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Comment by magic_man | Hacker News Reader

I work with sonar and the physical positioning of the sensors is important in trying to get useful results. Why is it these academic types don't release the apks or software? Just publications and maybe a video.

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You should try asking these academic types for the data and source code.

A lot of researchers are more than happy to discuss their work, but a big part of the academic industry is your research's impact and references. A way to get a better handle on who is looking at or following on with your work is to implicitly ask them to have a conversation with you before getting the whole kit 'n caboodle.

Additionally, a number of these research programs take the source code and make a go of a small business product.

And in many cases the universities own the IP associated with the research that goes on in their departments so they keep the source and treat it like a company would treat a trade secret. It's likely Washington will patent this and try to license the patents.

I think we left the topic of "science" about 4 posts up. I don't know what's being described here, but it's not science. Yet somehow, I get the feeling that I'm paying for it.

What's the legal situation with these academic research papers? Am I allowed to implement an algorithm from a research paper and then either sell the software or release it as open source?

I assume other academics are allowed to reimplement methods in order to reproduce the result and to compare to their own methods. Can I do the same as a learning exercise?

> implicitly ask them

I think you mean "explicitly"

No he means implicitly. By not providing everything the academic implicitly requests a conversation before providing everything. The request is never stated but is implied by the assumption that there is no other way to acquire everything.

Ah I misunderstood who was implicitly requesting the conversation, that makes sense.

I actually assumed that before. The way you had quoted it was revealing. My comment reeks of nerd-rage now that I re-read it. Damn italics. I should have mentioned that it would be fair to say: The academic wants an explicit request for everything. I can see how it would have been easy to misinterpret his statement in this way. It's true. It's just not what was stated.

These sorts of comments are why I come here. Thank you. Without prior awareness that something is common practice it can be extremely difficult to recognize it as an option. I simply lack the motivation for this behavior. If I were to release a teaser about my work it would be because I'm not ready to release my work.

I read an abstract for paper once (on debluring images) and could not find the original paper for free. I emailed the author about the situation, and got a full color hard copy in the mail shortly after. My best hope had been a .pdf by email, but he exceeded that by far. It's still on my shelf a decade later, while a .pdf probably would have gotten lost in the GBs.

Did you ask? Many years ago I decided to reproduce an algorithm used to detect copy/paste image modification.

http://blog.jgc.org/2008/02/tonight-im-going-to-write-myself...

The researcher was happy to provide me with their test images to verify that my implementation worked. Try asking.

Have you considered providing this tool as a service? It would be great to easily detect forgeries without CLI experience.

No. I wrote that 8 years ago, I've open sourced the code, anyone who wants to take it and run with it can. It's too much work for me to maintain a system that would do this for people.

It depends on the conference or journal they submit to. I typically request that authors release data and code in the review and the same is requested of me when I submit a paper for review. I don't know, maybe CHI doesn't have that sort of culture. Or maybe they do and these students just don't have the time right now and plan to do it right before the conference in May.

Indeed, there is no culture of replicability at CHI (and even less so at UIST). Reviewers usually reward novelty and cool PoC videos, not thoroughness. It is quite rare (especially for U.S. labs) to also publish source code, schematics, or raw data. There have been some initiatives advocating for replicability, and some researchers indeed publish everything, but in the whole, a quick, shiny video of a PoC implementation is often sufficient for a paper to be accepted.

Having been in this kind of situation before: because the software isn't ready for any kind of release. They probably spent a week gathering and tuning the parameters on the DSP for each individual phone they ran it on, and without their knowledge of the system it'd take you a month and a half to get it working on your phone.

If they are publishing a paper, their methods (including custom source code) are ready for release for peer review. Ftheit software sucks, thet should not rely on it for scientific results.

Product development isn't actually the purpose of science.

Here's a case that I have published under before: Their software is ready for their own use for research by them personally. However, it has no help, documentation, automation, magic, or even small amounts of assistance. It doesn't work until you have it spit out a page of numbers, which you feed into Matlab and hack on for a week before compiling a new copy of the app that has the resulting calibration matrix baked into the code. The instruction manual for the apk you're asking for would be equivalent to a bachelor's in computer science and half a PhD on DSP and machine learning. That's why they're not releasing it. It proves that their math works and the approach is valid. Replacing their expertise and making it fast enough and reliable enough for general release would require a startup, six developers three of whom need PhDs, a UX team, and a year and a half of work. The approach works and they can prove it. That's it.

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