10 ms·

Facebook AI Research Expands with New Academic Collaborations

115 points by TamoC 8y ago

bradgnar 8y ago
cool, even better ads.
mlthrowaway1953 8y ago
How is IP handled in this situation? Especially given the recent discussion [1] on HN about how the recently announced DeepMind Patent Portfolio could be a problem, how is it that state employees (Washington, California) are "co-employed" by an organization to do _exactly_ the research that their home universities work on ? Who owns the IP in this case? Are these sorts of agreements FOIA-able? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17266951 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17266951
- chrisseaton 8y ago
  > how is it that state employees (Washington, California) are "co-employed" by an organization to do _exactly_ the research that their home universities work on They will work part-time for the university, and part-time for Facebook. I don't see why that's so shocking? Presumably the university only funds them part-time for part-time work, so it's not like they're not getting what they're paying for if that's what you're asking. This is a very conventional set up for academics.
  - mlthrowaway1953 8y ago
    Most employer agreements have fairly draconian claims around IP. And I believe that many universities require their faculty to run consulting, etc. gigs through their legal teams, and the university gets a "right of first refusal" of sorts on the generated IP. Many academics get around this by claiming that they are doing research X at company (more applied, etc.) and research Y at the university (more theory, technically different projects under different grants). But with ML it seems like it would be harder. Regardless, I'd love to figure out if we can get these agreements through freedom of information act requests, to shed light on what state-employees are doing.
    - Fomite 8y ago
      Yeah, at my university partnerships between academia and industry have very complex IP terms that depend on the scope of work, how much of it involves novel research, etc. And there, there's the clarity of "I'm an employee of the university". With dual appointments...the agreement has to be complex. Either that, or really draconian based on Facebook throwing it's weight around and saying "Accept this, or we'll find another university that will."
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
surferbayarea 8y ago
All your engineers are belong to us.
naturalgradient 8y ago
I understand the call of money but I cannot help but feel very negatively towards academics doing this with facebook of all organisations. After recent events, they cannot pretend not to know the impact and damage their work may have here. Excusing yourself with "I am just a researcher, I don't have anything to do with how my work is used" is just not good enough any more. I would categorically reject any collaborations with FB as an academic in ML.
- yaseer 8y ago
  Completely agree with this. I see Facebook as the least ethical, and least useful from a civilization standpoint of all the big tech firms. Google is driven by the same ad-clicking incentives, but the one-tricky pony has been developing other extremely societally useful tech, like self-driving cars and other moonshot projects. Apple and Microsoft sell products, they do not make users the product (on the whole). Together they pioneered computing revolutions, and I'm confident history will judge them for making a positive contribution (on the whole). Amazon is a leviathan whose societal value I find more difficult to classify, but I genuinely derive lots of value from their service personally. It's good for my lifestyle. Facebook on the other hand, is a waste of my time, mental energy and a drain on society. As an academic, how can you turn your mind to furthering its goals?
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - visarga 8y ago
    That might be true, but don't confuse FAIR (their DL research lab) with FB. FAIR employs good people doing interesting and useful research. They promoted pytorch as a framework, and it is perhaps the best framework for non industrial applications. On a parallel line of thought, I prefer FB's React to Google's Angular. In both React and Pytorch I see the same elegant design. TensorFlow and Angular on the other part are unnecessarily complicated.
    - yaseer 8y ago
cujo 8y ago
QUIT USING FACEBOOK STUFF
- cube2222 8y ago
  Care to expand? Everybody in my vicinity uses messenger, no exception, it's the standard method of communication. It's like saying "quit using the Telco stuff!" 20 years ago.
  - yulaow 8y ago
    In my area first everyone dropped messenger because some people had no accounts and moved instead to Whatsapp that guarantee that if you had a phone you could have easily an account in a matter of seconds (download and install) without having to create a full profile on some site you could not care less ( at this point of time in my old account no one is writing anymore in his home but instead using it just as a news aggregator). Then everyone moved to Telegram because it allows you to share your account to others without giving them your personal number. It is just a matter of time and everyone will move to the most simple system for the specified purpose
    - cube2222 8y ago
      I'm not denying that at all, we've moved on from telcos too. But it isn't a "just drop it" situation. It's a "gracefully transition when the social dynamics are in your favor" situation.
      - yulaow 8y ago
        I agree with you on that
      - s-shellfish 8y ago
        Social dynamics being in your favor can work for you and against you. It's delusional to think that just because you can make that graceful transition that that doesn't mean people aren't going to get pissed off at it. All you've done is silence their perspective as you are making that graceful transition. That builds up over time, and this is why this stuff goes in circles. You have to actively listen to people and make an effort to understand that the social dynamics being in your favor is not something you control. It controls you. You are the head of the crowd therefore all your actions must be aligned with the interests of the social dynamic. If you silence any single one of them you create a different dynamic. So you have to make the effort to be aware of alternative perspectives instead of choosing blind ignorance in the face of valid arguments. That's just the business of politics.
