Doing Research...

It has been well documented that the research group is the very cornerstone of an active research culture in any context. With a long and illustrious research career spanning some of the world’s premier research institutions Xerox’s PARC, Bell Labs, Sun Microsystems and Novell, Eric Schmidt, Google’s Chairman and CEO tried hard to ‘grow a research culture’ in each of the organizations he led. At Google, he achieved success by observing that most of the innovation which stemmed from US universities resulted from small groups of 2-3 students led by a Professor. His organizational structure for Google mimicked this primarily flat tree with literally a hundred little research groups which had short turn-around tasks. As in the case of the US university research, several of the groups failed, but those few which succeeded, became household names.

The lack of funding for all but the smallest of scale research projects in ICT meant that such an approach was impossible for us in Sri Lanka. On the otherhand, the plummeting costs of computing power made it possible to purchase even fairly sophisticated infrastructure locally. In addition, human resources were of high quality and relatively inexpensive. Interacting with the international research community was the main reason identified for lack of progress in ICT research in Sri Lanka. Setting up our own Research Fund for this purpose provided the much needed momentum for boot strapping a research culture in ICT at the UCSC.

These informal research groups received much needed funding commencing in 2004 with several of them attracting funding from international agencies and donors. Currently, 7 internationally funded research groups function within the UCSC with collaborators in the US, Europe, Japan, Canada and countries in the region.

Research must necessarily be situated in context. What was relevant research in warring Britain or in neo-liberal America cannot be automatically appropriate for a developing economy such as Sri Lanka. Herein lies the mistake oft made: we, who learn the research method in these countries, automatically apply it in its entirety – with all the inappropriate assumptions and add-ons. It is true that fundamental research also needs to be also carried out in countries such as Sri Lanka. The distinction between fundamental and applied research however, also is situated within a particular context in which they were coined. In an increasingly more interdisciplinary academic and research context we find ourselves, the terms fundamental and applied make less sense than they probably did in the romantic era of industrialization.