9 ms·

Uber Would Like to Buy Your Robotics Department

141 points by calcsam 11y ago

ClintEhrlich 11y ago
I found some of the almost mournful passages in this piece off-putting. As the author ultimately recognizes, the drift of robotics talent from publicly funded universities to private enterprises is an indication that the technology has advanced to the point of commercial viability. In other words: Companies finally think they can build robots that are good enough that people will pay for them! To me, that is exciting news, not an occasion to lament the sudden emptiness of university laboratories. Perhaps in other fields, there is a strong tension between the basic research that government funds and the commercial applications that private companies pursue. But in robotics there are usually foreseeable uses for the technologies that researchers are pursuing. I don't foresee the direction of the field being dramatically changed, particularly given the amount of government money that will still pour in through the DoD.
- eanzenberg 11y ago
  This is great, as it frees up public research funds to be invested in other perhaps more forward-in-time projects.
- artnep 11y ago
  Uber and other companies (including Google) have been hiring a lot of robotics faculty as well as newly-minted PhDs. This is a good thing for robotics research. There's generally a shortage of tenure-track jobs relative to the number of qualified PhDs, so when companies poach faculty, it improves everyone's career options. This is one of the reasons why CS PhDs have a much higher chance of getting good tenure-track faculty jobs than, say, physics PhDs. Of course, when there's a faculty exodus it causes a temporary leadership vacuum--e.g. this has been the situation at Stanford for the last couple years, where most of the AI faculty has left to start companies. But most of the students at Stanford seem to do fine, and universities can usually fill the void in a few years and hire some new enthusiastic faculty.
  - nickff 11y ago
    Yes, the editorialist here seems to be bemoaning the 'professionalization' of the research topic, as if the companies and researchers owe some sort of loyalty to a university which profits off the cheap labour. It is roughly equivalent to chastizing NFL and NBA teams for taking all of the NCAA's best players, and paying them more.
    - heydenberk 11y ago
      More, in this case, meaning "at all."
      - angelbob 11y ago
        Nah, the CMU Robotics Institute folks they're talking about were almost certainly paid. Not by Silicon Valley standards, but they did receive actual money. These were faculty and employees, not students.
        heydenberk 11y ago
        I was referring to the NCAA athletes :)
        nmrm2 11y ago
        > Not by Silicon Valley standards Ph.D. students don't get "poached", they "graduate or drop out" and then "get jobs". The people being poahced are professors and scientists in permanent positions. I think people tend to under-estimate a full professor's salary at a top CS deapartment. The average salary of an associate professor at CMU is $138,000, full professor $194,000. Before consulting, money from research spinoff startups, etc. Even not adjusting for cost of living, I'm not sure how that's "not by Silicon Valley standards". And adjusted for cost of living, Pittsburgh is in one of the cheapest cities in the US (e.g., it's not uncommon for CMU grad students to buy houses in reasonable areas of the city on their $30-40k/yr PhD stipends). I'm not sure about non-faculty research scientists and so on, but I would imagine the $50-$100 range is about right. Which, again, adjusted for cost of living, is right there with SV. Edit: E.g., according to the obviously-take-with-a-grain-of-salt CNN COL calculator, the average CMU professor would have to make $324,000 to have a comparable salary in SF. So I guess "not by SV standards" is probably actually accurate, just probably not in the way you meant
- anigbrowl 11y ago
  People have been building robts for years, they're just becoming more consumer-facing. What's not good is that a few companies buy up all the talent and control the market in a monopoly or oligopoly-style situation. Whatever goes on in comercial labs will be heavily patented; all large tech companies play that game (out of necessity until such time as there is meaningful patent reform) and Uber has applied for patents on things like their surge pricing mechanism, even though the concept of equilibrium pricing is a matter of basic economics.
  - nickff 11y ago
    Your main problem seems to be with the use of patents to protect market dominance. I agree with you that this is a problem, but disagree on the cause. The patent system has been causing this kind of issue ever since its creation; look at when the Wright brothers patented aircraft roll control, and a lawyer patented cars.[1][2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers_patent_war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers_patent_war [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_B._Selden#The_Selden_patent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_B._Selden#The_Selden_pa...
    - anigbrowl 11y ago
