"The old Bell Labs doesn't exist anymore -- though I will certainly encourage young ambitious researchers to look at AT&T Labs; it has much to offer. I could have stayed in AT&T Labs' research center in Florham Park, NJ forever, but the interesting problems from the engineering and development areas weren’t coming the way they used to do. Also, after 24 years in one place, I felt the need for something new.
"Academia was -- and is -- a challenge for me. Academic research is far more different from industrial research than I had imagined and teaching itself poses a new whole new set of interesting problems for me. When I first graduated, I had a positive dread of becoming a teacher/professor because I had seen too many professors for whom academia was their whole world -- they had never seriously experienced the world outside school. I did not want to become such a teacher/professor. 24 years after, I felt I had something to contribute based on my experience.
"I also had some -- rather naïve -- ideas of perusing noble goals with a group of likeminded professors and students, coming closer to the ideals of Bell Labs than was possible in today's economic climate in industry."
