Date: Thu, 19 Aug 1999 11:32:38 -0600 From: Tim McDonough Tim_McDonough@aa.com Subject: Challenging Issues Kudos to the organizers of this year's successful KDD-99!! The mere existence of the "industrial" track at this year's KDD is both good news and bad news. The good news is that the flood gates continue to be opening for the deployment of KDD in the world of commerce. The bad news is that this deployment urgently necessitates the develoment of adequately defined protocols for the interaction of the gift-giving culture of the research community and the exchange culture of the profit maximizing economy. So that this interface does not become a chasm nor a clash, it is recommended that some of the following be considered for talking points within each community in the coming year: 1. The research community must continue to develop essential elements of the incentive structure of the gift-giving culture. These include peer recognition mechanisms such as jury awards and research grants. 2. Encourage basic research funding by the public sector. This will require a formal unified political lobbying effort by the research community. Invite policy makers to present the jury awards. Give them opportunities to acquire first hand knowledge that this community exists and is deserving of public funding. 3. The research community must resist the temptation to focus on exchange economy applications if the luxury of choice in the allocation of scarce resouces is available. Bias allocation decisions in favor of basic research wherever possible. Externalities in the exchange economy should be sufficient to justify this bias if adequate transfer mechanisms to the commercial world exist for the technology . 4. Rather than bow to pressures to acquire and defend exchange economy style intellectual property rights within the research community, perhaps open source solutions (GPL) could be produced that would provide both a transfer mechanism and a buffer between the research and industrial applications worlds. The transfer function of open source solutions would pass the technology to the economy at large and the buffer function could attenuate the price rationing influence of the exchange economy upon basic research motivation. Open source solutions could be packaged by entrepreneurs with their own value-added contributions such as mode d'emploi and product support services without back propagation of the complications of intellectual property rights issues in the exchange economy to the research community. Even universities could participate in the gold rush: "Doomaflotch Tools Unleashed, by Arnt I. Smart, University Press (Special edition including 5-CD ROM set)" . Researchers have their own mechanisms for managing intellectual property rights in the gift-giving culture (peer reviewed journals, text books, etc.). Science and society has never been an easy relationship to manage. It appears essential now that the KDD community begin to seriously address the social, economic and political issues as well as it has the technical. Congratulations to all in the KDD research community who have carried the torch thus far. Even a dull intellect such as my own can see that something wonderful is happening here. Tim McDonough Living a dichotomous life: Exchange economy identity: Sr. Analyst American Airlines Research community identity: Now writing PhD dissertation in Political Economy University of Texas at Dallas
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