Academic Department Or Corporate Lab, Which Fits?

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Presented at 15th USENIX Security Symposium 2006 by

Bill Aiello

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.