chriskanan 8y ago
To summarize why I think professors are going with this arrangement (in order): 1) Much less, if any, grant writing. A standard NSF $500K 3 year grant provides a lab about $100K per year (due to university overhead). This will support 1-2 PhD students on a pittance of a stipend. 2) Less teaching (1 course once a year) 3) Computing resources that are far greater than you could get a grant for. One NVIDIA DGX-1 is about $100K. Very hard to get a grant for something like that. Companies have far greater resources than just one DGX-1 4) Access to software engineering personnel to help with research 5) Access to data, and the ability to create new datasets. Many datasets cost over $100K to make (e.g., those for semantic segmentation). Very hard to get a grant to make a dataset (I've tried) 6) Much better media relations to popularize your research 7) Bigger salary A big part of this, in my opinion, is just that FB funds their labs. Getting government funding for a lab is difficult and frustrating and must be done continually, especially for these professors that run huge labs. NSF has a 7-15% success rate, and it can take a lot of effort to write a decent proposal. Including teaching regularly, this takes a lot of time from actual research. What these professors, I think, are negotiating is only teaching one semester a year and having a spigot of cash to fund their labs. They also gain access to massive amounts of data and computing resources. Other companies don't seem to be as open to this arrangement as FB, but it has a lot of appeal to me (although I'm not a lover of FB).
- gimmeThaBeet 8y ago
  > Much less, if any, grant writing. I don't know how it compares in software, I worked for a professor in undergrad who was in microelectronics. I was astonished at how much of their time was taken up by grant writing and applying for funding. The pressure for research professors to support their position was immense. There's a lot of reasons to hate FB, a lot of reasons to be wary of what comes out of their research. But to castigate researchers that cash-spewing tech titans create a better environment and experience for researchers than the public and universities feels a bit asinine. I've known too many starving grad students, post docs, and non-tenure professors to prefer people subject themselves to the system we have rather than what a company like FB wants to provide.
- Fomite 8y ago
  A couple notes: 1. Industry funding comes with its own set of hassles. And overhead is still a thing for industry funding - sometimes the overhead rate is less, but there's been a lot more pushback against this from universities (which I actually think is quite fair). 2. Being able to buy out teaching loads is a function of funding, not necessarily this funding 3. In many institutions, salaries are fixed - what this does is cover a percentage of your salary you don't have to cover from other mechanisms, or let you buy out teaching, as you note. It would be interesting to know if the dual FAIR appointments work like that or not. While private funding is awesome, and these labs are in a very good position, it should be noted that in most cases in my experience between NSF/NIH-style funding and an industry grant, the government grants last longer, are more flexible, and less of a hassle administratively.
Kyragem 8y ago
As usual FB and other companies only collaborates with the "elite/Ivy League" schools. IMHO there are plenty of great researchers at non-elite schools and it would have been great if FB would start collaborating with those to reduce this vast concentration of academic research that has been happening for the past decade.
- electricslpnsld 8y ago
  Half the schools on the list are publics, and none of them are Ivies.
  - whymauri 8y ago
    How does being a public school mean a college cannot be elite? Pretty sure his point is these schools are elite within this field, and people from lesser known schools (not just public) are rarely given these chances.
- fatjokes 8y ago
  It's a bit chicken-and-egg. These collaborators are also in cities where FB already has offices that they can lead teams out of. Of course, these offices were started because of the prestigious schools that were already there.
- sonnyblarney 8y ago
  The collab with McGill and U Montreal I believe. U Montreal has the largest AI program going.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
throwawayjava 8y ago
I think Facebook hate is clouding out reasonability in this thread. E.g., there's even a comment asserting that people who collaborate with facebook (a.k.a., Jessica Hodgins, Andrea Vedaldi, and Jitendra Malik) are "not worth their salt" (?!?!?!). IDK. Maybe -- just possibly -- there do exist researchers who have their choice of funding spigots and are choosing to work with Facebook. Either that or HN has some damn high standards for what it means to be "worth their salt". There's nothing intrinsically wrong with industry collaboration, even when it involves companies whose impact on the world you might not like. The big oil companies are, unlike FB, an actual existential threat to humanity. But I wouldn't fault renewable energy researchers for taking research dollars from those companies. The question is: will the funded research agendas push science forward in the direction it was headed anyways, or will this money distort the type of research being done? In any case, in a week we'll be back to our regular programming bemoaning the fall of the industry research lab and the paltry salaries offered to phd students...
- te_chris 8y ago
