The craziness of research funding. It costs us all. | Geraldine Fitzpatrick | TEDxTUWien

raise your hand who pays taxes here Oh, quite a few, even some of the students I thought there might not be that many hands since there are so many students, especially those of you who pay taxes I want to thank you for

funding

our public universities and you pay my salary and I it allows me and the people at my Institute to do

research

that we are passionate about, which is about designing technology that fits people and fits their daily lives, without you having to adapt to technology and its taxes too they go to fund some of the large

funding

schemes that we apply for

research

funding in consortia to do our research and my concern here today is not to talk to you about the great research that we are doing in our group that I would love to do in another But I'm going to tell you something that worries me more and more and that is that the systems and processes we have now mean that people are spending more and more time talking about how to investigate or reporting on investigations that we should have done and are not doing the right thing. research that we need to address some of the really serious problems that we face in today's society and I can illustrate this a bit with an email I received last week about a research proposal that was submitted to a large European funding scheme and this was with 11 partners from universities, public industry bodies from six countries and it was this large research project that we were concerned with designing technologies to support the health and well-being of older people living at home, but the rest of the The letter goes on to say that we're sorry we couldn't fund you, that your score fell short of funding, but in fact, what happened here is that only six of the 187 proposals were funded, and in fact, this was a great qualified proposal, so which is not that the proposed research was not good, other than not being able to do the research that we cared about and wanted to do, and had spent an enormous amount of time and effort months of effort to write a postdoc a fellow at my institute will not have a job to go to when you finish your current project in the short term a colleague from another university has very strict monetary targets that you must meet that are set by your university each year as part of your annual performance review, so this will not help you meet with their funding goals, but I also have to make an admission because another part of me also said thank you that we didn't make it and that's because I know if we had made it. you were buying a huge amount of administration, management, and overhead that would be really onerous, so what's going on with this?

I think the proposal itself illustrates some of this because it was a hundred and fifty three page proposal and only about thirty three of those pages were actually about research and the rest about administration and management and so on. and we could have if we wanted to bring in consultants at a thousand euros a day to write those pieces because they know how to adapt to the needs of the funding body. and in that proposal we had to say exactly what we would be doing at any time in the next three years that this project was working in the state of a radically changing technology, we would have had to say in three and a half years four years when we were doing this work what would we be doing how long would it take and exactly what would we be producing and this becomes a straitjacket and we have to report back this gantt chart gantt plan at regular intervals to the funding body and they don't pay us all their money until the ending and sometimes they hold it back because for some reason we didn't exactly follow through on what we said. differentiate what this thought was about and how it got assigned to what work package and that we still know that this timesheet has to reflect the time we said it would take, not the time it actually took and there are some false assumptions here's an assumption that this research work can be defined as a rational process that you go from A to B and that you know what that path is and you know the shape and size of the moon that you are going to reach at the other end, but the reality of the research is so different that we know where we started from and we can actually define the problem space very well and we can have a good plan for how we think we're going to get there to solve it, but I don't know what's going on over that hill what we're going to find and what other paths we might end up taking that could lead us to much more exciting and interesting places than we ever thought we could go some of the ways that we do that particularly for us as human-computer interaction researchers is talking to the people we're for designing and we can come to them with an idea but after talking to them and working with them they can say no but the straitjacket of our Gantt chart and our agreement with the funding body says we can't assume its not, we have to keep delivering what we ship, so we can't really respond to your needs.

They continue to help us because they want to help as participants but we're not giving them anything of value we're giving a checkbox on a report there's also no room in this model for what this rational model of what research for errors is learning errors and that's a key part of how we innovate how we advance how we generate new insights into some of the accounting models for many of these funding agencies these errors or failures are deviations or issues that we can account for in our report with even more documentation but they are not seen as a normal part of the research process they are not seen as learning opportunities to explore what is a better way that every failure, a mistake, is one more step to a better place and I think Albert Einstein would have trouble these days operating in our current funding environment in our current university environment because it talks about time to think what a luxury and time to think for months and years like open i don't know how long it will take me to think about this it talks about trying things 99 times and succeeding on the 100th time, but you can't predict in your Gantt chart in advance that it will take you a hundred tries, you just have to keep trying and I can imagine you submitting a proposal for one of these funding schemes and getting a rejection letter because you couldn't fully specify your path towards relativity theory and there are plenty of research examples of unexpected innovations coming in unexpected ways, so Percy Spencer, who had a chocolate bar melted in his pocket while standing next to a magnetron that generated the microwave as an invention an artistic design student who took a radically different approach to thinking about how to have design prosthetics by doing actual models and final drawings and really exploring joint articulation and changed the paradigm of how we do prosthetics and robotic arms , but he did it in this same practice.

