8 ms·

You Cannot Serve Two Masters: The Harms of Dual Affiliation

255 points by stochastician 8y ago

chriskanan 8y ago
I'm a professor working in AI. I'd say the raiding of AI faculty is a reality, so Facebook's proposal is better than the raw poaching that is occurring. With salaries more than 3-6x higher in industry than in academia, the cost of being in academia is high for AI researchers compared to other fields where it is close to 1.5x. The program I received my PhD from had many faculty leave entirely to join companies, and this "dual affiliation" seems like a reasonable compromise. Facebook enables PhD students to be funded, provides access to massive resources for building datasets and for compute power, and removes much of the grant writing burden allowing one to focus more on curiosity-driven research. Faculty have so many things that pull them away from research, grant writing/fundraising, teaching multiple courses, and university service. Because things are moving so fast in AI, it requires more time to stay current on research activities which is hard to do in academia because so much time is spent doing other things.
wanderfowl 8y ago
Just a quick note: 'Dual Affiliation' is being used here differently than in most academic contexts, so the headline's a bit odd. Normally, it means having a joint appointment in two academic departments (e.g. Linguistics and Cognitive Science at State U, or in the Department of Linguistics at State U, with an appointment at the Head-and-Neck surgery program at the local med school). This is a well-known and common practice, and although it can be tricky (particularly with even splits, where there's not one true home), it's not a 'harmful' thing. As the author explains in the article per se, he's talking about an industry/academic split. This is much harder, for the reasons he's outlined, and as an academic, I too am skeptical. It could be a nice idea in moderation, and it'd be great to have more bridges between Academia and industry, particularly given the brutality of the Academic Job Market. But I can easily see that a professional administrator somewhere deciding that it's cheaper to stock departments with 20% appointees than to actually hire career professors and educators. And as any adjunct-heavy institution will tell you, a department full of moonlighters is no place to make a life. Perhaps more damning, 20% of anybody's life isn't enough to support all but the weakest of teaching, even for a single course, so over-reliance on this will just further damage the instructional core of universities. So, one or two in a department could be nice, but I don't think it's a great model for the future.
- grawprog 8y ago
  For the last year of my degree our teachers were mostly contract teachers taken from industry. The courses they taught suffered fairly heavily for it. Their contracts covered only the time spent at school so marking, coming up with assignments and lectures were all done on the teacher's own time. This led to some pretty half asset efforts by the teachers, arguably not entirely their fault, and one case of a teacher making trouble for students working on a project outside of school and the same teacher using his position to acquire grant money for work he didn't do.
- mi_lk 8y ago
  Dual affiliation meaning industry/academic split is unambiguous here since that's the word Facebook AI Research choose to use [1][2] and the authors are explicitly responding to Facebook's model. [1]: https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-yann-lecun-dual-affiliation-model-ai-experts-2018-8 https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-yann-lecun-dual-aff... [2]: https://www.facebook.com/schrep/posts/10156638732909443 https://www.facebook.com/schrep/posts/10156638732909443
  - beambot 8y ago
    Facebook's reappropriation of a well-understood term in academia doesn't mean it's not ambiguous... If anything, it's disingenuous.
    - grigjd3 8y ago
      Maybe better to call it misguided.
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
- AndrewKemendo 8y ago
  I think particularly in the case of FAIR, this is a response to Facebook being outspoken about "dual affiliation" with their AI researchers, so it's a response really to Facebook specifically. https://www.facebook.com/yann.lecun/posts/10155435964892143 https://www.facebook.com/yann.lecun/posts/10155435964892143
MrEfficiency 8y ago
I find this a bit silly. 80/20 is more like "Somewhere between 60/40 and 100/0" I had a boss ask me not to take a second university class, this was smart for everyone involved. There are busy times and work and boring times at work, to push that it unrealistic to manage a structured life outside of work is silly. Ive worked with professors that let me take 2 weeks off for Work Travel. I've had to cut out of work because I had a class. I came in early the next day and prepared for my meeting, things were fine. I'm a big fan of moderation, and this article claims an extreme situation that is temporary and often unlikely.
jjaredsimpson 8y ago
Article says two masters which implicitly assumes industry would be some new master pulling professors in some new direction. But right now professors have multiple masters. Undergrads, grads, administrations, grants/funding, etc. The idea that the previous master was "curiosity driven research" and now it will be "shareholders" is an exaggeration. I could cynically say the previous master was "least publishable unit." It seems more likely to me this article assumes zero sum competition where there are actually positive sum gains to be had. It's good Facebook wants to pay for PhDs to do real market driven work instead of these people starving as adjuncts somewhere.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
