Question: when will visable signs of your research succeading become public?

David Corne answered on 17 Jun 2011:

another very good question. It makes me consider what I am doing (which is generally not visible to the general public) and ask myself is it really worth it … Well my answer to that is “yes”, but it is good for me to keep asking myself. Most of the things that are visible to the public are like 100-piece jigsaws – you see the completed picture, but 100 different scientists and engineers were each responsible for a piece. I think I have pieces in several visible jigsaws, while there are also a few complete pictures out there which are based mainly on my work, but actually aren’t very visible to the public! Here are a handful of puzzles I’ve worked on:
– figuring out how to guess the location of a mobile phone that doesn’t have GPS. This is something where my team did the complete picture, and it is now available in a product that a mobile phone company offers to other mobile phone companies, and it applies only to certain types of network. So, not very visible to the public.
– I worked on a key part of a new AI idea for solving a very wide range of logistic problems (arranging processing schedules for factories, or events, and so on). This idea, now called “hyper-heuristics” has about 30,000 hits on google scholar (i.e. huge numbers of academic papers talk about it), and I would estimate that around 10,000 companies now use it worldwide. This means lots of complete jigsaws around in which I had a piece, and none of the big pictures are all that visible to the public – it’s just lots of companies making better profits or delivering things to you more quickly etc.
– currently working directly with three companies (one is BP, two are much smaller companies) on different problems involving their data. Fairly soon, I will see the results in that each of these companies will be offering a new product that they sell to other businesses, or an improved service offered to clients. The effect on the public will be subtle – perhaps oil will be slightly cheaper, it will not take so long for your bank to offer you a mortgage.
– right now (almost all scientists would say this, but it is usually true!) I am also working on some really exciting stuff involving brainwave data – I would say more, but the team of other scientists and engineers I am working with would probably prefer we keep it quiet for a while.