Sector: environment

Gideon Mann‘s remarks on the occasion of the Robert Khan distinguished lecture at The City College of New York on 5/22/16: and opportunities about a specific aspect of this relationship, the broader need for computer science to engage with the real world. Right now, a key aspect of this relationship is being built around the risks and opportunities of the emerging role of data.

Ultimately, I believe that these relationships, between computer science andthe real world, between data science and real problems, hold the promise tovastly increase our public welfare. And today, we, the people in this room,have a unique opportunity to debate and define a more moral dataeconomy….

The hybrid research model proposes something different. The hybrid research model, embeds, as it were, researchers as practitioners.The thought was always that you would be going about your regular run of business,would face a need to innovate to solve a crucial problem, and would do something novel. At that point, you might choose to work some extra time and publish a paper explaining your innovation. In practice, this model rarely works as expected. Tight deadlines mean the innovation that people do in their normal progress of business is incremental..

This model separated research from scientific publication, and shortens thetime-window of research, to what can be realized in a few year time zone.For me, this always felt like a tremendous loss, with respect to the older so-called “ivory tower” research model. It didn’t seem at all clear how this kindof model would produce the sea change of thought engendered byShannon’s work, nor did it seem that Claude Shannon would ever want towork there. This kind of environment would never support the freestanding wonder, like the robot mouse that Shannon worked on. Moreover, I always believed that crucial to research is publication and participation in the scientific community. Without this engagement, it feels like something different — innovation perhaps.

It is clear that the monopolistic environment that enabled AT&T to support this ivory tower research doesn’t exist anymore. .

Now, the hybrid research model was one model of research at Google, butthere is another model as well, the moonshot model as exemplified byGoogle X. Google X brought together focused research teams to driveresearch and development around a particular project — Google Glass and the Self-driving car being two notable examples. Here the focus isn’t research, but building a new product, with research as potentially a crucial blocking issue. Since the goal of Google X is directly to develop a new product, by definition they don’t publish papers along the way, but they’re not as tied to short-term deliverables as the rest of Google is. However, they are again decidedly un-Bell-Labs like — a secretive, tightly focused, non-publishing group. DeepMind is a similarly constituted initiative — working, for example, on a best-in-the-world Go playing algorithm, with publications happening sparingly.

Unfortunately, both of these approaches, the hybrid research model and the moonshot model stack the deck towards a particular kind of research — research that leads to relatively short term products that generate corporate revenue. While this kind of research is good for society, it isn’t the only kind of research that we need. We urgently need research that is longterm, and that is undergone even without a clear financial local impact. Insome sense this is a “tragedy of the commons”, where a shared public good (the commons) is not supported because everyone can benefit from itwithout giving back. Academic research is thus a non-rival, non-excludible good, and thus reasonably will be underfunded. In certain cases, this takes on an ethical dimension — particularly in health care, where the choice ofwhat diseases to study and address has a tremendous potential to affect human life. Should we research heart disease or malaria? This decisionmakes a huge impact on global human health, but is vastly informed by the potential profit from each of these various medicines….

Private Data means research is out of reach

The larger point that I want to make, is that in the absence of places where long-term research can be done in industry, academia has a tremendous potential opportunity. Unfortunately, it is actually quite difficult to do the work that needs to be done in academia, since many of the resources needed to push the state of the art are only found in industry: in particular data.

Of course, academia also lacks machine resources, but this is a simpler problem to fix — it’s a matter of money, resources form the government could go to enabling research groups building their own data centers or acquiring the computational resources from the market, e.g. Amazon. This is aided by the compute philanthropy that Google and Microsoft practice that grant compute cycles to academic organizations.

But the data problem is much harder to address. The data being collected and generated at private companies could enable amazing discoveries and research, but is impossible for academics to access. The lack of access to private data from companies actually is much more significant effects than inhibiting research. In particular, the consumer level data, collected by social networks and internet companies could do much more than ad targeting.

Just for public health — suicide prevention, addiction counseling, mental health monitoring — there is enormous potential in the use of our online behavior to aid the most needy, and academia and non-profits are set-up to enable this work, while companies are not.

To give a one examples, anorexia and eating disorders are vicious killers. 20 million women and 10 million men suffer from a clinically significant eating disorder at some time in their life, and sufferers of eating disorders have the highest mortality rate of any other mental health disorder — with a jaw-dropping estimated mortality rate of 10%, both directly from injuries sustained by the disorder and by suicide resulting from the disorder.

Eating disorders are particular in that sufferers often seek out confirmatory information, blogs, images and pictures that glorify and validate what sufferers see as “lifestyle” choices. Browsing behavior that seeks out images and guidance on how to starve yourself is a key indicator that someone is suffering. Tumblr, pinterest, instagram are places that people host and seek out this information. Tumblr has tried to help address this severe mental health issue by banning blogs that advocate for self-harm and by adding PSA announcements to query term searches for queries for or related to anorexia. But clearly — this is not the be all and end all of work that could be done to detect and assist people at risk of dying from eating disorders. Moreover, this data could also help understand the nature of those disorders themselves…..

There is probably a role for a data ombudsman within private organizations — someone to protect the interests of the public’s data inside of an organization. Like a ‘public editor’ in a newspaper according to how you’ve set it up. There to protect and articulate the interests of the public, which means probably both sides — making sure a company’s data is used for public good where appropriate, and making sure the ‘right’ to privacy of the public is appropriately safeguarded (and probably making sure the public is informed when their data is compromised).

Next, we need a platform to make collaboration around social good between companies and between companies and academics. This platform would enable trusted users to have access to a wide variety of data, and speed process of research.

Finally, I wonder if there is a way that government could support research sabbaticals inside of companies. Clearly, the opportunities for this research far outstrip what is currently being done…(more)”