Allow the approach that you didn't define in advance or couldn't have defined in advance because you did it by trial and error and in fact the medical physicists that you were working with were really skeptical that he was going to get anywhere or that this it was the way to go, but it changed what we do with bossy Cs now, so research is a much more exciting open-ended creative process than is captured in these formal models, charts, and timesheets that embody this. rationalist account of research that can be fully defined in advance and what encourages in the end is not so much creativity in research as creativity in reporting and keeping time sheets so we can keep the computer happy and keep the funding body happy and make sure we get paid money for the work we really want to do.

This has really problematic implications. I think we should all be concerned with one being the social level and the other being the individual cost to the researchers involved. on a societal level so I'm just using this as an illustration in 2015 this is a report of a report from one of the major European funding agencies 42,000 proposals were submitted that year and a total of about 4200 that were actually funded by what is about a 10 point 7 percent success rate. I have some numbers from a 2011 study on the order of effort required to make a proposal, so I'm putting together numbers from different years, so they're just indicative, but what they're saying is we had almost 19,000 700 person-years in 2015 we just started writing proposals writing about research they don't do research almost 1.5 billion euros if you look at a UNESCO report that actually equates to all researchers in Ireland in 2050 not being able to do any real research just capable of writing about doing research and then there are also the

costs

of people getting funding in contract negotiations that take time and effort and also when they get the projects funded over the next three years their significant effort required to manage and report and every D and W in that Gantt chart we saw earlier generates loads of documents would we be happy if this level of effort was invested if we had 1.5 billion euros set aside to fund medical teams and nurses competing to save the lives of patients in this operating room not operating not saving lives just by competing by talking about what they do and then when they get that funding for the few that do, they wouldn't actually be in the operating room to a large extent, they would be filling out the paperwork and reporting in administration about it.

It's a huge cost that you're using our taxpayer funds to talk about the investigation, not to do it and I understand that because it's taxpayer funds, there's a responsibility that's really important, but I think we have the wrong balance between managing of risk and control versus trusting researchers to continue and investigate and appropriately allocate their time to deliver benefits to society and said there are also personal

costs

in this age Academics are increasingly subject to numerous metrics. There was a 2012 report in the UK that said UK academics were subjected to 100 different metrics that measure publishing, earn income or assess teaching, a lot of them and there this quantified academic identity now boils down to numbers that They're out of context and they don't make any sense, but these numbers are important because they're important for promotion to get your next job to get your next grant and it puts enormous pressure on people and I heard this.

I do some interviews for a series of podcasts with academics and I heard about the enormous stress people are under. There are study reports showing that people work 50 to 60 hours on average in academia and there is a real problem with chronic stress and burnout and we know from the psychology literature that when people are stressed they are less creative. , his thinking is more closed and these are the same people we want not if we want to be open and creative the university my colleague in our proposal was not funded his university recognizes like many others that his academics our staff are increasingly stressed, but he does What they're doing is not dealing with the measures that are causing them and the performance indicators that are causing the stress, they're offering them stress management courses and mindfulness training, which are great, they're great skills to have, but not just to put people back on the battlefield in those same pressure situations, so what do we need to make science really really important?

There was a march for science on April 22 and in 600 cities more than 600 cities around the world people marching for the importance of what science can contribute to society in terms of the health of our communities, education, well-being, the economy, all we need, good healthy scientists and researchers, bringing to society the results we are paying you for as taxpayers, the United States. Nations developed a set of sustainable development goals in 2015 and I think they're great because they recognized that gross domestic product is the only indicator, because the health of a nation's health was a very narrow indicator and it was about trying to to develop a much more inclusive set of indicators and to redefine what success means and I wonder what we could similarly do within a research setting within an academic context what a sustainable set of research and researcher goals would look like that recognizes that research is creative and messy and open that different types of research need different time frames than health and wellnessof the researchers conducting the research are as important as the results of the work and that recognizes that collaborative work environments compassionate non-competition and stress are the way to deliver good science how we can manage risk positively that is It's based on trust in our researchers, so I want to encourage us to start thinking about what this set of goals might look like to redefine what success is and what our indicators are. they are so that we can really make the best use of our taxpayer funds to do science, not just talk about science, thank you