I am participating in a workshop at NYU which aims to help us take our research from the lab out into the actual marketplace. It is very enlightening.
When you do research, you generally try to imagine what the future will be like. You need to make guesses about how powerful, in perhaps another ten or fifteen years, computers will be, or networks, or graphics processors, or some other resource that currently exists only in the lab — if at all.
But when you think in terms of the marketplace, you need to think nearer to the present. There needs to be a value proposition for people in the near-term, not ten or fifteen years from now.
It’s a different way of thinking. In some ways it can be confining, but in other ways freeing. One thing I can say for sure is that I am enjoying the learning process.
Ah, the joys of multiple computing platforms and supporting languages other than English.