Academic Department or Corporate Lab, Which Fits?

After 15 years in two of the Bell Labs' progeny, the last 5 as a division manager for cryptography and network security at AT&T Labs, a little over a year ago I became the head of the computer science department at the University of British Columbia. This was not exactly a controlled experiment since it involved moving from the U.S. to Canada, from the East Coast to the West Coast and switching from corporate research to academia. But I'll share my thoughts on what I've seen as the similarities and differences between life in a university versus life in a corporate research lab on issues such as incentives, funding, intellectual freedom, decision-making structures, intellectual property, performance review, and graduate student project supervision.

This will be a non-technical session for graduate students on the job market, for more senior researchers contemplating a move from corporate research to academia or vice versa—and for anyone else who wants to join in the discussion. I expect lots of folks in the audience to add, rebut, amplify, you name it. And we'll leave time to discuss changes in both corporate and government support for long-term research and the implications for life in corporate labs and universities in the future. In the end, most computer science and security researchers could be happy in either a university department or a corporate research lab but for some the fit is distinctly better in one versus the other. Hopefully, from the ensuing discussion, we can all help junior researchers come away with a better understanding of the pros and cons, the ups and downs, unique to each type of job.