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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 u

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
        angelbob 11y ago
        Hm. I know the guy who ran the Master of Software Engineering department at CMU West (in Mountain View.) And he didn't make the "average full professor" amount you're claiming. And one would assume he'd be making at least average for a professor. That would be crazy money in Pittsburgh. Are you sure that figure is accurate?
- hammock 11y ago
  >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. Good for the PhDs; bad for the schools, who must now find more funding to retain the same level of talent, thus making future academic research (e.g. the next gen of robots) more challenging to accomplish
  - meatysnapper 11y ago
    Maybe they can divert money from their athletic departments to pay their PhDs $20k more per year?
    - relaxatorium 11y ago
      This is not an argument that applies much to, say, the mighty Carnegie Mellon Tartans.
    - rsfern 11y ago
      Even at schools with actual athletics programs and budgets, most PhD students are paid with grant money won by their advisors, or through government fellowships. Not by the university. (I'm a PhD student at CMU paid with NSF grant money.) Also of note, CMU just introduced a new presidential fellowship to fund undergraduate and graduate students in all fields [1]. 1: http://www.cmu.edu/news/stories/archives/2015/september/presidential-fellows-scholars.html http://www.cmu.edu/news/stories/archives/2015/september/pres...
  - plonh 11y ago
    You are assuming that there is a talent shortage and that universities know how to rank the talent. Not really true, considering how many PhD seats there are and how few faculty seats there are.
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'.

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
      - angelbob 11y ago
        Hm. I know the guy who ran the Master of Software Engineering department at CMU West (in Mountain View.) And he didn't make the "average full professor" amount you're claiming. And one would assume he'd be making at least average for a professor. That would be crazy money in Pittsburgh. Are you sure that figure is accurate?
hammock 11y ago
>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. Good for the PhDs; bad for the schools, who must now find more funding to retain the same level of talent, thus making future academic research (e.g. the next gen of robots) more challenging to accomplish
- meatysnapper 11y ago
  Maybe they can divert money from their athletic departments to pay their PhDs $20k more per year?
  - relaxatorium 11y ago
    This is not an argument that applies much to, say, the mighty Carnegie Mellon Tartans.
  - rsfern 11y ago
    Even at schools with actual athletics programs and budgets, most PhD students are paid with grant money won by their advisors, or through government fellowships. Not by the university. (I'm a PhD student at CMU paid with NSF grant money.) Also of note, CMU just introduced a new presidential fellowship to fund undergraduate and graduate students in all fields [1]. 1: http://www.cmu.edu/news/stories/archives/2015/september/presidential-fellows-scholars.html http://www.cmu.edu/news/stories/archives/2015/september/pres...
- plonh 11y ago
  You are assuming that there is a talent shortage and that universities know how to rank the talent. Not really true, considering how many PhD seats there are and how few faculty seats there are.

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'.