sharemywin 8y ago
I find the idea odd. if you want to contribute to academic research create a grant(s) with your budget.
- ansgri 8y ago
  That's a big can of worms. This dual employment may have its drawbacks (I think mostly due to the fact that this is a mega-corp; for a small bootstrapped company it's only good, I think), but consider the following two topics: * People would work in academic institution XOR your company: you cannot give the grant to the best in your field and still have him work for you, so you'd always want to hire the best you can, and give the grants to the rest; * Grants most often support publications, not working solutions. At least with government-sponsored grants it's best when the academic analysis and publication is sponsored from a grant, whereas industrial involvement guarantees that the work is relevant and the published solution actually works.
  - Fomite 8y ago
    It's trivial to structure grants (or indeed contracts) such that they have concrete deliverables, even for academic research.
    - PAClearner 8y ago
      I think the moment a 'grant' has concrete deliverables (to a private firm?) it ceases being a grant and starts being some kind of consulting. I think people try to do this around ucla pretty often i.e. (I give a professor money -they do the research- I keep the IP)- it is pretty frowned upon in that context. In ML and CS I think this is probably more kosher-Michael Kearns seems to have a pretty thriving consultancy.
      - Fomite 8y ago
        My university, in contrast, is pushing industry engagement like this pretty hard. I happen to disagree with that approach, but it is a thing. There is sort of a continuum between consulting and a research contract, admittedly, but I'll also note that I have government grants with deliverables. All it really means is that there's potentially interim products that need to be delivered, or that there's things that are less vague than papers and presentations that the agency/sponsor wants to see.
sharemywin 8y ago
Seems more like 80% industry 20% spy to me.
- ansgri 8y ago
  As a person working like 40% academy, 60% industry, I'd say it is in reverse: you get to 'spy' on industry's knowledge and practice and transplant it into academic setting, where it is very likely publishable.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
bvc35 8y ago
The bulk of academic work is chasing grants, not "curiosity driven research". If universities want professors not to leave in droves to tech companies that will consistently give them funding and cut away the bullshit that eats up the majority of a professor's time, they should try competing, rather than bemoaning that professors are no longer following the sacred path of academic asceticism.
- stochastician 8y ago
  I do not think this is what the piece is arguing. Rather, the concern is that by creating these 80/20 splits, the core values of the university are compromised. There's nothing a priori wrong with industrial research, it's this attempted hybrid that's problematic. Hence the title, "you cannot serve two masters". Quoting the piece, "Part of the point of being a big company is to control your environment by crushing, containing, or co-opting inconvenient innovations." I think the author is arguing that attitude is fundamentally at odds with the values of the academy.
  - rlkf 8y ago
    If BigCompany expects its research center to crush inconvenient innovations, they're not really running a research center, they're just calling it that because they like the titles.
    - hnbroseph 8y ago
      i read "inconvenient" as "competing". if your r&d can lead to a few choice patents (or you "just" buy them) you can sometimes hamstring competition or get little graft by leeching off competitor's developments.
    - buth_lika 8y ago
      The point of being a big company, not the point of running a research center.
- Miltnoid 8y ago
  Top conferences accept papers with a large expected impact, not necessarily papers the authors were really curious about. It's deeper than merely what time is spent on, it's also where accolades are given. The facebook thing shows real problems to the researchers and provides good data, good starts to high impact papers.
variational123 8y ago
I think an important factor is the salary disparity. Unless you live in the middle of nowhere, academic salaries cannot provide an upper middle-class lifestyle anymore. Academics are only human and it is natural to want the lifestyle all of their peers from grad school, college (or even their recently graduated student who works for FAANG) seem to enjoy. Unless academic salaries in CS increase significantly (and match say, business school salaries), this trend will continue.
- s0rce 8y ago
  I'm guessing salaries may come down somewhat CS industry jobs as supply of people with software development training increases. Salaries are much lower in physical science, engineering and biology even for PhDs compared to software development/CS/"tech". Although in industry salaries are still higher than academic ones, although the difference is not as dramatic.
andyidsinga 8y ago
