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Tale of two cities

In January, I took a one year leave of absence from the University at Buffalo and joined Amazon's Automated Reasoning Group at AWS S3. At S3-ARG, our mission is to apply formal methods for verification of large scale distributed systems to provide durability, availability, and security guarantees. It has been 5 months, and I am loving it.  Going forward I will have more opportunities to talk about my work at S3-ARG. Today, I wanted to reflect on the difference of objectives/incentives in industry and academia and how that shapes the corresponding landscapes. What I write is *my subjective experiences*. At both places I have been blessed with great colleagues and great working environments, so my comparison is mostly about relative merits of ideal positions in academia and industry.  What's the goal? The goal of academic research in CSE is to sell a new vision of 10 years in the future.  In academia, there is a very perverse prioritization of novelty over practicality, use...

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