  By choosing to work with facebook you're literally working for a company that has stoked mob killings and enabled genocide. Anyone working there needs to be called out. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/may/05/facebook-anti-muslim-violence-sri-lanka https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/may/05/facebo... https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/03/revealed-facebook-hate-speech-exploded-in-myanmar-during-rohingya-crisis https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/03/revealed-faceb...
  - throwawayjava 8y ago
    > By choosing to work with facebook you're literally working for a company that has stoked mob killings and enabled genocide. Okay, granted. > Anyone working there needs to be called out. I'll take this seriously when you start "calling out" IBM employees for working for a company that in the past enabled genocide. I'm unsure how research on "visual and robot learning" or on "geometric 3D reasoning" is supposed to be enabling genocide. Those seem more akin to "green energy researchers taking money from big oil cos". Which is very different, ethically, from actively helping build and maintain the core business. Unless you want to suss out the link between geometric reasoning and genocide for me? And in the case of Facebook, your opinion is worse than just hyperbolic. There is an entire research field that focuses on detecting speech sentiment. Your position, as stated, is that those people should not work with Facebook, even if 100% of their time is spent designing algorithms and processes to detect and remove hate speech/calls to violence during active genocides. I think that advice is actively dangerous because I don't believe in a magical world where Facebook disappears tomorrow.
username_123 8y ago
What level are these professors being hired at within Facebook? What sort of base salaries, stock options do they command? Any idea on total compensation numbers here? With them being part-time professors what are their university salaries like? In total compensation between industry and university I'd imagine this would be a good deal. Lastly, how does recruiting work here? I assume they don’t make these people go through 5-6 algorithmic interview rounds.
- edhu2017 8y ago
  Total compensation: Definitely a wide range, but a few hundred K would be the median. Recruiting: one of my labmates flat out refused to do algorithmic interviews for a research position and the company still gave him an offer. Your projects, papers, and ability to demonstrate your understanding of research topics are far more important then your ability to solve a small, defined problem in 45 minutes.
  - username_123 8y ago
    I assume there is a distinction between software engineering and research applicants in terms of their interviews at the Big 4s? I know two people with PhDs that were given algorithmic questions and had to go through the same process as regular software developers (this was at the same Big 4 company). The only exception is one had expertise in ML and during one of his interviews they brought in a ML expert and interviewed them on their dissertation, in addition to their 4-5 algorithmic interviews. Both of these people were interviewing for software developer positions despite having expertise in research. Wasn't sure if the research interviews would be different. Good on your lab mate.
    - electricslpnsld 8y ago
      I interviewed for a research position at Facebook reality labs, and it was the same process as an interview for an academic job. Give an hour talk about your research, meet with 6 researchers in hour chunks for the rest of the day. The process was similar for my previous industry research job as well. I can't speak to Facebook's other research arms or Google.
braindongle 8y ago
I see similarities here with pharma and medical research. Conflicts of interest are endemic there, and they will be here, too, but this sort of sponsorship is inevitable. What can be done? In the case of pharma, I'm OK with them sponsoring peer reviewed, academic research, as long as policies are in place to make it immediately obvious where the money is coming from when I read the literature.
nemild 8y ago
A related quote from this fascinating interview with Jonathan Tow (media researcher)[1] on FB research: > Often, these companies [like FB] are open to research partnerships and things, but it’s always on their terms. If you do research with them, you’re dealing with IP issues, you’re signing over the rights to the research. It has to be reviewed completely and vetted by their legal process. They often handpick researchers that help them and help their purpose and help their cause — they maybe throw in some sprinkles of criticism. I understand why they would be hesitant to want to work with people like me. [1] http://www.niemanlab.org/2018/02/news-in-a-disintegrating-reality-tows-jonathan-albright-on-what-to-do-as-things-crash-around-us/ http://www.niemanlab.org/2018/02/news-in-a-disintegrating-re...
colmvp 8y ago
While I dislike FB, I don't blame researchers/profs for joining FB when the numerous advantages for joining them dwarf what you could get at a lot of other institutions. Reminds me of how on the one hand it sucks that certain talented engineers/designers work for ad-driven companies, but at the end of the day the compensation is simply on another level compared to working for more benevolent causes.
peter303 8y ago
An important aspect in any research arrangement is PROTECT THE STUDENTS. Academic research is likely to have many student assistants. The students should be able to publish their results in a timely manner. Students will benefit from exposure to researchers and resources in industry. And potentially lucrative internships. My alma mater Stanford had a bumpy ride in the 1980s: over clingy patent policy, faculty startups not allowing publications. Lawsuits ensued. Ut by the time dot.com began the next decade it was much smoother, e.g. the Yahoos and Googles. And this not just comp-sci, but biotech, oil&gas, aero engineering too.