snip snip: > The proposal harms our students directly. Our faculty at their best secure everyone’s future by teaching talented students how to understand the challenges facing the broader world. Such mentorship is enriched by the courage, independence, security, and trained judgement of senior scholars to guide students’ perspectives on what is worth doing, what is likely irrelevant, and what is wrong. Engaging with a student body requires an all-in commitment, both in teaching and advising roles. Faculty primarily working elsewhere means cancelled classes. Faculty wedded to a company means advice that’s colored by the interest of the company. I'm not sure I agree with the implications of what follows the first sentence in the paragraph above - these are rather broad generalizations. Academia may certainly help students understand challenges of the larger world but in my experience this is as mixed a bag as other settings: working in the private sector, working in non-profits and volunteering. Finally, faculty working elsewhere seems like a very common thing. I've hired academics as consultants in the past and worked in companies where this was common and seemed encouraged by their universities. Note that they weren't primarily working for us - so this is a good distinction - but it also begs for a more clear definition of what "All-in commitment" means above. (edits : grammar etc)
AndrewKemendo 8y ago
You can’t do disruptive entrepreneurism if 80% of what you do is owned by a big company. This should be the headline. The most critical issue here is Intellectual Property. In academia the IP is owned by the academic institution and has traditionally found its way into published research before being put through a technology transfer office or taken out of the universities by their creator. Don't forget Stanford still gets HUGE annuities from their licensing of the tech to Brin/Page[1]. Alternatively, corporations own the IP from any research from the outset, and history would indicate that trade secrets or patents that can monopolize a technology made from the research, will be pursued before or simultaneous to any publishing in research journals. You have to pay one of them eventually if you want to make a product with it. So the question is, do we want corporations or academic institutions being the primary driver/owner of new knowledge? Or is it just totally pragmatic, and we let the one with the most money win? [1]https://www.redorbit.com/news/education/318480/stanford_earns_336_million_off_google_stock/ https://www.redorbit.com/news/education/318480/stanford_earn...
kiallmacinnes 8y ago
I feel lots of this applies to Open Source too. The notion of wearing the company or community hat is pretty common, and often used to persuade others of your good intentions. The number of times I've read a sentence that started with something similar to "Wearing my community hat, .." and felt the sentence was anything but community orientated is way higher than I would like. I'm sure a certain percentage of this is actually my own biases, but I'm also pretty sure that percentage isn't 100%.
gweinberg 8y ago
Yeah, working 80% of your time in industry would be catastrophically destructive to most academics' intellectual freedom. You know what else would be catastrophic to their intellectual freedom? Working 20% of their time at a university.
- vkou 8y ago
  Where exactly do I sign up to get paid to do research on topics that don't have immediate business application? Pick your poison here. Either you're a servant to teaching, training grad students, chasing grants, and academic politics, or you only get to work on things that will make Facebook, Google, etc, money.
  - throwaway_bob 8y ago
    FAIR, DeepMind, Brain, MSR and many others all employ large numbers of people working on pure research with no immediate business application, and with at least as much freedom as their academic counterparts.
vowelless 8y ago
Semi orthogonally, in my opinion, Ben Recht is one of the most important voices in ML and AI. I highly recommend people follow him.
- PAClearner 8y ago
  I agree-he is a very crisp and clear thinker.
gwbas1c 8y ago
When I took computer science in 1999-2003, the best professors had rather significant industry experience. The worst professors were completely clueless because they never worked with a large computer program in their life. I would have been thrilled if my freshman and sophomore computer science classes were taught by guest "professors" who had legitimate careers, and occasionally took the time to teach a class. I'm sure their feedback to my department would have been extremely valuable, because, at the time, every class was some professor's half-baked experiment on teaching computer science. Now, almost 20 years later, I'd really enjoy the opportunity to take a school's almost complete syllabus, and teach it to students. How does this apply to Artificial Intelligence? I'm sure there are lots of unwritten lessons from industry that haven't make their way back into academia.
- wellpast 8y ago
  > The worst professors were completely clueless because they never worked with a large computer program in their life. Completely clueless? I think you mean: clueless about working as a practitioner on a large, messy code base. No?
  - deanCommie 8y ago
    I don't get this narrative (and memes) that University code is clear and perfect and real life code is ugly dirty and hacky. My experience shows the opposite. Academics write code that only they need to understand. And the type of deep thinking required for academia lends itself nicely to fewer context switching, ie massively long classes and functions and procedural execution of steps. On the other hand, in real life you have to worry about others modifying your code, sometimes at the same time as you, meaning abstractions, decomposition, decoupling, etc.
    - wellpast 8y ago
      You misunderstood me. I wasn’t implying academics write clean code, just exactly what you’re saying usually it’s small & dirty code. However Dijkstra, of course, always wrote impeccable code.
btilly 8y ago
