The environment and the atmosphere in the laboratory is a mixture of 2 seemingly un-compatible things:
- commercial company optimizing all the processes, client cooperation and staff efforts to generate profit
- academic institution seeking to produce cutting edge research results, where scientists work in small focused groups on the topics that or of interest to them
I personally joined the group working on a business intelligence tool:
http://www.zurich.ibm.com/mcs/infoanalytics/marketing_sales.html
and I teamed up with a colleague from the Analytics group to write a paper about high-dimensional data visualization, that was accepted to ICDM 2010 (sub 20% acc. rate) and I presented it in Sydney in December:
http://www.computer.org/portal/web/csdl/doi/10.1109/ICDM.2010.71
All in all, I enjoyed the combination of having the freedom in choosing and pursuing research ideas while also being confronted with the real clients expecting a working tool and the overall context of commerce.
Ps:
I spoke about the experience from the perspective of finishing Master/Ing students at a local Computer Science conference, you can find the slides (albeit for some reason they got damaged by SlideShare and the presentation is in Slovak) here.
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