      That is not the case, and I apologize for the lack of clarity. I am not totally opposed to patents, and I think your examples undermine your argument since they describe innovations that are clearly patentable (whereas my mention of Uber applying for a patent on surge pricing is highly questionable under the Prior Art standard). My main problem is the use of capital to establish market dominance by indirectly buying out the public commons. Taxpayers arguably subsidized the development of Cornell's robotics department, with the benefits of their research being available across the whole economy (possibly through patent licensing), but by hiring away all the staff at once Uber has indirectly appropriated a chunk of that public subsidy. Now all the individual scientists who worked there are independent agents who presumably liked the terms of the offers they received and also wanted to continue working with each other. One could say that the human capital in the lab was undervalued by the public funding option, but one could equally argue that Uber has helped itself to a large consumer surplus (qua hoarding the supply of available robotics scientists) with the joint effect of denying their availability to competitors, and increasing the price the public will have to pay to re-establish a comepetitive department, if it can do so at all. There is no guarantee that this will result in an increase in robotics innovation from the private sector. It might suit Uber equally well to pay the robotics scientists to sit around and do nothing or otherwise fritter away the investment, as long as the scientists' absence from the marketplace of ideas disadvantages Uber's competitors. In other words, you don't need your own robot car, you just need to make it harder for anyone else to build robot cars that could compete with you. I do not want to suggest that Uber has evil motives here, by the way - I have no idea what the firm's plans or goals are. I'm just pointing out that acquisition of a resource does not automatically lead to greater economic efficiency. We've all seen examples of ;arge firms buying up potentially disruptive competitors in order to bury them.
- SalmoShalazar 11y ago
  I have to agree with the more 'mournful' passages from a general perspective. I agree, it's promising to see the hard work of researchers finally enter the market, but the comments the author is making addresses a deeper issue. Funding for basic research has dropped considerably over the decades across North America, yet the long-term value has shown itself to be unimaginably vast. It's incredibly short-sighted for a government to primarily invest in research that has direct industrial applications. The returns on basic research on both a financial and intellectual level, as a whole, are massive. We need to keep investing heavily in researchers that are addressing fundamental topics that some might otherwise see purely as 'academic'.
rubidium 11y ago
"There’s a useful high-tech concept called the Technology Readiness Level that helps explain why Uber pounced when it did. NASA came up with this scale to gauge the maturity of a given field of applied science. At Level 1, an area of scientific inquiry is so new that nobody understands its basic principles. At Level 9, the related technology is so mature it’s ready to be used in commercial products." There's a often a big difference between the people who like to work on level 1 verse level 9 stuff. "How do I scale this to be used by 10,000 people?" isn't even an interesting/relevant question to a researcher pursuing level 1 areas of science, but it's one of the most important questions for an engineer of a technology at level 9.
lifeisstillgood 11y ago
It seems to me that Silicon Valley's unicorns are themselves turning into incubators for future spin offs. Uber is taking a ridiculous amount of funding and investing in what can barely be called related technologies. It's not a conglomerate, it's not a global taxi firm, it's not a VC. It's ... Something new. And it's not alone. Google, Amazon, AirBnB for heavens sake, all are placing bets on future innovations and models a long way from their core. I don't have a problem with this, but it's going to have a lot of knock on impacts. From traditional business valuation techniques to how to tax R&D globally, we are going to see a few decades where unfair and undemocratic could be the global theme, or, we could see better forms of governance emerge. This, Uber going robotics crazy, is for me just a trigger to realise what has been going on for a while, from Pikkety to Varoufakis, tech has emerged from nice career to political engine of the next decades. The boy has started saying the emperor has no clothes on. We the people need to know how to deal with a naked emperor and a new species of global something's. We the developers are not isolated from the political effects of the fun technologies we work with. Gosh I'm pontificating now ...
- beambot 11y ago
  Robotics for Uber is not a "barely-related technology." For a lot of us, it was always obvious that the core operational model for autonomous cars was Uber-esque. The fact that every major automaker is investing heavily in autonomy should convince you that autonomous cars are an existential threat to Uber. (Not to mention that the driver situation is one of Uber's biggest issues at the moment!)
  - ClintEhrlich 11y ago
    That last point is really fascinating: The employment status of Uber's drivers could have a significant effect on the speed at which autonomous vehicles are introduced in this country. Uber may accumulate a tremendous amount of cash, only to suffer unfavorable legal rulings that jeopardize its current business model. One of the obvious solutions would be to devote that money towards replacing the drivers with automation, so that the entire "independent contractor vs. employee" issue becomes moot.
dpieri 11y ago
As a CMU grad it was kind of a gut punch when I heard about this. However, I'm confident that the CMU robotics program will be just fine in the long run. The thing that worries me more is if this makes universities afraid of partnering with companies like Uber in the future.
- 9872 11y ago
  They can be afraid if they want. What are they going to do about it? Faculty will want to do it. If the administration forbids that, they will not attract good faculty.
