February 14, 2020
This is an attempt at penning down my current state of thought in the form of a statement. It is really not useful for others but I am hoping this will help me keep myself on track and not lose focus. From time to time, I will revisit this page and if I cannot resist will make modifications to it, likely only additions. Over the last few months, I have shifted my focus a lot from one field of study to another leaving me unsatisfied and cranky at all times.
This is an attempt at penning down my current state of thought in the form of a statement. It is really not useful for others but I am hoping this will help me keep myself on track and not lose focus. From time to time, I will revisit this page and if I cannot resist will make modifications to it, likely only additions. Over the last few months, I have shifted my focus a lot from one field of study to another leaving me unsatisfied and cranky at all times.
Given my appreciation for Google's ethics, I looked at their current philosophy behind the research [1]. In my opinion, it is truly the organization that has had the most impact on the world. Since I need validation and security for every decision I make, I thought looking at Google's recent investments into research will help me assess my plans. My general insecurity and sense of unhappiness come from my financial insecurity among other reasons. And not being "happy" means I am not using my potential to the fullest. I wish it was the other way round. So it is critical for me to get my plan evaluated and an established entity to support it, directly or indirectly. That, in the end, I can get a job and it's worth doing what I am doing.
Language, Algorithms, Systems, and Software has always been there in the research focus of Google, even Human-Computer Interaction. But it still isn't enough. It doesn't explicitly say how much of it is driven by product needs and how far it extends. A lot of Google products have originated because of the scale they are operating at. Innovation is different from science.
To my surprise, but slightly expected, Google only started supporting computational neuroscience Ph.D. fellowships explicitly after 2018. It has supported 5 students as of now (too bad not all of them have written about their work on the internet). This gives me the confidence to pursue this field more actively than I have been doing/able to do and worry less about outcomes. It is backed by their statement of philosophy behind the research:
"... our research philosophy has become more expansive than the hybrid approach to research we described in our CACM article six years ago and now incorporates a substantial amount of open-ended, long-term research driven more by scientific curiosity than current product needs."
The difference between the two approaches, six years ago and current, is very clear. CS is now being explored at the fundamental level even if it doesn't have a close connection to a specific application or a product. So the belief "Successful outcomes might be better technology, useful theories or new discoveries." is there.
CS and ML are going into robotics and for robots to be truly intelligent, brain-inspired approaches need to be explored. And the brain is just too vast across all dimensions, so any scientific attempt at it contributes to our understanding.
Acknowledging and owning the impact of the research outcomes is something that helps Google stand out from the majority of industrial organizations, small and large. If there is a "business-need", then there is definitely not enough intellectual freedom [1].
"In order to foster an environment that supports long-term research, we acknowledge our inability to predict exactly which ideas that we work on today will be the most useful in the years to come."
True, I chose to only look at the optimistic side.
[1]: “Philosophy.” Google Research, research.google/philosophy/.