As I’ve worked through some of the ideas that we’ll be using at Directed Edge over the last few years I’ve stumbled across several subfields of computer science: information retrieval, semantic webs, graph algorithms, recommender systems.

As we cross boundaries there is one question that always strikes me: Why don’t computer scientists track related sub-fields?

This problem seems to afflict academia in general, but computer scientists seem to have even worse tunnel vision than par. When I stumble across papers that are potentially useful to the work that we’re doing I tend to track down the papers they’ve cited in search of other useful pieces of the puzzle and invariably there is almost no overlap in co-citation across sub-fields.

Why is this?

On the one hand, this provides a measure of excitement to me; there are these pools of knowledge that I manage to stumble across every few months that help bring our technology closer to realization. On the other hand, there’s this nagging wonder that so many brilliant minds aren’t talking to their colleagues to put together cool solutions to interesting problems.  Theories?

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