- wavefunction 11y ago
  I think some increased consideration of public/private partnerships can only be a good thing. They generally seem to benefit the private side of the partnership from this example and others.
- angelbob 11y ago
  I'm a CMU grad as well. And CMU has a long and storied history of being raided for talent like this. 40 at once is unusually big, but this story plays out regularly. It's good for the profs, it's mostly good for the school, and it's part of why we have such a good reputation in industry -- so it's good for alums like you and me personally, as well. With that said, sure, 40 is a lot. But the Robotics Institute will recover.
Animats 11y ago
Uber didn't buy CMU's robotics department. They hired the employees. CMU didn't get any money out of it. It's good to see robotics finally happening. I used to be in that field; I had one of the DARPA Grand Challenge teams in 2005, and was a visiting scholar in robotics at Stanford in the early 1990s, where I figured out how to get legged robots run over rough terrain. It was all too early back then. Now I'm too old. Nobody is making any money yet, though. Other than teleoperators for the military, vacuum cleaners, and industrial robots, there are no robot products that sell in quantity. Industrial robots with some limited AI are now available[1] but sales are small. This still isn't a commercial technology. [1] http://www.rethinkrobotics.com/baxter/ http://www.rethinkrobotics.com/baxter/
- shostack 11y ago
  An important distinction for sure. I wonder if this will make academic jobs more competitive with corporate jobs at those levels. Side question, but where is the line drawn between something being considered "robotics" vs. something else? For example...is a Nest a robot? If it controls the temperature in my home by regulating various valves and such, isn't that robotic, even if the device isn't physically moving from thermostat to thermostat to change the temperature?
  - Animats 11y ago
    It matters that robotics isn't making money yet. Google has a big automatic driving research operation, but to make money from it, they will have to get into the auto business in a big way. That's a huge, risky investment. Also, making cars has lower margins than search ads, which means Google's stock would go down if they did that. Google could become a parts supplier to Detroit, but that's not very profitable. All the big carmakers already have their own automatic driving systems. Cadillac has one developed with CMU which is almost as good as Google's. It's hard to see how Google turns automatic driving into a big moneymaker. Google isn't a patient company. They kill off products and research that don't pay off within a few years. At some point, they may "put more wood behind fewer arrows" and dump automatic driving. They've done it before. Google hasn't historically spent big outside their core business area. Google Fiber is still just a few demos, and that's been going on for years now. Uber is in a better position. They're in the transportation business. They're losing their labor lawsuits and will end up buying cars and hiring drivers. As a high-volume car buyer, they can get car companies to put their self-driving technology in the cars they buy. For Uber, automatic driving adds to the business model.
atomical 11y ago
What's the connection between Uber and Robotics? Computer vision for driving?
- Nilef 11y ago
  Computer vision for self-driving, then longer-term, automating logistics. Something has to load all those self-driving trucks...
- forgotAgain 11y ago
  Automate the driving function.
elektromekatron 11y ago
Excellent. I shall dig it out from under the stairs then and give it a bit of a dust.
bliti 11y ago
Hopefully this will drive more funding to privately funded research by non-academic groups. I've struggled with such issue in the past.
EGreg 11y ago
Science used to be a gift economy. Today, stuff like physics still is. That's why we have physicists working on problems, building on each other's research. The collaboration aspect is key. This is what the free software and open source model was based on. Now next door to the physicists are the biochemists who have been snapped up by Big Pharma and now their stuff is patented. And when it's not patented, it's a trade secret. Their colleagues can no longer build on their research. So the real danger isn't that the companies are willing to pay these researchers to work on commercially viable robots. It's that there will now be an explosion of PATENTS encumbering the whole field! Robotics researchers won't be as free to build on each other's work, like the physicists, whose results are less monetizable. The public pays for research and, when it gets profitable, the profit is taken away from them. What should happen is that the public universities should be able to continue giving their professors free access to the research whose whole beginning, false starts and proving out, WAS FUNDWD WITH PUBLIC MONEY! Instead, the public is shut out of benefiting from the very research they helped fun. The only benefit they'll derive from now on is as consumers, the profits will go to the private sector. I guess the private sector owns the means of distribution, and the public essentially funds "incubators" and is forced into an early exit. That's the best we can hope for, in our system... but the sad part is that the research could go a lot faster, like the explosion that open source software fueled, if these guys weren't shut up in silos. The public's money would go a lot further. Replace patents with prizes.
3pt14159 11y ago
This happened to the University of Toronto's Machine Learning lab. Microsoft just came in and handed out salary offers to everyone. Makes complete sense compared to buying out an actual company.

