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0 pointsbskap13y ago0 comments

That's because you never hear about what's going on outside of the research centers- they're all under NDA.

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Do companies want to profit from this computer science research being done under a NDA? Don't they have to release these advances in the form of a product to earn a profit?

Then show me some products which demonstrate this "cutting-edge" computer science research.

wcarss13y ago

They don't necessarily have to, and even if they did, it may not be obvious.

Consider a financial company working to improve prediction algorithms for their in-house use, hiring smartypants PhDs and giving them free reign and great pay. The result after ten years could be way ahead (or even just a little ahead) of the academic world's work and never release a product with a sticker for a big shiny new algorithm.

The firm wouldn't even have to stand out in its success; it could do reasonably well compared to others, and just attribute a lot of its modest success to its algorithmic insights.

Even in externally released products, really clever ways to get around things aren't necessarily visible. Just today I was reading about Jonathan Blow's work [1] on localised kriging [2] for his upcoming game The Witness. He's pulling from advanced geostatics academia for a little feature he wanted in a game, and if he didn't blog about it (and then discuss enhancements in the comments) no one would know it existed - even once the game is released. A small example to be sure, but I think it exemplifies the point.

[1] http://the-witness.net/news/2010/05/kriging-is-cool/ [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kriging

raquo13y ago

I don't see how this situation is an issue of patents, really. A company that is decidedly keeping its prediction technology secret to gain an edge in a market which is entirely about being better at prediction than the other guys is not going to patent and therefore open source their technology no matter what happens to the patent system.

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anonymoushn13y ago

A company could instead profit by trading using their results, and some results could belong to governments.

I'm reminded that my graph theory professor said that he could factor polynomials over finite fields in polynomial time, but that he could not tell me how to do it.

iskander13y ago

...but doesn't this sort of argument reduce to "you can't disprove the existence of unicorns?". Eventually this cutting-edge stuff has to come out from under NDA, so we should at least know of major advances from the 90s which were only revealed later.

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