One often-heard complaint is that academics labour away in their ivory towers, divorced from happenings in the real world. A few years ago, Professor Semih Salihoglu of the Data Systems Group at the University of Waterloo's Cheriton School of Computer Science noticed exactly this for graph processing.
Professor Salihoglu is an expert in data systems for storing, querying, and processing graphs, which can model everything from friendships on social networks to the interaction of genes in our bodies to the network of roads we drive on. He noticed that academic papers repeatedly studied the same graph algorithms over the same few datasets and wondered: do these accurately reflect the needs of industry practitioners working with graph data? Academic research should aim to deliver real-world impact. To this end, were they working on the right problems? Read the full story.