Can universities compete?

Today I had a somewhat humbling experience. I was in a workshop all day, starting early, with an international industry partner and many of their R&D engineers online. I presented, my students presented, and then they concluded with the presentation of three of their projects. I was blown away by what they were doing and realised that there is no way, in an academic environment, for us to undertake such ambitious projects with access to real data and system artefacts and comparable resources. I wonder, in technology fields, how academia can compete, research-wise. Yes, we have the students they need. And of course, we are tenured and are sustained by taxpayer money. I am not going to be fired any time soon. But how can we remain relevant and competitive in terms of our research? (I am not referring to publishing papers.) Or perhaps only extremely wealthy universities can. But I can't think of any example in Canada, except for the AI institutes (Mila, Vector) the government decided to support.

Lionel C. Briand is professor of software engineering and has shared appointments between (1) The University of Ottawa, Canada and (2) The SnT centre for Security, Reliability, and Trust, University of Luxembourg. In collaboration with colleagues, over 25 years, he has run many collaborative research projects with companies in the automotive, satellite, aeropsace, energy, financial, and legal domains. Lionel has held various engineering, academic, and leading positions in six countries. He was one of the founders of the ICST conference (IEEE Int. Conf. on Software Testing, Verification, and Validation, a CORE A event) and its first general chair. He was also EiC of Empirical Software Engineering (Springer) for 13 years and led, in collaboration with first Victor Basili and then Tom Zimmermann, the journal to the top tier of the very best publication venues in software engineering. 

Lionel was elevated to the grades of IEEE Fellow and ACM Fellow for his work on software testing and verification. He was granted the IEEE Computer Society Harlan Mills award, the ACM SIGSOFT outstanding research award, and the IEEE Reliability Society engineer-of-the-year award, respectively in 2012, 2022, and 2013. He received an ERC Advanced grant in 2016 — on the topic of modelling and testing cyber-physical systems — which is the most prestigious individual research award in the European Union. He currently holds a Canada Research Chair (Tier 1) on "Intelligent Software Dependability and Compliance". His research interests include: software testing and verification, applications of AI in software engineering, model-driven software development, requirements engineering, and empirical software engineering.