I worked in academic research for 6 years (in AI/systems engineering) and I never encountered anyone who was succesful and interested in pragmatic issues.

On reflection, this is perhaps a bit harsh to some of the very bright people I used to work with.

What I meant was that in the context of a highly competitive research environment those who were succesful had learned that to succeed they couldn't afford to focus on anything that wouldn't progress their own careers - and that meant (and presumably still means) publications in the rights places which are usually completely uninterested in practical details and focused more on pure mathematical/conceptual concepts.

Not at all, especially in systems.

But it helps to be pragmatic and interesting, even in systems. mobisys and mobicom is full of stuff that is more interesting than pragmatic.

I guess my reply might have been ambiguous. Systems professors are generally especially pragmatic, mainly because of the maturity of the field and their culture (reflected in the high standards for top tier OSDI/SOSP papers). Mobisys and Mobicom are becoming more of a venue for the sensing community, which is relatively new and still dealing with technology that is a few years from being ready, so it makes sense that they are more on the interesting side. For systems work to be interesting, they go off and show how it can pragmatically improve your life (e.g., by finding lots of bugs in Linux).

I'm not a systems researcher but I work in a systems research group (at MSRA) as a PL researcher, which is a very different community; we tend to be more designy.

In my experience, yes.

It's not that they don't look for things with practical results. It's just that there's no incentive to continue beyond the point where you demonstrate the contribution.