115 points by TamoC 8y ago

cool, even better ads.

mlthrowaway1953 8y ago

How is IP handled in this situation? Especially given the recent discussion [1] on HN about how the recently announced DeepMind Patent Portfolio could be a problem, how is it that state employees (Washington, California) are "co-employed" by an organization to do _exactly_ the research that their home universities work on ? Who owns the IP in this case? Are these sorts of agreements FOIA-able? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17266951 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17266951

chrisseaton 8y ago
> how is it that state employees (Washington, California) are "co-employed" by an organization to do _exactly_ the research that their home universities work on They will work part-time for the university, and part-time for Facebook. I don't see why that's so shocking? Presumably the university only funds them part-time for part-time work, so it's not like they're not getting what they're paying for if that's what you're asking. This is a very conventional set up for academics.
- mlthrowaway1953 8y ago
  Most employer agreements have fairly draconian claims around IP. And I believe that many universities require their faculty to run consulting, etc. gigs through their legal teams, and the university gets a "right of first refusal" of sorts on the generated IP. Many academics get around this by claiming that they are doing research X at company (more applied, etc.) and research Y at the university (more theory, technically different projects under different grants). But with ML it seems like it would be harder. Regardless, I'd love to figure out if we can get these agreements through freedom of information act requests, to shed light on what state-employees are doing.
  - Fomite 8y ago
    Yeah, at my university partnerships between academia and industry have very complex IP terms that depend on the scope of work, how much of it involves novel research, etc. And there, there's the clarity of "I'm an employee of the university". With dual appointments...the agreement has to be complex. Either that, or really draconian based on Facebook throwing it's weight around and saying "Accept this, or we'll find another university that will."
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]

surferbayarea 8y ago

All your engineers are belong to us.

naturalgradient 8y ago

I understand the call of money but I cannot help but feel very negatively towards academics doing this with facebook of all organisations. After recent events, they cannot pretend not to know the impact and damage their work may have here. Excusing yourself with "I am just a researcher, I don't have anything to do with how my work is used" is just not good enough any more. I would categorically reject any collaborations with FB as an academic in ML.

