According to a tweet by Matthias Heinrich , the WWW’2012 conference (in short, the most important research conference on web topics) had a very strong presence of industrial players: “Out of 108 papers, Yahoo contributed to 22 and MS to 13 papers.” and more than 40 people from Google attended .
Compared to these numbers, the situation in modeling research conferences is ludicrous (possibly improving but still ludicrous). And this is bad, very very bad since it hinders the communication and technology transfer between researchers and practitioners (many companies do attend and present in more “tool-oriented” conferences, specially EclipseCon but there we, the researchers, rarely attend because publishing a paper there does not count so it’s not easy to justify the trip).
I don’t know why this difference (is the modeling market not big enough for companies to invest in research? is the research we do too far from what they could be interested in?) but your opinions on this matter will be more than welcome!
FNR Pearl Chair. Head of the Software Engineering RDI Unit at LIST. Affiliate Professor at University of Luxembourg. More about me.
And why doesn’t it count when research papers are presented at tool- or user-oriented conferences? Or in magazines or a blog instead of peer-reviewed journals?
That sounds like it’s the biggest stumbling block right there: the mechanism for disclosing research instead became a mechanism for insulating it from industry and the general public.
There is no technical impediment to submitting research papers to trade journals or hobbyist magazines. There’s no law against it either.
End the academic snobbery and begin publishing through media with larger circulations. And let users and industry players also participate in the review process, not just researchers.
I´m totally fine with disseminating research results outside the research world. In fact my group does this regularly (both attending tool-oriented conferences and publishing summaries of our work on internet magazines from time to time). And I´d say all researchers are interested in this. Academic snobbery is not because of the researchers is because this kind of work does not count in our career (evaluation agencies only count papers publishedhttps://modeling-languages.com/wp-admin/edit-comments.php?p=2397&approved=1#comments-form in “serious” venues) so we have to do it for “free”
Nevertheless this is not the point I wanted to raise here. My point is that, under the same conditions, big industry players have an active participation in our research domains but not in ours.