Their response is different from my first thought. Which is that Facebook wants the freedom to embed their employees inside universities where they are in a position to get the best and brightest students into Facebook's hiring pipeline.
sgt101 8y ago
Why does "faculty working elsewhere mean cancelled classes" - if the faculty is paid for 100% by facebook, but works 20% at the university does this not mean that the students receive a bonus teacher? Is there no scope for enrichment of computer science by industry? And what is "academic computer science"? I mean, look down at your keyboard - nothing in computer science is purely academic; it's the most applied of domains! The only exceptions I can think of are the fringes of physics attacked by complexity analysis - but these really are fringes!
- Fomite 8y ago
  Working 80% for Facebook basically precludes the time commitment for teaching classes.
  - sgt101 8y ago
    As per many other comments - doing admin and applying for grants takes up ~80% of normal academic time - and yet classes get taught.
    - Fomite 8y ago
      So I'm actually a professor. And while admin and grants is a lot of my day, they're built into the assumptions of having an academic appointment. We know. Packing all of your university-related duties into 20% of your time? That means classes won't get taught.
    - sgt101 8y ago
      Ok - let's say that the departmental budget for professors is $1m, and you pay $100k to fund 10 professors, who then teach 50 classes. All is well. Now, one of these professors announces that Facebook will pay them $500k instead, but they will allow 20% of time at the university, and will pay you $50k Now you have $150k, and 1 class per year already in the bank. You need to find 4 more classes taught, and by spending $120k you are able to do that, you also have $30k for TAs.
austincheney 8y ago
> This model assumes people can slice their time and attention like a computer, but people can’t do this. I disagree. Perhaps the most famous exception is Grace Hopper, a naval reservist who had both a civilian employer and a separated military career. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper I too am an officer reservist, though Army not Navy. Two separate careers with often unrelated skills in unrelated industries. Yes, there are challenges to division of effort in this regard. To say humans are incapable of doing this, though, is ignorance from people who have never tried it or magnificently fail at it. Another example I worked with personally: MG Scottie Carpenter. He is also an Army Reservists with two separated careers. When I worked with him in his first general command he was a senior leader of the North Carolina State Troopers (state police). He is now the deputy commanding general of the Army Reserves. http://www.usar.army.mil/Leadership/Article-View/Article/1262474/maj-gen-scottie-d-carpenter/ http://www.usar.army.mil/Leadership/Article-View/Article/126... Yes, competent and career minded individuals can achieve dual affiliation serving two masters. It is completely possible and some people excel very well at it. --- What people don't see about dual affiliation is that there is extra insight gained from these struggles that other people cannot relate to. I have tried to explain this to people many times before and it is often utterly incomprehensible. My civilian employment is a senior JavaScript developer at a big bank. The military considers itself a profession, and like other professions there is mandated education and certification to do anything. Other civilian careers, nearly everything I can think of, has this but software does not. As a result there are somewhat fewer incompetent people that get promoted to higher responsibility compared to the corporate world. Trying to explain this kind of incompetence to software developers is like shooting yourself in the face. In the civilian corporate world software development is a big common thing. In the military it is nearly nonexistent. The primary reason for this is workplace culture and the near absence of a professional nature around software in the civilian world that the military can model internally. By professional nature I mean there is no widely accepted definition of skills (even in an ad hoc defacto way), licensing, or code of conduct that defines the profession. Trying to explain how the military is behind the times and could save hundreds of millions of dollars a year by aggressively building an internal professional culture of its own around software development is equally frustrating. Another example is that people in the civilian world are sometimes easily offended. This is incredibly frustrating when every conversation is a midnight tip toe on egg shells. This accepted degree of sympathy and sensitivity are what, in my opinion, allow the Dunning-Kruger effect to occur (sometimes rampantly). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect Conversely, in the military you want to be just kind enough to avoid crushing someone's soul and destroying their self-esteem, unless they have honestly earned a good soul destroying moment. Kindness has a far lower value than honesty, which is a wildly different work culture. Jumping between these work cultures can be disorienting. Brutal honesty is a pretty simple thing to figure out, even if emotionally scaring, compared to guessing at people's self-serving emotional motives. So in the corporate world you really have to slowly test the waters before challenging peoples' opinions even if you have 20 years experience and they have none. Perhaps the most similar quality between the military and the corporate software world are the various irrational things people do to assert job security. In the military it is hard to fire people, but it is easy to cancel a contract and swiftly eliminate a large swath of civilian contractors. This can result in some software products that are massively complex and hardware bound so that they need continued, exclusive, and highly specialized support from particular vendors. In the corporate world, on the other hand, it is very person for themselves resulting high doses of invented here. God forbid software developers ever expose their incompetence by writing original software, so instead write as little software as possible and simply glue third party products together as much as possible. This is why many developers in the web world spend their careers painfully specializing around framework/libary APIs instead of spending a few hours learning the standard APIs that everything compiles to. