Where the Jobs Are - Past Forecast

The research has one year, but I think that it is still valid to see what happened. IEEE Spectrum surveyed 752 IEEE members about the past, present and future technological trends they are seeing. The questions were:

1. Do you think the number of R&D employees in your organization has…
2. What type of change do you expect in the number of R&D employees at your organization?
3. What technology area, including academia, would you advise students interested in R&D to get involved with?
4. What proportion of your R&D do you do offshore?
5. Which of the following problems (if any) have you experienced with offshoring R&D?
6. How much money does your organization spend on R&D per year?

You can see the full research here.

Changing the Research Focus: Towards Industrial Projects and New Startups

Since 2001, when George Johnson said: “all science is computer science” – even with some researchers from different areas not agreeing with it – we can see some changes in research and other discussions such as: “computation is the third branch of science, along with theory and experimentation” and “every discipline is becoming computationally intense” are being raised. In the EDUCAUSE review, on July-August 2006, Sandra Braman starts some important reflections about the Transformations of the Research Enterprise. In this interesting paper, she discusses – among other – that research is more likely to be carried out in the context of a problem-oriented application than within the context of a specific academic community. Her analyzes is based on key funding agencies as National Science Foundation (NSF) which is starting the process of shifting research funding attention toward specific problems and away from discipline-bound and theory-driven basic research. In her words “as a corollary, researchers are increasingly required to respond to social and political demands to be accountable rather than isolating themselves within an ivory tower”. In Brazil, we are having some initial efforts in this direction, for example, with the FINEP agency which has stimulated research projects involving academic institutions and companies. In special cases in the country, this reality is being common in some universities/innovation institutes which believe that this integration is essential for its impact on the city/state/country or even in the world. In Recife, this effort started about 11 years ago headed by Prof. Silvio Meira which was the mentor of the Recife Center for Advanced Studies and Systems (C.E.S.A.R) and next of the Porto Digital. The result of this new way of think/do/transform can be seen with important awards such as Microsoft Imagine Cup, ACM Programming Contest and recently with the Intel/UC Berkeley Technology Entrepreneurship Challenge. In the last one, in this year, in the first step, from 65 business plans from different universities were selected 20, which 5 were from Recife (RiSE was one of them). Considering that in the last year, the 2nd best business plan was from Recife, we can easily see the results. In addition, we can comment other programs in this direction involving universities (Recife Beat) at Federal University of Pernambuco and Garage at C.E.S.A.R which can increase these benefits in the future. For other universities and companies in the country, we hope that this feedback can be useful to start new reflection in this direction and generate a path for the country starts a new era.

Open Market for Software Development

Today, we had an interesting discussion in the RiSE group involving a draft proposal by David Weiss related to an Open Market Software Development (OMSD). David has a long experience with software development and his proposal is at least polemic. David proposes a new approach to software development called OMSD in order to be an attempt to free software developers from restrictions under which they work by allowing them to work on what they choose and with whom they choose. His approach is inspired – it is very good for us – by Ricardo Semler a Brazilian executive with innovative ideas in which our managers must read more.

In David’s approach, he discusses some rules for development in the market, roles, metrics, etc. However, during the discussion, some topics were strongly questioned [sometimes in a funny way] such as: 1. the approach is just related to software product line in which we have a well-defined architecture? If yes, it can be a problem in an open market in which not often we (developers) have all the background in that domain. 2. the guys questioned the analogy made with the Personal Computer area. 3. the relationship between the company publishing the specification and the available developers should be very defined since the developers cannot do their work or disappear, etc. So, maybe, we have to define more legal aspects in the model. Maybe, some NDAs can solve it. But, it should be well-defined. 4. Often when I discuss this model, the people – managers – asked me about the business model and the economic aspects. It is not easy to define a rigorous analysis for this approach since we do not have data about it. However, David has a strong background in the measurement area (he created the GQM) and I think that he is thinking in this direction.

In general, I think that this approach can be more discussed and maybe experimented in our environment, Digital Port, where we have a rich ecosystem composed of universities, companies, and especially, very good professionals. I believe that this approach can be a way to integrate more these parts and maybe contributes to increase our potential to enter in international markets.

Unfortunately, we cannot publish David’s paper here, however, you can see his talk during the 2nd Workshop for Reuse Introduction in Companies (WIRE).