Smart people doing remarkable things don't seem to have a place in our society anymore, neither in academia nor in the private economy. Sure there are exceptions.
Microsoft Research, Google X and of course a handful of universities that actually work as they are supposed to, but for most of my ex colleague's these weren't real options as noone ever instilled the courage in them to find their way there, or survive the competition.
It's strange that most of them are building CRUD Software, Writing Shaders for Game Engines or work in marketing, instead of pushing us towards breakthroughs in CV and with that AI.
1. Resources. Time and money. These research ventures might take years and sometimes need some funding in addition to your own salary. It is basically borderline impossible for most developers to contribute anything useful in an environment where they need to worry about paying their bills for this month.
2. Know-how. Right now, most industries have advanced so much that you need very specialized knowledge and a metric fuckton of math/stats to contribute to any particular field in any significant way. A developer with a BS in CS can most often not even understand the papers being currently published due to the high math/specialized required knowledge.
I think smart people doing remarkable things have greater visibility than they have at any point in the recent past due to the internet and platforms like YouTube, etc. It is easier than ever to share and discover knowledge now than it ever has been in the past..
The biggest problem I see is that there is limited compensation for participating in these endeavors. I think this is an issue from the standpoint that some research is very costly or requires resources that the average person cannot obtain. There is still a great number of discoveries that can be made by people working in labs they have made wherever they found space.
In addition to that, not every publicly funded school provide these publicly funded software packages freely for public use, hoping by keeping them private to exploit their "business value" somehow. At least in this part of Europe.
[1]: http://www.andreykurenkov.com/writing/a-brief-history-of-neu...
He was a terrible professor! Yes, publish or perish is real, but that's such a terrible, pessimistic attitude to have. Its like he had given up on trying to actually do research. Tell him to go become an adjunct.
My professor during my Master's adventure was insistent on publishing a lot. He didn't mind if it was little deltas. He burned the phrase "publish or perish" into my brain. But had I figured out something novel, he would have absolutely supported putting it out there. That would have been the whole point of doing this work! Deltas help you survive, but novel ideas are what you should strive for.
My major professor diluted the paper and added other content consistent with the previous method. Not just adding prior art to the introduction, but changing the meat of the paper so that it didn't seem like a departure.
He assured me that this would make it easier to publish, and publishing was all that mattered. There were no bonus points for publishing a novel technique, and there would certainly be extra work having to deal with referees.
I'm very glad to be out of that environment now. I noped out of academia and happily dealing with corporate B.S.