Khoury dean Beth Mynatt appears on ‘Sean Carroll’s Mindscape’ podcast
Mynatt discussed her work charting the integral relationship between government-funded university research and how it creates sometimes surprising innovation that benefits the public.
Elizabeth Mynatt, dean of Khoury College of Computer Sciences, appeared on the most recent episode of “Sean Carroll’s Mindscape,” where she talked about the sometimes surprising ways that university research improves our lives.
In a wide-ranging conversation with Caroll, Mynatt discussed her approach to human-centered computing, how technology can better support people in their everyday lives and the role companies and governments must play in making that a reality. However, the primary focus of the episode was Mynatt’s recent analysis, based on her earlier 2020 report, of the vital relationship between government, universities and private business in the U.S.
“The modern American university, since the ’50s, has been the foundation for massive innovation and economic growth in the country,” Mynatt says.
Mynatt points to research conducted at Stanford University that ultimately became the foundation for Google’s search engine. However, “very few things are that clean cut,” she says.
A better example of the subtle, circuitous route university research takes to the public is, oddly, the modern dairy farm.
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In the 1950s, researchers at Cornell University started looking into a novel use for radio frequency identification. RFID had previously been used during World War II as a way for pilots to identify other aircraft as friend or foe.
“Somehow, some researchers at Cornell said this could be useful for cows, and they developed and miniaturized the technology to the point that RFID tags for a long time were just known as cow tags because that turned into the dominant commercial use,” Mynatt says.
By tagging each cow with its own RFID tag, farmers could more specifically monitor what food each cow was getting and how much milk they were producing.
“No one, I’m sure in the creation of friend and foe technology that was being done in World War II thought that these tags would show up now pervasive across dairy farms, and that was enough of a push to keep that technology going because now it’s in every single inventory,” Mynatt says.
Add to that automated milking machines, which are also the product of decades of university researchers pushing robots to get better at manipulating objects, and dairy farms are a perfect example of how government-funded research can have major public impacts.
“What has been incredibly helpful for the dairy industry, which has had huge labor shortages, is they can continue to be economically self-sufficient with now this very healthy business ecosystem of robotic milking machines,” Mynatt says.
Importantly, the relationship between government, industry and universities is complementary, Mynatt explains, with each branch leveraging strengths that the other might not have.
Universities tend to take their time when pursuing research that might seem basic, foundational or without an obvious pay off. Certain research might go unused and unapplied for decades. But business leaders and entrepreneurs, who need to move more quickly to market, often rely on that very work to rapidly innovate.
“People working on the mathematical foundations of information science, they weren’t thinking about Amazon, right? Amazon didn’t exist, right?” Mynatt says. “They weren’t thinking about any of that, but they were creating the theoretical foundations, which now leads to secure e-commerce that people use day in and day out.”