Lambda the Ultimate

This may be slightly off-topic, but I was wondering if some of you in the community could point me in the right direction with some questions I have about a career in computer science research. To give you some background, I recently graduated from college with a CS degree, and I'm currently working for a small-to-medium-sized consulting firm doing software development in .NET.

Lately I've been thinking that software development in general might not be for me, and that I might be better off getting into research, or at least something closer to it. I feel like most of the problems I run into in my work are not that difficult, and that I just won't be putting all of my technical skills to good use in this line of work. I want to work on technical problems with some real "meat" on them, instead of just putting buttons on a form. One of my interest areas is programming languages, which is why I've come here for advice.

I guess I was initially turned off from graduate school and research after I read this article on Joel on Software, specifically the part about the dynamic logic class. After seeing that, I thought that the only way to do work that would actually make it to the "real world" would be to get into software development. I realize now that that's not entirely true, but I'm still concerned about making sure any work I do is useful, and doesn't solve a problem that no one cares about.

With all of that said, here are my questions:

• Can anyone explain to me, or link to an article that explains, the general timeline of research getting implemented in industry? I at least have a vague idea of how researchers find problems, come up with solutions, and publish papers, but from that point there's a gap in my knowledge - how does the information from that paper trickle down to a point where developers in the trenches like me know about it? I know not every piece of research is used everywhere, but something like object-oriented programming might be a good example: It originally started, more or less, with Simula and Smalltalk. How did it get to the point where practically every developer uses it, and bookstores are filled with shelves on design patterns and object-oriented languages like Java and C#?
• As a follow-up to my first question, are there careers that bridge that gap between research and industry (in this case, specifically in programming languages)? Is there a job where one can read research that others have done, evaluate it, and decide if it would be useful to put that work into some form usable by the masses? And if so, what kind of path would one take to get there? Grad school? Climb the ladder at a certain kind of company?
• Am I at all justified in being concerned about the usefulness of my work if I were to go into research? Is that something that researchers worry about, or does it tend to not be an issue?

As you can possibly tell, I'm primarily just ignorant of the various options out there, and trying to figure out what they are. As a result, any answers, advice, or links to relevant information are appreciated, and thank you for reading this long message.

Paper submission deadline: EXTENDED: April 21, 2008

Architectures and Languages for Throughput Applications
(ALTA 2008)

Held in conjunction with the
2008 International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA-35)

Sunday June 22nd, Beijing, China

Official Web Site

Submitted papers will be considered to be published on one or more special issues of journals or newsletters highlighting the "Best of ISCA 2008 Workshops."

Workshop Theme

Throughput-oriented applications are attracting broader interest because of the proliferation of multi- and many-core CPUs and GPUs. The reasons are many-fold. Increasing software-exposed parallelism is necessitated by power-constrained design. Moreover, the emphasis on visual quality in entertainment-oriented applications is driving demand on client platforms. Finally, the pre-existing demands for compute cycles in high-performance computing is challenged by the changing programming and optimization landscape found in highly integrated multi-core devices.

This workshop seeks an interdisciplinary set of commercial and academic researchers and practitioners working at the frontiers of throughput oriented programming models, applications, and architectures.

Algebra of programming using dependent types. S-C. Mu, H-S. Ko, and P. Jansson.

Dependent type theory is rich enough to express that a program satisfies an input/output relational specification, but it could be hard to construct the proof term. On the other hand, squiggolists know very well how to show that one relation is included in another by algebraic reasoning. We demonstrate how to encode functional and relational derivations in a dependently typed programming language. A program is coupled with an algebraic derivation from a specification, whose correctness is guaranteed by the type system.

Code accompanying the paper has been developed into an Agda library AoPA.