yaseer 8y ago
Completely agree with this. I see Facebook as the least ethical, and least useful from a civilization standpoint of all the big tech firms. Google is driven by the same ad-clicking incentives, but the one-tricky pony has been developing other extremely societally useful tech, like self-driving cars and other moonshot projects. Apple and Microsoft sell products, they do not make users the product (on the whole). Together they pioneered computing revolutions, and I'm confident history will judge them for making a positive contribution (on the whole). Amazon is a leviathan whose societal value I find more difficult to classify, but I genuinely derive lots of value from their service personally. It's good for my lifestyle. Facebook on the other hand, is a waste of my time, mental energy and a drain on society. As an academic, how can you turn your mind to furthering its goals?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- visarga 8y ago
  That might be true, but don't confuse FAIR (their DL research lab) with FB. FAIR employs good people doing interesting and useful research. They promoted pytorch as a framework, and it is perhaps the best framework for non industrial applications. On a parallel line of thought, I prefer FB's React to Google's Angular. In both React and Pytorch I see the same elegant design. TensorFlow and Angular on the other part are unnecessarily complicated.
  - yaseer 8y ago

cujo 8y ago

QUIT USING FACEBOOK STUFF

cube2222 8y ago
Care to expand? Everybody in my vicinity uses messenger, no exception, it's the standard method of communication. It's like saying "quit using the Telco stuff!" 20 years ago.
- yulaow 8y ago
  In my area first everyone dropped messenger because some people had no accounts and moved instead to Whatsapp that guarantee that if you had a phone you could have easily an account in a matter of seconds (download and install) without having to create a full profile on some site you could not care less ( at this point of time in my old account no one is writing anymore in his home but instead using it just as a news aggregator). Then everyone moved to Telegram because it allows you to share your account to others without giving them your personal number. It is just a matter of time and everyone will move to the most simple system for the specified purpose
  - cube2222 8y ago
    I'm not denying that at all, we've moved on from telcos too. But it isn't a "just drop it" situation. It's a "gracefully transition when the social dynamics are in your favor" situation.
    - yulaow 8y ago
      I agree with you on that
    - s-shellfish 8y ago
      Social dynamics being in your favor can work for you and against you. It's delusional to think that just because you can make that graceful transition that that doesn't mean people aren't going to get pissed off at it. All you've done is silence their perspective as you are making that graceful transition. That builds up over time, and this is why this stuff goes in circles. You have to actively listen to people and make an effort to understand that the social dynamics being in your favor is not something you control. It controls you. You are the head of the crowd therefore all your actions must be aligned with the interests of the social dynamic. If you silence any single one of them you create a different dynamic. So you have to make the effort to be aware of alternative perspectives instead of choosing blind ignorance in the face of valid arguments. That's just the business of politics.

chriskanan 8y ago

To summarize why I think professors are going with this arrangement (in order): 1) Much less, if any, grant writing. A standard NSF $500K 3 year grant provides a lab about $100K per year (due to university overhead). This will support 1-2 PhD students on a pittance of a stipend. 2) Less teaching (1 course once a year) 3) Computing resources that are far greater than you could get a grant for. One NVIDIA DGX-1 is about $100K. Very hard to get a grant for something like that. Companies have far greater resources than just one DGX-1 4) Access to software engineering personnel to help with research 5) Access to data, and the ability to create new datasets. Many datasets cost over $100K to make (e.g., those for semantic segmentation). Very hard to get a grant to make a dataset (I've tried) 6) Much better media relations to popularize your research 7) Bigger salary A big part of this, in my opinion, is just that FB funds their labs. Getting government funding for a lab is difficult and frustrating and must be done continually, especially for these professors that run huge labs. NSF has a 7-15% success rate, and it can take a lot of effort to write a decent proposal. Including teaching regularly, this takes a lot of time from actual research. What these professors, I think, are negotiating is only teaching one semester a year and having a spigot of cash to fund their labs. They also gain access to massive amounts of data and computing resources. Other companies don't seem to be as open to this arrangement as FB, but it has a lot of appeal to me (although I'm not a lover of FB).

