IT-driven innovation is an enormous factor in the worldwide economic leadership of the United States. It is larger than finance, construction, or transportation, and it employs nearly 6% of the US workforce. The top three companies, as measured by market capitalization, are IT companies - Apple, Google (now Alphabet), and Microsoft. Facebook, a relatively recent entry in the top 10 list by market capitalization has surpassed Walmart, the nation's largest retailer, and the largest employer in the world. The net income of just the top three exceeds $80 billion - roughly 100 times the total budget of the NSF CISE directorate which funds 87% of computing research. In short, the direct return on federal research investments in IT research has been enormously profitable to the nation.
The IT industry ecosystem is also evolving. The time from conception to market of successful products has been cut from years to months. Product life cycles are increasingly a year or less. This change has pressured companies to focus industrial R&D on a pipeline or portfolio of technologies that bring immediate, or almost immediate, value to the companies. To defeat the competition and stay ahead of the pack, a company must devote resources to realizing gains that are shorter term, and must remain agile to respond quickly to market changes driven by new technologies, new startups, evolving user experience expectations, and the continuous consumer demand for new and exciting products.
Amidst this landscape, the Computing Community Consortium convened a round-table of industry and academic participants to better understand the landscape of industry-academic interaction, and to discuss possible actions that might be taken to enhance those interactions. We close with some recommendations for actions that could expand the lively conversation we experienced at the round-table to a national scale.
"It Might be Technically Impressive, But It's Practically Useless to us": Motivations, Practices, Challenges, and Opportunities for Cross-Functional Collaboration around AI within the News Industry
Human-Computer Interaction Institute, Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学人机交互研究所）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, University of Oxford（牛津大学路透新闻研究所）；School of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Iowa（爱荷华大学新闻与大众传播学院）
Internationalizing AI: Evolution and Impact of Distance Factors
School of Information Management, Central China Normal University（华中师范大学信息管理学院）；School of Medicine and Health Management, Tongji Medical College, Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学同济医学院医药卫生管理学院）；School of Information Management, Wuhan University（武汉大学信息管理学院）
The Narrow Depth and Breadth of Corporate Responsible AI Research
Sam M. Walton College of Business, University of Arkansas（阿肯色大学沃尔顿商学院）；Lundquist College of Business, University of Oregon（俄勒冈大学伦德奎斯特商学院）；Mendoza College of Business, University of Notre Dame（圣母门多萨商学院）；School of Computing, Southern Illinois University（南伊利诺伊大学计算机学院）
