IBM is still one of only very few companies doing truly interesting research.
Can you qualify that? Almost every big technology company and thousands of small ones have teams of smart people conducting interesting research across many fields. Take a look at any issue of Wired or Technology Review (or the top links to HN on any given day) to see some examples.
Outside of Google, Palintar, and some of the other machine learning or niche consulting companies, I see little to no research on problems as hard and potentially influential as those that IBM or HP work on. The big reason you don't see what they do is that they don't work on consumer facing products very often.
The companies whose work I see at CS conferences and in patent searches for core algorithmic techniques are mostly IBM, HP, Microsoft, and Google. The majority of companies that are in the top links on HN on a given day do not do interesting research of the type IBM is doing.
Further, there is a lot of reinventing of the wheel going on in the startup scene these days. Just look at "new" things like in memory databases, column stores, event driven frameworks (Node.js) and others. All of these things are many decades old and do not count as new research even though they are newly written implementations. They may be more approachable to the common developer than the decades old implementations, and that has value, but this is not "research".
I probably should have said "important" instead of "interesting".
How many of those companies are doing research that can be compared to what came out of Bell Labs in the 60's and 70's - the transistor, the laser, ... ?
IBM's work on advanced semiconductors and Watson certainly qualify. The later will probably be seen as one of the most important developments in the history of humanity and it wouldn't have been possible without the former.
Not really. Lots of people knew that the laser was important, that Xerox park stuff was important, that C/Unix was important, etc even at the time they were introduced.
In the case of the laser, there may have been some sense that it was important, but at the time there were no immediate applications and it was called "a solution in search of a problem."
In Wikipedia though it says that "Gould’s notes included possible applications for a laser, such as spectrometry, interferometry, radar, and nuclear fusion. He continued developing the idea, and filed a patent application in April 1959."
Comments
What about Watson ?
IBM is still one of only very few companies doing truly interesting research.
Among the other achievements of IBM I would like to mention the 4 Nobel prizes(3 in Physics):
http://www.research.ibm.com/resources/awards.shtml
IBM is still one of only very few companies doing truly interesting research.
Can you qualify that? Almost every big technology company and thousands of small ones have teams of smart people conducting interesting research across many fields. Take a look at any issue of Wired or Technology Review (or the top links to HN on any given day) to see some examples.
Outside of Google, Palintar, and some of the other machine learning or niche consulting companies, I see little to no research on problems as hard and potentially influential as those that IBM or HP work on. The big reason you don't see what they do is that they don't work on consumer facing products very often.
The companies whose work I see at CS conferences and in patent searches for core algorithmic techniques are mostly IBM, HP, Microsoft, and Google. The majority of companies that are in the top links on HN on a given day do not do interesting research of the type IBM is doing.
Further, there is a lot of reinventing of the wheel going on in the startup scene these days. Just look at "new" things like in memory databases, column stores, event driven frameworks (Node.js) and others. All of these things are many decades old and do not count as new research even though they are newly written implementations. They may be more approachable to the common developer than the decades old implementations, and that has value, but this is not "research".
I probably should have said "important" instead of "interesting".
How many of those companies are doing research that can be compared to what came out of Bell Labs in the 60's and 70's - the transistor, the laser, ... ?
IBM's work on advanced semiconductors and Watson certainly qualify. The later will probably be seen as one of the most important developments in the history of humanity and it wouldn't have been possible without the former.
its pretty hard to know what is important in the moment.
Not really. Lots of people knew that the laser was important, that Xerox park stuff was important, that C/Unix was important, etc even at the time they were introduced.
In the case of the laser, there may have been some sense that it was important, but at the time there were no immediate applications and it was called "a solution in search of a problem."
In Wikipedia though it says that "Gould’s notes included possible applications for a laser, such as spectrometry, interferometry, radar, and nuclear fusion. He continued developing the idea, and filed a patent application in April 1959."
Don't forget Microsoft is also pushing the envelope. Their showcase says it all ... https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/showcase/channelDetails.aspx...
Check your link? That URL returns a server error.
/drum-drum
I hope Watson survives, but based on what I've heard out of Almaden over the years, I'm skeptical.
Survives ? From what I hear it's already being applied to medicine.
And banking. And insurance. The list will likely continue to grow.