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invented_here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invented_here
reality_czech 8y ago
Wow. I don't even know where to start on this one. My experience with academia is that everyone is scrambling to get grants and get published. Nobody ever asked questions about where the grants came from. A lot (probably even the majority at the time) was from the department of defense, and explicitly targetted to create weapons. Professors spent a huge amount of their time writing grant proposals. It's like pitching to a bunch of VCs, only you do it every month, and the amounts of money are much smaller. And this is the reward for a lifetime of achievement. If you're starting at the bottom today, conditions are positively Dickensian. The average (not the maximum, the average!) PhD in CS took 6 years. During that time you'll be paid almost nothing, no matter what the cost of living is around you. And you are essentially an indentured servant of the professor. If he wants you to do a routine task that has nothing to do with your research, you have to do it. Cumulatively these tasks could add up to years of delays. After you graduate, you'll probably have to take multiple postdoc jobs, often at very low salaries, in hopes of getting a faculty position. Sometimes the hopes come true, but very often not. And from what I understand, CS is actually one of the "good" subjects to go to graduate school for. Things are much, much worse in the humanities. It's truly incredible that anyone would hold this up as a better system than how industry works. Hmm, let's see... a two week interview process, after which the company will tell the applicant whether they're hired. Or, a two year postdoc after which the university may choose to throw them away like garbage. Spending half your time writing grants, versus spending a few minutes a week writing a status report. Come on. Also, the section about how "the students will suffer" from industry partnerships reads like a bad joke. Students suffer because the most universities hire faculty purely based on research, and not at all based on teaching. Full stop. The top research schools have contempt for teaching undergrads; that's why they hire adjuncts to do it at minimum wage. (Well, they also dump some of the burden on graduate students, too.)
- azhenley 8y ago
  It seems like once a week I see comments like this. This was not my experience at all. With internships, I made over 60k a year in grad school. I worked on projects of my choice. I did not do a postdoc after graduating. I graduated from a small, unranked department and got a tenure-track position at an R1 university in a top 75 department.
nicodjimenez 8y ago
Companies also have this problem...
killbrad 8y ago
Our government, and moreso, our society through cultural and government apathy has devalued anything academic that does not produce material gains - capital, wealth, patents, etc. I fear that the total commercialisation of academia means that we are unlikely to see meaningful material gains for society in terms of new cures to disease or technology advances outside of those that can be monetised for recurring revenue in the next decade. It's really an unfortunate but self inflicted American problem.
- lsc 8y ago
  It's a problem, sure... but the problem is that we're not funding schools. If we spent some tax dollars on our education system, academia would be more independent from business, and could focus more on the sorts of long-term and difficult-to-monitize research that business is not so great at.
listenYou 8y ago
Last time I checked, adjuncts make shit, get shat on, and have to work multiple jobs anyway. Without dumping blame on Universities, the point is that the cost of "teaching" gets passed on to students, saddling them with debt. Profit or no, the ratio of most tuitions often boils down to students paying what might be the cost of a 1:1 student:teacher ratio, effectively paying an entire adjunct salary (gross pay), for 4 years straight, single handedly. Take a look at what that means when the reality is a 30:1 ratio or worse. But, the rationalization being: they get a diversity of expertise, vetted for world class quality (hopefully) even if they don't get the one-on-one personal touch of a direct hands-on apprenticeship, with the personal attention of a mentor. But hey, yeah the campus grounds cost money, and accredation, and administrative bureaucratic overhead, and so one. But yeah, adjuncts make shit, work part time, and have more than one source of income anyway. So, suck it, ivory tower!
infinity0 8y ago
TL;DR some professors are worried that their poorly-paid students doing grunt-level work that professors find beneath themselves to do, will realise quite quickly what the better deal is after working 80% for a company and 20% for a university.