141 points by calcsam 11y ago

I found some of the almost mournful passages in this piece off-putting. As the author ultimately recognizes, the drift of robotics talent from publicly funded universities to private enterprises is an indication that the technology has advanced to the point of commercial viability. In other words: Companies finally think they can build robots that are good enough that people will pay for them! To me, that is exciting news, not an occasion to lament the sudden emptiness of university laboratories. Perhaps in other fields, there is a strong tension between the basic research that government funds and the commercial applications that private companies pursue. But in robotics there are usually foreseeable uses for the technologies that researchers are pursuing. I don't foresee the direction of the field being dramatically changed, particularly given the amount of government money that will still pour in through the DoD.

eanzenberg 11y ago
This is great, as it frees up public research funds to be invested in other perhaps more forward-in-time projects.
artnep 11y ago
Uber and other companies (including Google) have been hiring a lot of robotics faculty as well as newly-minted PhDs. This is a good thing for robotics research. There's generally a shortage of tenure-track jobs relative to the number of qualified PhDs, so when companies poach faculty, it improves everyone's career options. This is one of the reasons why CS PhDs have a much higher chance of getting good tenure-track faculty jobs than, say, physics PhDs. Of course, when there's a faculty exodus it causes a temporary leadership vacuum--e.g. this has been the situation at Stanford for the last couple years, where most of the AI faculty has left to start companies. But most of the students at Stanford seem to do fine, and universities can usually fill the void in a few years and hire some new enthusiastic faculty.
- nickff 11y ago
  Yes, the editorialist here seems to be bemoaning the 'professionalization' of the research topic, as if the companies and researchers owe some sort of loyalty to a university which profits off the cheap labour. It is roughly equivalent to chastizing NFL and NBA teams for taking all of the NCAA's best players, and paying them more.
  - heydenberk 11y ago
    More, in this case, meaning "at all."
    - angelbob 11y ago
      Nah, the CMU Robotics Institute folks they're talking about were almost certainly paid. Not by Silicon Valley standards, but they did receive actual money. These were faculty and employees, not students.
      - heydenberk 11y ago
        I was referring to the NCAA athletes :)
      - nmrm2 11y ago
        > Not by Silicon Valley standards Ph.D. students don't get "poached", they "graduate or drop out" and then "get jobs". The people being poahced are professors and scientists in permanent positions. I think people tend to under-estimate a full professor's salary at a top CS deapartment. The average salary of an associate professor at CMU is $138,000, full professor $194,000. Before consulting, money from research spinoff startups, etc. Even not adjusting for cost of living, I'm not sure how that's "not by Silicon Valley standards". And adjusted for cost of living, Pittsburgh is in one of the cheapest cities in the US (e.g., it's not uncommon for CMU grad students to buy houses in reasonable areas of the city on their $30-40k/yr PhD stipends). I'm not sure about non-faculty research scientists and so on, but I would imagine the $50-$100 range is about right. Which, again, adjusted for cost of living, is right there with SV. Edit: E.g., according to the obviously-take-with-a-grain-of-salt CNN COL calculator, the average CMU professor would have to make $324,000 to have a comparable salary in SF. So I guess "not by SV standards" is probably actually accurate, just probably not in the way you meant
anigbrowl 11y ago
