Author: Josh Patterson
Date: May 25th, 2018
This is the 2nd article in a 5-part series supporting the Smart Communications and Analysis Lab (SCAL) and the 2018 Chattanooga Deep Learning Conference.
Image From the article: Cities: Building the best cities for science
In the United States both the San Franciso area ("Silicon Valley") and Boston are well-known hubs of technology companies. We can see in chart above they both rate in hte top 10 in the world in producing research publications.“Both analyses highlight cities in which scientific output is growing. In particular, Beijing, which churned out 0.76% of the global output in 1996, produced 2.74% in 2008 (319,000 research papers). Other fast-growing areas are Tehran, Istanbul, Seoul, Singapore City and São Paulo.”
C. W. Matthiessen, A. W. Schwarz and S. Find Urban Stud. 47, 1879–1897; 2010
Image From the article: Cities: Building the best cities for science
"Take three or four of the best universities in the world, put them in a city with a seaport, and voilà!" says Lobo. But copying the region's formula is quite another matter. How can one city start to emulate another that attracts the most research funding in the United States and has been built up over centuries?”
From the article: Cities: Building the best cities for science
The quote teases the question about how another city can copy some of the same ideas from successful cities like Boston, or Austin, which tend to "punch above their weight". We'll take a look at the recommendations later on in this article.
Beyond citations, we also see large investment dollars by large technology companies in new research labs clustered in these same cities and emerging regions like Toronto[footnote:Toronto], Canada:
Now let's correlate these high-producing research cities with key large technology companies, and trace those back to the ones that were founded from students at the schools.
So let's take a closer look at how many of these are tied to schools in the region. The key schools[footnote:Schools] in the area are Stanford and University of CA at Berkeley. This region was home to an early wave of key technology companies based out of Stanford:
More recent notable companies that trace their origin stories back to those schools include:We can go on to examine some of the success stories in the Boston region[footnote:Boston] :
With Seattle, WA, obviously the two most famous technology companies would be Microsoft and Amazon. Jeff Bezos is on record as saying engineering talent availability was a major factor in starting Amazon in Seattle[footnote:Seattle] with the University of Washington as a fertile computer science recruiting ground.
Austin, TX is another interesting case where we don't see as many of the companies formed there, but we see nearly every major tech company with a large office in Austin. Companies founded in Austin, TX Area:
Major companies with large offices in Austin, TX:While not every single company was founded by 2 people out of a garage in Palo Alto, a lot of these companies have at least part of their origin story connected to research produced by high-performing graduate programs. These people ended up in the area specifically for those graduate programs, and ended up staying close to found key technology companies.
A counter-argument to the relationship between these cities and high output graduate programs might be the argument that these cities have well-funded computer science programs due to the abundance of wealthy tech companies pouring in money; its more likely that these programs feed the region with candidates, pulling in companies, who pour money back into programs in a virtuous cycle. What we do not see are regions that have robust tech sectors without high-producing regional phd programs in computer science.
The compounding and derivative effects of regional graduate research, research labs, and the formation of key technology companies created tend to show yeild over time in certain key cities. We believe investment in specifically graduate research programs is how these ecosystems of technology are booted up for the long-run. Those things being said, these are long-term-class investments, which are not easy to make. Let's take a look at what factors have contributed to success in fostering research output in regions (and then what did not work).