gimmeThaBeet 8y ago
> Much less, if any, grant writing. I don't know how it compares in software, I worked for a professor in undergrad who was in microelectronics. I was astonished at how much of their time was taken up by grant writing and applying for funding. The pressure for research professors to support their position was immense. There's a lot of reasons to hate FB, a lot of reasons to be wary of what comes out of their research. But to castigate researchers that cash-spewing tech titans create a better environment and experience for researchers than the public and universities feels a bit asinine. I've known too many starving grad students, post docs, and non-tenure professors to prefer people subject themselves to the system we have rather than what a company like FB wants to provide.
Fomite 8y ago
A couple notes: 1. Industry funding comes with its own set of hassles. And overhead is still a thing for industry funding - sometimes the overhead rate is less, but there's been a lot more pushback against this from universities (which I actually think is quite fair). 2. Being able to buy out teaching loads is a function of funding, not necessarily this funding 3. In many institutions, salaries are fixed - what this does is cover a percentage of your salary you don't have to cover from other mechanisms, or let you buy out teaching, as you note. It would be interesting to know if the dual FAIR appointments work like that or not. While private funding is awesome, and these labs are in a very good position, it should be noted that in most cases in my experience between NSF/NIH-style funding and an industry grant, the government grants last longer, are more flexible, and less of a hassle administratively.

Kyragem 8y ago

As usual FB and other companies only collaborates with the "elite/Ivy League" schools. IMHO there are plenty of great researchers at non-elite schools and it would have been great if FB would start collaborating with those to reduce this vast concentration of academic research that has been happening for the past decade.

electricslpnsld 8y ago
Half the schools on the list are publics, and none of them are Ivies.
- whymauri 8y ago
  How does being a public school mean a college cannot be elite? Pretty sure his point is these schools are elite within this field, and people from lesser known schools (not just public) are rarely given these chances.
fatjokes 8y ago
It's a bit chicken-and-egg. These collaborators are also in cities where FB already has offices that they can lead teams out of. Of course, these offices were started because of the prestigious schools that were already there.
sonnyblarney 8y ago
The collab with McGill and U Montreal I believe. U Montreal has the largest AI program going.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

throwawayjava 8y ago

I think Facebook hate is clouding out reasonability in this thread. E.g., there's even a comment asserting that people who collaborate with facebook (a.k.a., Jessica Hodgins, Andrea Vedaldi, and Jitendra Malik) are "not worth their salt" (?!?!?!). IDK. Maybe -- just possibly -- there do exist researchers who have their choice of funding spigots and are choosing to work with Facebook. Either that or HN has some damn high standards for what it means to be "worth their salt". There's nothing intrinsically wrong with industry collaboration, even when it involves companies whose impact on the world you might not like. The big oil companies are, unlike FB, an actual existential threat to humanity. But I wouldn't fault renewable energy researchers for taking research dollars from those companies. The question is: will the funded research agendas push science forward in the direction it was headed anyways, or will this money distort the type of research being done? In any case, in a week we'll be back to our regular programming bemoaning the fall of the industry research lab and the paltry salaries offered to phd students...

te_chris 8y ago
By choosing to work with facebook you're literally working for a company that has stoked mob killings and enabled genocide. Anyone working there needs to be called out. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/may/05/facebook-anti-muslim-violence-sri-lanka https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/may/05/facebo... https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/03/revealed-facebook-hate-speech-exploded-in-myanmar-during-rohingya-crisis https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/03/revealed-faceb...
- throwawayjava 8y ago
  > By choosing to work with facebook you're literally working for a company that has stoked mob killings and enabled genocide. Okay, granted. > Anyone working there needs to be called out. I'll take this seriously when you start "calling out" IBM employees for working for a company that in the past enabled genocide. I'm unsure how research on "visual and robot learning" or on "geometric 3D reasoning" is supposed to be enabling genocide. Those seem more akin to "green energy researchers taking money from big oil cos". Which is very different, ethically, from actively helping build and maintain the core business. Unless you want to suss out the link between geometric reasoning and genocide for me? And in the case of Facebook, your opinion is worse than just hyperbolic. There is an entire research field that focuses on detecting speech sentiment. Your position, as stated, is that those people should not work with Facebook, even if 100% of their time is spent designing algorithms and processes to detect and remove hate speech/calls to violence during active genocides. I think that advice is actively dangerous because I don't believe in a magical world where Facebook disappears tomorrow.

