Sic Transit Gloria ...

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

> Date: Fri, 23 May 2003 14:45:35 -0400
> From: Ted Dolotta <Ted () Dolotta ORG>
> Subject: Sic Transit Gloria ...
>
> Dave,
>
> >From today's WSJ -- page A1.
>
> I suspect enough IP'ers (a) have ties to BTL, and (b)
> do not read the WSJ to make this article a useful IP list
> submission.
>
> ted
>
> ======================================================
> At Bell Labs, Hard Times Take Toll on Pure Research
>
> Under Weakened Lucent, Famed Haven For Theorists Gets a More Practical
> Bent
>
> By DENNIS K. BERMAN
>
> Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
>
> For seven years, Bell Labs linguist Chilin Shih struggled to develop
> the world's best program for making a computer speak. It would have
> the subtle intonations that go into real speech, and not just sound
> like a robot. Roaming through the labs' hallways in Murray Hill, N.J.,
> she brainstormed with mathematicians and statisticians, with little
> success.
>
> One day in 1999, she started talking to a physicist, Greg Kochanski,
> who leapt at her problem, mapping out a possible solution on a
> cafeteria napkin. That sparked a collaboration: Dr. Kochanski's
> equations helped Dr. Shih model the muscles of the mouth, and
> eventually get a better idea of how to convey emotion in computerized
> speech.
>
> The two are still perfecting their software, but they're not doing it
> at Bell Labs. In November, Lucent Technologies Inc., parent of the
> renowned facility, scuttled the speech-research department. The move
> comes as part of a $2.1 billion cost-saving and reorganization program
> at Lucent. These cuts, combined with five large business divestitures,
> have shrunk the labs' pure-research staff to just over a third of its
> 1996 level, and narrowed the labs' focus to projects directly related
> to telecommunications products.
>
> For many researchers, these moves represent the erosion of a
> scientific icon. For nearly eight decades, Bell Labs stood at the
> summit of American technological prowess, garnering six Nobel Prizes
> and fostering a climate of unhampered scientific inquiry. The labs'
> deep pockets funded research that either invented or laid the
> groundwork for the transistor, communications satellite, fax machine,
> VCR and numerous other landmark devices. When the Apollo space program
> needed to calculate rocket trajectories and landing spots for its
> first mission to the moon, it called on Bell Labs for help.
>
> Now, in the wake of the telecom collapse and Lucent's flagging
> fortunes, Bell Labs' research budget has sunk to about $115 million
> from its mid-1990s level of $350 million. To many scientists, the labs
> are now a symbol of declining corporate support for "pure" research --
> scientific inquiry that seeks not to develop specific products, but to
> make basic discoveries from which future innovations are drawn.
>
> Bell Labs is a "national tragedy," says Charles Vest, president of the
> Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "Bell Labs for decades was not
> only an icon of farsighted research, but it employed the very best
> scientists. [Now it] is an icon for changes that have happened to
> basic research."
>
> During the 1960s and 1970s, spurred by Cold War rivalries, the federal
> government paid for about two-thirds of all basic research in the U.S.
> That figure has since dropped to about a third, according to the
> National Academy of Sciences. The rollback was bearable as long as
> private industry took up the slack, which it did during the 1980s and
> early 1990s. But because of stiff global competition and shareholder
> demands, companies have little room to fund blue-sky research. Xerox
> Corp. spun off its famed Palo Alto Research Center last year, making
> it responsible for its own profit and losses. Lucent spin-off Agere
> Systems Inc., an integrated-circuit maker, no longer maintains a
> central research laboratory.
>
> To be sure, Lucent's $2.3 billion R&D budget is still one of the
> biggest in telecommunications, and the 21st largest among U.S.
> companies during 2002, according to researchers Schonfeld &
> Associates. Having just received its 30,000th patent, the company
> continues to push hard into the core research that can make telecom
> and wireless networks cheaper and more flexible. Some inside the Labs
> say that its new focus on applied research is a necessary change,
> given that scientists used to joke that they didn't know why the
> company was paying for their work in the first place. Lucent,
> meanwhile, says it will return to profitability in the quarter ending
> Sept. 30 after 13 straight losing quarters.
>
> Lucent executives acknowledge that scientists need room to dream.
