Yesterday, Allison Randal gave a great lecture on open innovation and open source and collaboration for the Turing Institute - the audience asked some really interesting questions (e.g. on open data; and on applying the model of open source to medicine - e.g. drugs - and on how much open source works across north/south divide in the world)....
I didn't want to take time, so i'll add my questions here:
1/ as well as open source software, we're seeing open hardware - not just processors (risc V) but peripherals, but also affordable 3D printing means even things like electric guitars - so the maker community that does a lot of this stuff (c.f. Cory Doctorow's books:) maybe exemplify the open collaborative ecosystems even more than coders, no? and they get to have a really good story about sustainability (repairing stuff is so much better than replacement.
2/ Sustainability - so machine learning (particularly deep learning) appears to be badly unsustainable in terms of compute resource training takes - this argues strongly for sharing trained classifiers - perhaps a carbon tax on neural networks could be turned into an incentive (carbon trading for AIs)
3/ some open ideas have horrible consequences - simple things like pagerank (which made google's search very hard to game compared to predecessors like Altavista) led to clickthrough which led to two-sided markets which led to surveillance capitalism. H-Index, which is supposed to replace publish-or-perish with citation count weight as a measure of quality, just leads to citation gaming. And so on - can we encourage replacements from the open source community, please, asap.
4/ Open source also depends somewhat on freedom of movement of people between different organisations - indeed, California mandated this right in law, stopping "golden handcuff" employment contracts. In the Cambridge ecosystem, i know people that have moved from microsoft to oracle to amazon (and even back) to work on the next thing. In the US, famously, people went from Cisco to Juniper to Cisco, as innovation moved around - this is clearly a Good Thing - perhaps folks who are working on Brexit could learn something from this (although they seem impervious to learning anything based on evidence).
5/ Most of the talk was on details of uptake of the culture and forms by industry - of course, the Turing Institute (and its member universities) are not-for-profit - so the culture is probably adopted in a slightly different light - what are the appropriate incentive forms for academia to adopt openness (aside from just being told to by our funding agencies:-) ?
I didn't want to take time, so i'll add my questions here:
1/ as well as open source software, we're seeing open hardware - not just processors (risc V) but peripherals, but also affordable 3D printing means even things like electric guitars - so the maker community that does a lot of this stuff (c.f. Cory Doctorow's books:) maybe exemplify the open collaborative ecosystems even more than coders, no? and they get to have a really good story about sustainability (repairing stuff is so much better than replacement.
2/ Sustainability - so machine learning (particularly deep learning) appears to be badly unsustainable in terms of compute resource training takes - this argues strongly for sharing trained classifiers - perhaps a carbon tax on neural networks could be turned into an incentive (carbon trading for AIs)
3/ some open ideas have horrible consequences - simple things like pagerank (which made google's search very hard to game compared to predecessors like Altavista) led to clickthrough which led to two-sided markets which led to surveillance capitalism. H-Index, which is supposed to replace publish-or-perish with citation count weight as a measure of quality, just leads to citation gaming. And so on - can we encourage replacements from the open source community, please, asap.
4/ Open source also depends somewhat on freedom of movement of people between different organisations - indeed, California mandated this right in law, stopping "golden handcuff" employment contracts. In the Cambridge ecosystem, i know people that have moved from microsoft to oracle to amazon (and even back) to work on the next thing. In the US, famously, people went from Cisco to Juniper to Cisco, as innovation moved around - this is clearly a Good Thing - perhaps folks who are working on Brexit could learn something from this (although they seem impervious to learning anything based on evidence).
5/ Most of the talk was on details of uptake of the culture and forms by industry - of course, the Turing Institute (and its member universities) are not-for-profit - so the culture is probably adopted in a slightly different light - what are the appropriate incentive forms for academia to adopt openness (aside from just being told to by our funding agencies:-) ?
No comments:
Post a Comment