username_123 8y ago

What level are these professors being hired at within Facebook? What sort of base salaries, stock options do they command? Any idea on total compensation numbers here? With them being part-time professors what are their university salaries like? In total compensation between industry and university I'd imagine this would be a good deal. Lastly, how does recruiting work here? I assume they don’t make these people go through 5-6 algorithmic interview rounds.

edhu2017 8y ago
Total compensation: Definitely a wide range, but a few hundred K would be the median. Recruiting: one of my labmates flat out refused to do algorithmic interviews for a research position and the company still gave him an offer. Your projects, papers, and ability to demonstrate your understanding of research topics are far more important then your ability to solve a small, defined problem in 45 minutes.
- username_123 8y ago
  I assume there is a distinction between software engineering and research applicants in terms of their interviews at the Big 4s? I know two people with PhDs that were given algorithmic questions and had to go through the same process as regular software developers (this was at the same Big 4 company). The only exception is one had expertise in ML and during one of his interviews they brought in a ML expert and interviewed them on their dissertation, in addition to their 4-5 algorithmic interviews. Both of these people were interviewing for software developer positions despite having expertise in research. Wasn't sure if the research interviews would be different. Good on your lab mate.
  - electricslpnsld 8y ago
    I interviewed for a research position at Facebook reality labs, and it was the same process as an interview for an academic job. Give an hour talk about your research, meet with 6 researchers in hour chunks for the rest of the day. The process was similar for my previous industry research job as well. I can't speak to Facebook's other research arms or Google.

braindongle 8y ago

I see similarities here with pharma and medical research. Conflicts of interest are endemic there, and they will be here, too, but this sort of sponsorship is inevitable. What can be done? In the case of pharma, I'm OK with them sponsoring peer reviewed, academic research, as long as policies are in place to make it immediately obvious where the money is coming from when I read the literature.

nemild 8y ago

A related quote from this fascinating interview with Jonathan Tow (media researcher)[1] on FB research: > Often, these companies [like FB] are open to research partnerships and things, but it’s always on their terms. If you do research with them, you’re dealing with IP issues, you’re signing over the rights to the research. It has to be reviewed completely and vetted by their legal process. They often handpick researchers that help them and help their purpose and help their cause — they maybe throw in some sprinkles of criticism. I understand why they would be hesitant to want to work with people like me. [1] http://www.niemanlab.org/2018/02/news-in-a-disintegrating-reality-tows-jonathan-albright-on-what-to-do-as-things-crash-around-us/ http://www.niemanlab.org/2018/02/news-in-a-disintegrating-re...

colmvp 8y ago

While I dislike FB, I don't blame researchers/profs for joining FB when the numerous advantages for joining them dwarf what you could get at a lot of other institutions. Reminds me of how on the one hand it sucks that certain talented engineers/designers work for ad-driven companies, but at the end of the day the compensation is simply on another level compared to working for more benevolent causes.

peter303 8y ago

An important aspect in any research arrangement is PROTECT THE STUDENTS. Academic research is likely to have many student assistants. The students should be able to publish their results in a timely manner. Students will benefit from exposure to researchers and resources in industry. And potentially lucrative internships. My alma mater Stanford had a bumpy ride in the 1980s: over clingy patent policy, faculty startups not allowing publications. Lawsuits ensued. Ut by the time dot.com began the next decade it was much smoother, e.g. the Yahoos and Googles. And this not just comp-sci, but biotech, oil&gas, aero engineering too.