unrelated to the basic idea being studied: a hardware vendor does not deliver or does not perform as expected; funding runs out; key project participants leave; the technology was inadequate to the task.
From page 54...
... A large-scale project might cost several million dollars per year for several years and require dozens of personyears to complete. It is inherently collaborative, and the research team might consist of several principal investigators, a dozen graduate students, a few technical staff members, and a full-time administrative officer.
From page 55...
... . : SUMMARY Without adequate infrastructure, many ECSE faculty are not able to fulfill their true potential.


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