People have been building robts for years, they're just becoming more consumer-facing. What's not good is that a few companies buy up all the talent and control the market in a monopoly or oligopoly-style situation. Whatever goes on in comercial labs will be heavily patented; all large tech companies play that game (out of necessity until such time as there is meaningful patent reform) and Uber has applied for patents on things like their surge pricing mechanism, even though the concept of equilibrium pricing is a matter of basic economics.
- nickff 11y ago
  Your main problem seems to be with the use of patents to protect market dominance. I agree with you that this is a problem, but disagree on the cause. The patent system has been causing this kind of issue ever since its creation; look at when the Wright brothers patented aircraft roll control, and a lawyer patented cars.[1][2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers_patent_war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers_patent_war [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_B._Selden#The_Selden_patent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_B._Selden#The_Selden_pa...
  - anigbrowl 11y ago
    That is not the case, and I apologize for the lack of clarity. I am not totally opposed to patents, and I think your examples undermine your argument since they describe innovations that are clearly patentable (whereas my mention of Uber applying for a patent on surge pricing is highly questionable under the Prior Art standard). My main problem is the use of capital to establish market dominance by indirectly buying out the public commons. Taxpayers arguably subsidized the development of Cornell's robotics department, with the benefits of their research being available across the whole economy (possibly through patent licensing), but by hiring away all the staff at once Uber has indirectly appropriated a chunk of that public subsidy. Now all the individual scientists who worked there are independent agents who presumably liked the terms of the offers they received and also wanted to continue working with each other. One could say that the human capital in the lab was undervalued by the public funding option, but one could equally argue that Uber has helped itself to a large consumer surplus (qua hoarding the supply of available robotics scientists) with the joint effect of denying their availability to competitors, and increasing the price the public will have to pay to re-establish a comepetitive department, if it can do so at all. There is no guarantee that this will result in an increase in robotics innovation from the private sector. It might suit Uber equally well to pay the robotics scientists to sit around and do nothing or otherwise fritter away the investment, as long as the scientists' absence from the marketplace of ideas disadvantages Uber's competitors. In other words, you don't need your own robot car, you just need to make it harder for anyone else to build robot cars that could compete with you. I do not want to suggest that Uber has evil motives here, by the way - I have no idea what the firm's plans or goals are. I'm just pointing out that acquisition of a resource does not automatically lead to greater economic efficiency. We've all seen examples of ;arge firms buying up potentially disruptive competitors in order to bury them.
SalmoShalazar 11y ago
I have to agree with the more 'mournful' passages from a general perspective. I agree, it's promising to see the hard work of researchers finally enter the market, but the comments the author is making addresses a deeper issue. Funding for basic research has dropped considerably over the decades across North America, yet the long-term value has shown itself to be unimaginably vast. It's incredibly short-sighted for a government to primarily invest in research that has direct industrial applications. The returns on basic research on both a financial and intellectual level, as a whole, are massive. We need to keep investing heavily in researchers that are addressing fundamental topics that some might otherwise see purely as 'academic'.