> However, they say, the purpose of Bell Labs is no longer to serve some
> vague public interest but the specific demands of its five million
> shareholders. "The reality is that progress can only be there to the
> extent that we can afford it," says Bell Labs President William
> O'Shea.
>
> Originally created in 1925, and funded by the monopoly profits of AT&T
> Corp. and its equipment-making arm, Bell Labs was designed to bring
> together some 4,000 engineers and scientists working on improving
> phone systems. The labs were also a way for AT&T to show its
> commitment to the national interest, heading off criticism of its
> market power. With callers paying artificially high phone rates, the
> company spent lavishly. Researchers could get approval within two days
> to buy elaborate lab equipment. A swarm of librarians was on hand to
> order any book staff scientists requested.
>
> The freedom to spend created a freedom to explore. Researchers were
> attracted by the opportunity to pursue their work unfettered by market
> demands. One of their biggest discoveries came in 1965. When tinkering
> with a radio antenna -- originally used to detect radio signals across
> a network of orbiting balloons -- Bell Labs astronomers Arno Penzias
> and Robert Wilson noted a disturbance affecting the transmission.
> Further exploration led them to conclude that the disturbance was the
> lingering effect of the Big Bang: the explosion that scientists
> believe created the universe. For this work, the two were awarded the
> Nobel Prize in physics in 1978.
>
> By the mid-1990s, Bell Labs' pure-research staff had swelled to about
> 1,100. To turn their breakthroughs into actual products, the labs
> employed another 23,000 developers spread among 21 sites in eight
> states. Perhaps the most famous site of all was the main labs'
> cafeteria in Murray Hill -- where top scientists from different
> disciplines mingled freely, without the strict divisions in place at
> universities. They were an eclectic group: At one point, various
> researchers were designing computerized ballets with digital stick-
> figures and creating psychological profiles of successful managers.
> Working at Bell Labs , say veterans, was like being at a university
> with no classes to teach and no papers to grade.
>
> The cafeteria is still a meeting ground for scientists. But the
> corporate world around it has changed drastically. The transition
> began in 1984, when a court broke up AT&T, carving out the local phone
> operations into seven separate carriers. What was left of AT&T was
> splintered into three more units in 1996, one of which combined Bell
> Labs and Western Electric, the venerable operation that designed and
> built telecom equipment.
>
> The new company, Lucent, rose through the telecom boom. But when the
> crash came, Lucent was too bloated with employees and facilities to
> keep pace. It lost more than $28 billion over the past two years
> alone, at one point dimming lights in the Murray Hill hallways to save
> money. The market currently values Lucent at about $10.5 billion, down
> from $287 billion in late 1999.
>
> Today, Lucent's core-research staff at the labs numbers about 400.
> Many departments have lost about a quarter to a third of their
> researchers. Gone entirely are research centers for ecology,
> psychology and economics, which were founded when Lucent was part of
> the flush AT&T.
>
> Some scientists who remain at Bell Labs say they want to keep their
> scientific autonomy but feel pressured and personally motivated to
> help the company through its hard times. That has led to complaints
> that scientists have been turned from long-range thinkers into short-
> term tinkerers, called in as "SWAT teams" to consult customers on
> Lucent product snafus. The fear among many current and former workers
> is that these short-term demands are turning Bell Labs into just
> another industrial-development group, without the carte blanche that
> led to so many breakthroughs.
>
> "The message is clear that 'capital-S' science does not matter," says
> Jon Bentley, a former Bell Labs expert on computer programming who has
> since moved to Lucent spinoff Avaya Labs. Now what matters is "what
> things can you do to help the company this quarter."
>
> To some scientists, the new, practical Bell Labs is an improvement
> over the old operation, in which they could toil for decades and never
> see their work turn up in AT&T products. "We get joy out of doing
> research, and double joy out of seeing it in real use," says Rod
> Alferness, a top researcher in optical networking, systems that use
> waves of light to transmit data.
>
> Labs scientists now continuously meet with their counterparts running
> Lucent businesses to get a better sense of the technical demands
> they're facing. In marketing, the company's services unit touts
> customers' "access to the experts," a direct linkage that would have
> been considered almost heresy years earlier. The new cooperation
> "shows we care," says Jeff Jaffe, Bell Labs' president of research.
>
> Mr. O'Shea, the labs' overall president, says: "Though smaller than in
> the past, we continue to do great work across a range of fundamental
> research disciplines." One such project would make transistors out of
> plastic, instead of silicon, greatly reducing costs.
