Dear Everybody,

I often read with interest the various initiatives for technology transfer from Universities to Industry and I often find it incredible how short-sighted they can be! Demosthenes, 2300 years ago, when addressing the Athenian public said the famous: "Money therefore is needed, and without it, nothing of what has to be done, will be done!" People in need of money throughout the centuries! Nothing new about that! Society in need of technology throughout the centuries. Nothing new about that either! People with brilliant ideas throughout the millenia. Nothing new again. Ideas, technology, progress. Where does the money come in? But obviously in braking this chain! Example, the Remote Sensing sector. There is a lot of progress in the development of automatic vision systems for monitoring agriculture, the environment, the forests, the desert, the climate. Researchers come up with propositions of ingenious systems that may continually receive and analyze the images from satellites and be able to forecast at a click of a button the latest predictions on agricultural yields, on the current state of land use, the instant identification of a forest fire. Has ever any such system really been developed beyond the demonstrator level and installed? To the best of my knowledge, never! How can it possibly happen when an image costs 1000 or 2000 UK pounds each, and for a large scale system the images could be needed at a rate of 1 per hour? Why images are so expensive? Because satellites that obtain them have an average life span of a few years and their cost plus profit have to be covered over their life span. Why profit? Because they are privately owned. Companies cannot possibly operate with the idea of investing millions today, to make people realize the potential of their technology, allow researchers to develop the necessary methodology, and start profiting in 20, 30, 40 years' time! Governments, whole Societies, can do that if they view it as an investment for the future generations. (Think of what a great investment for the future the pyramids of Egypt were; they still bring a handsome income to the country!) But then, if a government makes such an investment why should it allow the benefits to be widely publicized? ("We don't fund participation to those conferences; they are our competitors!" "You are not encouraged to publish, our industry should have an edge") If you take a compass and draw a circle around you, you divide the world in two: the inside and the outside. The outside is always larger! If you isolate yourself in order to protect your ideas, you lose more by not letting things in than you gain by not letting things out! As long as there are bubbles of short-sightedness drawn in the four dimensional spacetime, the technology transfer is bound to happen in dribs and drabs!

Maria Petrou