rubidium 11y ago

"There’s a useful high-tech concept called the Technology Readiness Level that helps explain why Uber pounced when it did. NASA came up with this scale to gauge the maturity of a given field of applied science. At Level 1, an area of scientific inquiry is so new that nobody understands its basic principles. At Level 9, the related technology is so mature it’s ready to be used in commercial products." There's a often a big difference between the people who like to work on level 1 verse level 9 stuff. "How do I scale this to be used by 10,000 people?" isn't even an interesting/relevant question to a researcher pursuing level 1 areas of science, but it's one of the most important questions for an engineer of a technology at level 9.

lifeisstillgood 11y ago

It seems to me that Silicon Valley's unicorns are themselves turning into incubators for future spin offs. Uber is taking a ridiculous amount of funding and investing in what can barely be called related technologies. It's not a conglomerate, it's not a global taxi firm, it's not a VC. It's ... Something new. And it's not alone. Google, Amazon, AirBnB for heavens sake, all are placing bets on future innovations and models a long way from their core. I don't have a problem with this, but it's going to have a lot of knock on impacts. From traditional business valuation techniques to how to tax R&D globally, we are going to see a few decades where unfair and undemocratic could be the global theme, or, we could see better forms of governance emerge. This, Uber going robotics crazy, is for me just a trigger to realise what has been going on for a while, from Pikkety to Varoufakis, tech has emerged from nice career to political engine of the next decades. The boy has started saying the emperor has no clothes on. We the people need to know how to deal with a naked emperor and a new species of global something's. We the developers are not isolated from the political effects of the fun technologies we work with. Gosh I'm pontificating now ...

beambot 11y ago
Robotics for Uber is not a "barely-related technology." For a lot of us, it was always obvious that the core operational model for autonomous cars was Uber-esque. The fact that every major automaker is investing heavily in autonomy should convince you that autonomous cars are an existential threat to Uber. (Not to mention that the driver situation is one of Uber's biggest issues at the moment!)
- ClintEhrlich 11y ago
  That last point is really fascinating: The employment status of Uber's drivers could have a significant effect on the speed at which autonomous vehicles are introduced in this country. Uber may accumulate a tremendous amount of cash, only to suffer unfavorable legal rulings that jeopardize its current business model. One of the obvious solutions would be to devote that money towards replacing the drivers with automation, so that the entire "independent contractor vs. employee" issue becomes moot.

dpieri 11y ago

As a CMU grad it was kind of a gut punch when I heard about this. However, I'm confident that the CMU robotics program will be just fine in the long run. The thing that worries me more is if this makes universities afraid of partnering with companies like Uber in the future.

9872 11y ago
They can be afraid if they want. What are they going to do about it? Faculty will want to do it. If the administration forbids that, they will not attract good faculty.
wavefunction 11y ago
I think some increased consideration of public/private partnerships can only be a good thing. They generally seem to benefit the private side of the partnership from this example and others.
angelbob 11y ago
I'm a CMU grad as well. And CMU has a long and storied history of being raided for talent like this. 40 at once is unusually big, but this story plays out regularly. It's good for the profs, it's mostly good for the school, and it's part of why we have such a good reputation in industry -- so it's good for alums like you and me personally, as well. With that said, sure, 40 is a lot. But the Robotics Institute will recover.

