Long term carrer in communication theory?

rusticsage@gmail.com wrote:
> Appretiate your comments.
> As jerry pointed out, I might be (hopefully) completely wrong while
> making this statement. What I meant was that after turbo codes and MIMO
> there seem to be no more dimension available to revolutionaise the
> physical layer  efficeincy. Advanced modulation scehems, estimation
> techiques etc will get marginal gains. We cannot squeeze any more
> 'significant' milage out of these.T here are enough people working on
> this problems already. As you said, I think we are reaching the limts
> imposed by nature.
> Where would any new revolution come from? And even if it did, will it
> sustain so many engineers already in the field?
> 
> What is your take on the research activity for the next decade and
> beyond?
> 
> Thanks
> 
> 
> 
> 
> kd_ei@yahoo.com wrote:
> 
>>Hi,
>>
>>
>>
>>>As I see it, there are hardly any fundamental problems remaining to be
>>>solved.
>>
>>Do you care to elaborate this a little more?
>>
>>
>>
>>>Am I correct in saying that career in communication theory is on a
>>>decline and in next half a decade there wont be many jobs left?
>>
>>I am not sure. Maybe the physical layers (which I have worked on for a
>>few years) have its natural limitations (i.e. the laws of physics in
>>the transmission media) which will eventually put a brake on its
>>related research activities, but there are a lot more new algorithms
>>waiting to be discovered or refined at the higher layers.

Stuff like MIMO was totally unanticipated. I don't intend to be 
offensive but post like yours tends to get me torked. If you want to do 
research, then you need some imagination.  Band wagons are for grad 
students. If you don't see anything possible on the horizon then you 
might question yourself about your suitability to do research in this area.


>>
>>Just my $0.02
>>
>>K
> 
> 

Since you are posting after my paragraph, can you clariy whose post you
are talking about? Thanks.

K


Stan Pawlukiewicz wrote:
> offensive but post like yours tends to get me torked. If you want to do

kd_ei@yahoo.com wrote:
> Since you are posting after my paragraph, can you clariy whose post you
> are talking about? Thanks.
> 
> K
> 
> 
> Stan Pawlukiewicz wrote:
> 
>>offensive but post like yours tends to get me torked. If you want to do
> 
> 

It was to rustic

Hi Rustic,

> Where would any new revolution come from?

I think I can see where you are coming from and I can agree with you to
a certain extent. Communication "theory", once proven mathematically,
really leave little room for further adventures. My robotics professor,
chairman of a big international robotics conference, used to say, "What
we were calling pure robotics research has been dead, because we have
mastered 'nearly all' the mathematics needed for inverse kinematics and
its dynamics". The math has been there, so everyone in his lab is doing
some "non-fundamental" research. However, the important point is, even
though most of the current research is "non-fundamental", it is still
very exciting. (ASIMO, AIBO, DARPA Grand Challenge, virtual reality
robot control, etc.) I think the same thing can be said about
communication "theory".

I also agree with you that most of the things that researchers are
doing now are only adding marginal benefits to the existing methods.
Then again, if you look at the history of science/tech, there wasn't
that much big breakthrough that happened overnight either. Even
revolutionary things such as Internet or Theory of Relativity took
decades to develop. If you look back 10 years from now, you will
probably be amazed by what all these incremental advances have added up
to.

Furthermore, if you look at the general picture of things, most areas
of research follow a S curve. It has a long period of incubation where
the curve is flat. Nobody knows if something is going to be plausible.
Then once the cumulated research reaches a critical mass, there will be
a period of explosive growth when everyone can see that it is "hot".
Following that will be a period of maturity (flat curve). Is
"communication theory" at the end of the S curve? Or is it at the
beginning of another S curve? I think the answer really doesn't matter
too much, because at the end of one S curve, there is usually a
paradigm shift that will lead us to a new S curve. It may not be a new
S curve on the communication theory itself, but it is going to be
another exciting area and very often, the people who initiate the
paradigm shift are the people who have been working relentlessly on the
"old stuffs". (For example, look at how the idea of entropy has
spreaded from thermodynamics to so many fields of science and
economics.)


>> And even if it did, will it sustain so many engineers already in the field?

If you look at things from the communication "theory" point of view,
there aren't many people in this field actually. I would not call any
one doing something such as HSDPA or WiMAX implementation "an engineer
working on communication theory", even though he may have to design a
couple of filters or modulation detection algorithms.

I do agree that jobs as an algorithm developer is quite hard to find.
But from my personal experience, it is hard to find not because we have
too many communication engineers with too little research to be done,
but rather because there is too much work to be done and too few people
who can actually understand enough of it.


> What is your take on the research activity for the next decade and
> beyond?

I put some random examples in my previous post.


Again, my $0.02, so please be gentle on me.

Regards,
K