From Colliding Black Holes To Data Mining in the Cloud, a perspective from Industry

As a student of numerical relativity who planned to work the rest of his life in academia, I had never envisioned the possibility of finding myself working in the commercial sector. The perception exists that opportunities to do novel research or to direct one's own career path are limited in industry, but I have found that this is largely not true. Rather, different constraints on your time and resources are imposed, with different challenges and rewards. In this talk, I will describe how I came to find myself leading the development of a cloud-scale information extraction and retrieval application for a customer within the Intelligence Community, share my experiences working with multiple small businesses on research and development projects, identify what skills and training carry over from an education in physics, and try to offer a frank look at what life in industry is really like.