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Comment by pnathan | Hacker News Reader

> My PhD adviser was a wonderful man, low-key, with some fun things he was investigating, but he wasn't building an empire, built on the backs of enslaved grad students. We were just looking at interesting problems together.

That sounds like so much fun.

Hey, what was your PhD on? Can you talk about the product you shipped?

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My research was on spatial query processing -- z-order-based techniques. The idea is to map spatial objects to one dimension by noting how a space-filling curve (z-order) passes in and out of the object. Overlapping objects can then be found by simple operations on 1-d data structures supporting random and sequential access, (e.g. sorted array, btree). I believe that the same transformation is used in geohashes.

The product is Akiban Server, a database system. I implemented nearest neighbor and point containment queries, and integrated it with our query optimizer. (You can download it from akiban.com and try it out.)

It probably won't actually matter but it could for some who do something similar to you, but are you sure you actually own your research and that the IP doesn't belong to the university? That's another reason not to do a PhD that was relevant for me: the ability to have more control over the value I was creating rather than giving it to the university to dispose of.

I don't think anyone "owns" it. The research was published, and anyone can read the papers and then perhaps build something with it. That is true of the vast majority of academic research. There is no IP in the form of something that could be patented, because a published idea would count as prior art.

Commercial efforts started by people employed by the university are a completely different matter, and universities have rules about how much time can be spent on such efforts (including consulting), and about ownership of companies established by faculty.

I've read your statement about five times now. I still only have the loosest idea of what your dissertation would be about. Which makes me kind of curious!

If you have a link to the dissertation or would like to chat about it, my email is in my profile, and I'm interested in learning more.

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