Academic Research as it appears to me today

(Disclaimer: The views expressed here are somewhat negative. They are a reflection of my thoughts and feelings at this time. I hope these will be proved wrong sometime in the future.)

PhD. The acronym still evokes a feeling of awe among many people. At a time, in the 1800s and 1900s, only a handful of people could get it. And they often went on to make ground-breaking work in their respective fields, mostly physics, chemistry, mathematics or literature, history, philosophy in those days. The world has thoroughly changed now. Doing a PhD is nothing uncommon now, in fact it is quite common. In every main city, in every single locality you may find a PhD-holder. Apart from the traditional subjects mentioned above, PhDs are now common in engineering (especially Computer Science - which is to the current world what physics was to it in the 1800s and 1900s),  management, finance, economics and what not.

Most people treat PhD as an important step in building their careers- and rightly so. That is how it is in the current world. And yet, there are some people who still romanticize the idea of PhD. They feel that to do a PhD is noble. Some of them think that academic research is the fullest attainment of  intellectual satisfaction. Other people think that PhD is a way to become a great scientist who will change the face of the world/country. That was the impression forced on me when i was in high school, and maybe even college. As a research student in Computer Science, i feel (at least now) that these people, unfortunately, are living in fool's paradise. Whether it should be so or not, is a different question, but definitely it is not like that. In fact, one prof in my dept has recently gone on record saying that he views research as "Business"- sell ideas to conferences/industry and get papers/patents in return. And that is where i feel frustrated.

In PhD, in most parts of the world, the first step is to "find a problem". Alyosha Efros, professor of Computer Vision from Carnegie Mellon University, said in a conference, "In PhD, spend 3 years looking for a problem. Then spend 1 year solving it".  This, to me, looks a very baffling idea. In a highly developed country like USA, people probably can afford to do this, but what about India? A student is typically 24 years of age when (s)he joins PhD- in other words (s)he is at the prime time of his/her life. Its the best time in life to go ahead and do something concrete, something significant and impactful. Is it then really worthwhile to spend 3 years searching for a problem? There are many many problems in India- poverty, social injustice, unemployment, corruption, population explosion, pollution, insurgency.... the list goes on. If a youngster approaching a prof for a problem and the prof does not have a problem at hand to give, the youngster should better go and attack these problems, which are visible and quite shocking. By the time a student would finish PhD, (s)he will be 28-29, and it would be time for him/her to marry and raise a family, and settle down into a life. One can still do social work after that, but family responsibilities (which cannot be and should not be avoided) will take up a significant amount of his/her time.

And in any case, even if a problem is found in the academic realm itself, is it always impactful to the world/country? I strongly doubt so. Because of the enormously large number of people turning to research, the current state of research is very esoteric, something that cannot be explained properly beyond a cliquey society of profs, students and maybe industry people  who are familiar with the area. I am working in Machine Learning/Computer Vision, but when my uncle, who also has a PhD (but in Bengali Literature) asks about my research, i found it difficult to explain to him what the work is about. Same thing happened when some delegates from Hitachi Labs visited our lab, or when UG students of Computer Science itself visited our department on the IISc Open Day. And it is not that I can't express well...the same problem was faced by most of my labmates. How can some work, which is not even understood by people beyond a clique, be of any significant impact?

The most common way in which Computer Science-related research (particularly Game Theory, Machine Learning and Algorithms) do create an impact now is that they are used by the internet giants like Yahoo!, Google, Microsoft and IBM. They use the research to improve their web services, and provide the user with better facilities. I am not saying anything against that, indeed i am writing this blog because of the facility offered to me by these companies. But my doubt remains- for an average Indian, is it at all an issue? The mother of all problems in India is assymetric progress of people, and as far as India is concerned, this sort of research will only help that small part of its population which has already been pampered excessively, especially since the economy opened up in 1991.

And even then, does the academic research actually help in solving such problems also? Sometimes they do, the most impactful ideas in Internet Research-the Page Rank Algorithm, Latent Variable Model, Topic Models,  etc came up from  academia only. But more often than not, problems in academic research remain only of academic interest. This is especially true in India where there are bright people in the academia but not enough collaboration with the industry.

Remember this article is not written by a cynic who knows nothing about PhD but by a PhD student himself. So if u r a patriotic-minded Indian (which I am), and u r thinking about PhD, do think again!!