>
> The travails of Bell Labs' speech-research group provide a window onto
> the clash between business needs and scientific curiosity. The group
> can trace its beginnings to Alexander Graham Bell, who improved on a
> symbol system used for the deaf. Its innovations over the years
> included the Voder, exhibited at the 1939 World's Fair. It was the
> first machine to artificially generate the sound of the human voice,
> using a series of keys and foot pedals.
>
> By the 1980s, in a warren of offices in Murray Hill's Building 2, the
> speech team worked on the building blocks of speech emulators and
> voice-recognition tools. The offices echoed with the sounds of
> sentences repeated over and over again, like Henry Higgins training
> Eliza Doolittle in "My Fair Lady." For English alone, the group
> collected recordings of about 60,000 sentences over 20 years, building
> multiple systems to tackle the problem.
>
> Dr. Shih, who was hired in 1986 to create a Chinese-language speech
> simulator, recorded the distinct parts of speech sounds, such as the
> sound "pa" in the word "pan." Another colleague spent years studying
> facial expressions and lip movements to develop an animated "talking
> head" that would appear to speak written text.
>
> "This is why I loved Bell Labs the most," says the 48-year-old Dr.
> Shih, who met her husband in the same fourth-floor corridor where she
> would later be laid off. "Everyone has an intrinsic interest in other
> people's problems, and they plug their own pieces in, and we plug our
> pieces in, and we solve problems very, very quickly."
>
> Dr. Shih's collaboration with the physicist, Dr. Kochanski, was only
> beginning when Lucent embarked on an ambitious effort to sell its
> speech expertise. In January 1999, it launched 60-employee Lucent
> Speech Solutions using personnel from New Jersey and Naperville, Ill.
> The new unit sold speech-recognition software and hardware to the
> likes of Moviefone Inc.
>
> Then the Internet and telecom bubble burst. By 2001, amid Lucent's
> widening financial woes, Dr. Shih began to listen for the roar of the
> company helicopter, reasoning that the more flights it made, the more
> likely that bankers and lawyers were descending on Murray Hill to
> either sell Lucent or bring it into bankruptcy.
>
> The speech lab began to scramble to show its relevance to Lucent. Dr.
> Shih was one of four scientists assigned to build a new speech
> synthesizer from scratch, with hopes that it would compete with a
> similar AT&T system. As layoff rumors floated through the labs, Dr.
> Shih says she and a few colleagues "sensed we needed to do something
> drastic" to prove their worth to the company. Within about a month
> they had constructed a proposal: Using some of their speech-analysis
> software, they worked up a project that would automatically analyze
> incoming customer e-mail and phone calls and provide automated
> responses.
>
> The proposal was turned down by the labs' research director, Dr.
> Jaffe. In an interview, Dr. Jaffe says he admired the plan, but it
> wasn't a research project so he couldn't fund it.
>
> In the spring of 2002, for the first time in the history of the labs,
> managers met to conduct full reviews of each of the labs' 50 research
> projects.
>
> Bell Labs ranked each of the units, based on quality of research and
> relevance to the company. The speech group did not fare well,
> according to Dr. Jaffe, because the field was relatively mature. "You
> reach a point where you think a certain level of breakthrough has
> already been achieved," he says. "The next breakthrough is
> sufficiently far off."
>
> After a series of smaller cuts earlier in the year, the speech group
> received its final layoff notices in November. While their children
> were at school, Dr. Shih and some of her former Bell Labs colleagues
> gathered for grant-writing "salons" in her home just feet from the
> Bell Labs entrance.
>
> Then, earlier this month, members of the group began hearing welcome
> news. Dr. Shih says she is expected to get a teaching post at the
> University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign starting this fall. Her
> husband has already confirmed a faculty position there. Her main
> collaborator, Dr. Kochanski, will take up a professorship at Oxford
> University in England, and other colleagues have secured jobs at
> International Business Machines Corp. The two plan to continue working
> by e-mail on their project to put more emotion into computerized
> speech.
>
> "There will be a little bit of Bell Labs growing in a hundred
> different places," Dr. Shih says. "So maybe it's not so bad."
>
> Write to Dennis K. Berman at dennis.berman () wsj com
>
> Updated May 23, 2003 4:57 a.m.


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