255 points by stochastician 8y ago

I'm a professor working in AI. I'd say the raiding of AI faculty is a reality, so Facebook's proposal is better than the raw poaching that is occurring. With salaries more than 3-6x higher in industry than in academia, the cost of being in academia is high for AI researchers compared to other fields where it is close to 1.5x. The program I received my PhD from had many faculty leave entirely to join companies, and this "dual affiliation" seems like a reasonable compromise. Facebook enables PhD students to be funded, provides access to massive resources for building datasets and for compute power, and removes much of the grant writing burden allowing one to focus more on curiosity-driven research. Faculty have so many things that pull them away from research, grant writing/fundraising, teaching multiple courses, and university service. Because things are moving so fast in AI, it requires more time to stay current on research activities which is hard to do in academia because so much time is spent doing other things.

wanderfowl 8y ago

Just a quick note: 'Dual Affiliation' is being used here differently than in most academic contexts, so the headline's a bit odd. Normally, it means having a joint appointment in two academic departments (e.g. Linguistics and Cognitive Science at State U, or in the Department of Linguistics at State U, with an appointment at the Head-and-Neck surgery program at the local med school). This is a well-known and common practice, and although it can be tricky (particularly with even splits, where there's not one true home), it's not a 'harmful' thing. As the author explains in the article per se, he's talking about an industry/academic split. This is much harder, for the reasons he's outlined, and as an academic, I too am skeptical. It could be a nice idea in moderation, and it'd be great to have more bridges between Academia and industry, particularly given the brutality of the Academic Job Market. But I can easily see that a professional administrator somewhere deciding that it's cheaper to stock departments with 20% appointees than to actually hire career professors and educators. And as any adjunct-heavy institution will tell you, a department full of moonlighters is no place to make a life. Perhaps more damning, 20% of anybody's life isn't enough to support all but the weakest of teaching, even for a single course, so over-reliance on this will just further damage the instructional core of universities. So, one or two in a department could be nice, but I don't think it's a great model for the future.

grawprog 8y ago
For the last year of my degree our teachers were mostly contract teachers taken from industry. The courses they taught suffered fairly heavily for it. Their contracts covered only the time spent at school so marking, coming up with assignments and lectures were all done on the teacher's own time. This led to some pretty half asset efforts by the teachers, arguably not entirely their fault, and one case of a teacher making trouble for students working on a project outside of school and the same teacher using his position to acquire grant money for work he didn't do.
mi_lk 8y ago
Dual affiliation meaning industry/academic split is unambiguous here since that's the word Facebook AI Research choose to use [1][2] and the authors are explicitly responding to Facebook's model. [1]: https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-yann-lecun-dual-affiliation-model-ai-experts-2018-8 https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-yann-lecun-dual-aff... [2]: https://www.facebook.com/schrep/posts/10156638732909443 https://www.facebook.com/schrep/posts/10156638732909443
- beambot 8y ago
  Facebook's reappropriation of a well-understood term in academia doesn't mean it's not ambiguous... If anything, it's disingenuous.
  - grigjd3 8y ago
    Maybe better to call it misguided.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
AndrewKemendo 8y ago
I think particularly in the case of FAIR, this is a response to Facebook being outspoken about "dual affiliation" with their AI researchers, so it's a response really to Facebook specifically. https://www.facebook.com/yann.lecun/posts/10155435964892143 https://www.facebook.com/yann.lecun/posts/10155435964892143

