Sideline jobs can open a lot of doors 

Joshua Skewes is the head of the Department of Linguistics, Cognitive Science and Semiotics. In the autumn of 2019 he set up a collaboration with a company called Mindway Al, which works with responsible gambling and the screening of individuals who have gambling problems. 

Skewes learned about this company from two of his students, who had developed a proposal for how to use cognitive science to add substance to the work done by Mindway Al. The students presented their idea to Skewes, and it turned out that he knew one of the company founders because he had once been a PhD student at AU. 

Skewes contacted the company and suggested that two industrial PhDs should be set up. In the end this proved impossible, owing to financial difficulties and other reasons. But following a meeting at the company, and thanks to Skewes’s knowledge of the work done by its founder, he was convinced that there were a number of interesting academic perspectives in collaborating with the company. Skewes also felt that collaborating with a view to preventing gambling was both relevant and meaningful for society as a whole. 

Sideline jobs have to be registered  

The co-owner, who is also employed by AU, had already registered their association with the company as a sideline job, so it was obviously worthwhile finding out whether Joshua Skewes could do the same. The Faculty of Arts and the School of Communication and Culture had very little experience of doing this, so it took quite a long time to identify a format which would enable Skewes to exploit his academic expertise in the corporate context without exposing AU to accusations of giving a specific company a competitive advantage by financing research in a particular area. In practice, this meant that the parties agreed to collaborate in a project in which Joshua Skewes could use his theoretical approach to cognitive modelling to produce a computer model which was capable of imitating human behaviour and showing what happens in a gambler’s brain. The final product has not been developed yet, but it will be some kind of supplement to the company’s existing algorithms, which are sold to gaming companies. 

According to Skewes, companies like Mindway AI may be interested in employing researchers as consultants because this would provide them with part-time employees who have a more theoretical approach to the tasks they deal with. Mindway Al understood the potential increase in value that could be generated by combining their statistical insight with Skewes’s knowledge of cognitive science. 

Skewes’s reasons for having a sideline job at a company 

• It gives you access to data and interesting issues in which you can get involved, and to which you can apply your knowledge. 
• Working for a company allows you to apply theory to real issues, and to use your highly academic scientific insight in a more tangible manner. 
• Having a sideline job at a company enables you to see how your knowledge can be used in unexpected ways. It’s a bit like doing an internship. You also gain insight into the kind of challenges your students will face if they are employed at such companies after graduating from university. This knowledge can be used in your teaching, helping to prepare the students for life outside the ivory tower. 
• Working with a company can also give you a relevant professional network outside the university. 

Skewes’s good advice and points of focus 

• It is sometimes a challenge to decide when you’re doing research, and when you’re doing consultancy work for a company. 
• Conflicts of interest do occur sometimes because you need to make sure that your actions do not give a company an unfair competitive advantage. 
• It may be a good idea to regard your sideline employment as an ordinary job in which you are paid to carry out a specific task for a company.