Animats 11y ago

Uber didn't buy CMU's robotics department. They hired the employees. CMU didn't get any money out of it. It's good to see robotics finally happening. I used to be in that field; I had one of the DARPA Grand Challenge teams in 2005, and was a visiting scholar in robotics at Stanford in the early 1990s, where I figured out how to get legged robots run over rough terrain. It was all too early back then. Now I'm too old. Nobody is making any money yet, though. Other than teleoperators for the military, vacuum cleaners, and industrial robots, there are no robot products that sell in quantity. Industrial robots with some limited AI are now available[1] but sales are small. This still isn't a commercial technology. [1] http://www.rethinkrobotics.com/baxter/ http://www.rethinkrobotics.com/baxter/

shostack 11y ago
An important distinction for sure. I wonder if this will make academic jobs more competitive with corporate jobs at those levels. Side question, but where is the line drawn between something being considered "robotics" vs. something else? For example...is a Nest a robot? If it controls the temperature in my home by regulating various valves and such, isn't that robotic, even if the device isn't physically moving from thermostat to thermostat to change the temperature?
- Animats 11y ago
  It matters that robotics isn't making money yet. Google has a big automatic driving research operation, but to make money from it, they will have to get into the auto business in a big way. That's a huge, risky investment. Also, making cars has lower margins than search ads, which means Google's stock would go down if they did that. Google could become a parts supplier to Detroit, but that's not very profitable. All the big carmakers already have their own automatic driving systems. Cadillac has one developed with CMU which is almost as good as Google's. It's hard to see how Google turns automatic driving into a big moneymaker. Google isn't a patient company. They kill off products and research that don't pay off within a few years. At some point, they may "put more wood behind fewer arrows" and dump automatic driving. They've done it before. Google hasn't historically spent big outside their core business area. Google Fiber is still just a few demos, and that's been going on for years now. Uber is in a better position. They're in the transportation business. They're losing their labor lawsuits and will end up buying cars and hiring drivers. As a high-volume car buyer, they can get car companies to put their self-driving technology in the cars they buy. For Uber, automatic driving adds to the business model.

atomical 11y ago

What's the connection between Uber and Robotics? Computer vision for driving?

Nilef 11y ago
Computer vision for self-driving, then longer-term, automating logistics. Something has to load all those self-driving trucks...
forgotAgain 11y ago
Automate the driving function.

elektromekatron 11y ago

Excellent. I shall dig it out from under the stairs then and give it a bit of a dust.

bliti 11y ago

Hopefully this will drive more funding to privately funded research by non-academic groups. I've struggled with such issue in the past.

EGreg 11y ago

Science used to be a gift economy. Today, stuff like physics still is. That's why we have physicists working on problems, building on each other's research. The collaboration aspect is key. This is what the free software and open source model was based on. Now next door to the physicists are the biochemists who have been snapped up by Big Pharma and now their stuff is patented. And when it's not patented, it's a trade secret. Their colleagues can no longer build on their research. So the real danger isn't that the companies are willing to pay these researchers to work on commercially viable robots. It's that there will now be an explosion of PATENTS encumbering the whole field! Robotics researchers won't be as free to build on each other's work, like the physicists, whose results are less monetizable. The public pays for research and, when it gets profitable, the profit is taken away from them. What should happen is that the public universities should be able to continue giving their professors free access to the research whose whole beginning, false starts and proving out, WAS FUNDWD WITH PUBLIC MONEY! Instead, the public is shut out of benefiting from the very research they helped fun. The only benefit they'll derive from now on is as consumers, the profits will go to the private sector. I guess the private sector owns the means of distribution, and the public essentially funds "incubators" and is forced into an early exit. That's the best we can hope for, in our system... but the sad part is that the research could go a lot faster, like the explosion that open source software fueled, if these guys weren't shut up in silos. The public's money would go a lot further. Replace patents with prizes.

3pt14159 11y ago

This happened to the University of Toronto's Machine Learning lab. Microsoft just came in and handed out salary offers to everyone. Makes complete sense compared to buying out an actual company.