Those that have dedicated their lives to research will, at some point, be confronted with the question: what is the impact of my research. Citations and expanding human knowledge are certainly worthy goals, but a total lack of impact on industry can become depressing. Fortunately, there are known strategies that researchers can use to move their research towards practice. Drawing from three of my recent projects—a tech startup, a multi-national robotics company, and a small business—I will discuss three distinct strategies that can be used to transfer knowledge into practice. Via interactive content we will discuss these as well as the audience's strategies towards increasing impact as we all journey towards high impact research.
Editor-in-Chief, Journal of Systems and Software
Virginia Commonwealth University
David Shepherd is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Virginia Commonwealth University. He earned his Ph.D. and M.S. in Computer Science at the University of Delaware, and his B.S. in Computer Science at Virginia Commonwealth University. David has since worked as a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia, built sweat equity as employee #9 at Tasktop Technologies, and risen to Senior Principal Scientist at ABB Corporate Research. His research has produced tools that have been used by thousands, innovations that have been featured in the popular press, and practical ideas that have won business plan competitions. Dr. Shepherd currently serves as the Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Systems & Software. He has served as the Program Co-Chair for the industrial tracks of the 20th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE 2017), the 39th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2017), and the 31st International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME 2015). His current work focuses on enabling end-user programming for industrial machines and increasing diversity in computer science.
