3 ms·

> unlike competing companies like Google and Apple they encourage academic researchers to publish papers on the work they fund First, you cannot compare Googl

> unlike competing companies like Google and Apple they encourage academic researchers to publish papers on the work they fund First, you cannot compare Google and Apple when it comes to academic research. Apple barely does any, Google is usually the largest source of papers in all major ML conferences (when it's not FB): NIPS, ICLR, ICML, etc.

yodon 8y ago
I think you are confusing academic research and corporate research. Google has a huge stable of corporate researchers who publish papers in academic journals. Microsoft funds actual academic research. And yes, my inclusion of Apple in that list was fully aware Apple doesn’t do significant funding of academic research. That’s the point.
- andreyk 8y ago
  To be fair the boundary between academic and industry research is quite gray now - lots of collaboration, many PhDs doing internships, etc. Still, it's true MS is not given enough credit.
- ehsankia 8y ago
  So just because Google hires researcher and gives them resources, their publication is somehow worth less than Microsoft paying outside researchers? Why is one somehow superior than the other? Both are publishing papers and pushing academia forward, why does it matter where the researcher are doing their work?
- halflings 8y ago
  Frankly, when I read a machine learning paper without looking at the list of authors, it is impossible to tell whether it is written by "corporate researchers" or "actual academic researchers". I'm not sure the distinction you're making is really helpful. As long as the research is published openly, peer-reviewed, discussed in conferences, whether the researchers work for the company or for a university does not make much of a difference. Most of these "corporate researchers" were top of their field in academia before joining Google, Facebook, Microsoft. Furthermore, Google also funds academic research [0]... I'm not even sure where you're getting all your information at this point. [0] https://ai.google/research/outreach/faculty-research-awards/recipients/ https://ai.google/research/outreach/faculty-research-awards/...

yodon 8y ago

I think you are confusing academic research and corporate research. Google has a huge stable of corporate researchers who publish papers in academic journals. Microsoft funds actual academic research. And yes, my inclusion of Apple in that list was fully aware Apple doesn’t do significant funding of academic research. That’s the point.

andreyk 8y ago
To be fair the boundary between academic and industry research is quite gray now - lots of collaboration, many PhDs doing internships, etc. Still, it's true MS is not given enough credit.
ehsankia 8y ago
So just because Google hires researcher and gives them resources, their publication is somehow worth less than Microsoft paying outside researchers? Why is one somehow superior than the other? Both are publishing papers and pushing academia forward, why does it matter where the researcher are doing their work?
halflings 8y ago
Frankly, when I read a machine learning paper without looking at the list of authors, it is impossible to tell whether it is written by "corporate researchers" or "actual academic researchers". I'm not sure the distinction you're making is really helpful. As long as the research is published openly, peer-reviewed, discussed in conferences, whether the researchers work for the company or for a university does not make much of a difference. Most of these "corporate researchers" were top of their field in academia before joining Google, Facebook, Microsoft. Furthermore, Google also funds academic research [0]... I'm not even sure where you're getting all your information at this point. [0] https://ai.google/research/outreach/faculty-research-awards/recipients/ https://ai.google/research/outreach/faculty-research-awards/...