MrEfficiency 8y ago

I find this a bit silly. 80/20 is more like "Somewhere between 60/40 and 100/0" I had a boss ask me not to take a second university class, this was smart for everyone involved. There are busy times and work and boring times at work, to push that it unrealistic to manage a structured life outside of work is silly. Ive worked with professors that let me take 2 weeks off for Work Travel. I've had to cut out of work because I had a class. I came in early the next day and prepared for my meeting, things were fine. I'm a big fan of moderation, and this article claims an extreme situation that is temporary and often unlikely.

jjaredsimpson 8y ago

Article says two masters which implicitly assumes industry would be some new master pulling professors in some new direction. But right now professors have multiple masters. Undergrads, grads, administrations, grants/funding, etc. The idea that the previous master was "curiosity driven research" and now it will be "shareholders" is an exaggeration. I could cynically say the previous master was "least publishable unit." It seems more likely to me this article assumes zero sum competition where there are actually positive sum gains to be had. It's good Facebook wants to pay for PhDs to do real market driven work instead of these people starving as adjuncts somewhere.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

sharemywin 8y ago

I find the idea odd. if you want to contribute to academic research create a grant(s) with your budget.

ansgri 8y ago
That's a big can of worms. This dual employment may have its drawbacks (I think mostly due to the fact that this is a mega-corp; for a small bootstrapped company it's only good, I think), but consider the following two topics: * People would work in academic institution XOR your company: you cannot give the grant to the best in your field and still have him work for you, so you'd always want to hire the best you can, and give the grants to the rest; * Grants most often support publications, not working solutions. At least with government-sponsored grants it's best when the academic analysis and publication is sponsored from a grant, whereas industrial involvement guarantees that the work is relevant and the published solution actually works.
- Fomite 8y ago
  It's trivial to structure grants (or indeed contracts) such that they have concrete deliverables, even for academic research.
  - PAClearner 8y ago
    I think the moment a 'grant' has concrete deliverables (to a private firm?) it ceases being a grant and starts being some kind of consulting. I think people try to do this around ucla pretty often i.e. (I give a professor money -they do the research- I keep the IP)- it is pretty frowned upon in that context. In ML and CS I think this is probably more kosher-Michael Kearns seems to have a pretty thriving consultancy.
    - Fomite 8y ago
      My university, in contrast, is pushing industry engagement like this pretty hard. I happen to disagree with that approach, but it is a thing. There is sort of a continuum between consulting and a research contract, admittedly, but I'll also note that I have government grants with deliverables. All it really means is that there's potentially interim products that need to be delivered, or that there's things that are less vague than papers and presentations that the agency/sponsor wants to see.

sharemywin 8y ago

Seems more like 80% industry 20% spy to me.

ansgri 8y ago
As a person working like 40% academy, 60% industry, I'd say it is in reverse: you get to 'spy' on industry's knowledge and practice and transplant it into academic setting, where it is very likely publishable.
- deleted 8y ago
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bvc35 8y ago

The bulk of academic work is chasing grants, not "curiosity driven research". If universities want professors not to leave in droves to tech companies that will consistently give them funding and cut away the bullshit that eats up the majority of a professor's time, they should try competing, rather than bemoaning that professors are no longer following the sacred path of academic asceticism.

stochastician 8y ago
I do not think this is what the piece is arguing. Rather, the concern is that by creating these 80/20 splits, the core values of the university are compromised. There's nothing a priori wrong with industrial research, it's this attempted hybrid that's problematic. Hence the title, "you cannot serve two masters". Quoting the piece, "Part of the point of being a big company is to control your environment by crushing, containing, or co-opting inconvenient innovations." I think the author is arguing that attitude is fundamentally at odds with the values of the academy.
- rlkf 8y ago
  If BigCompany expects its research center to crush inconvenient innovations, they're not really running a research center, they're just calling it that because they like the titles.
  - hnbroseph 8y ago
    i read "inconvenient" as "competing". if your r&d can lead to a few choice patents (or you "just" buy them) you can sometimes hamstring competition or get little graft by leeching off competitor's developments.
  - buth_lika 8y ago
    The point of being a big company, not the point of running a research center.
Miltnoid 8y ago
Top conferences accept papers with a large expected impact, not necessarily papers the authors were really curious about. It's deeper than merely what time is spent on, it's also where accolades are given. The facebook thing shows real problems to the researchers and provides good data, good starts to high impact papers.

variational123 8y ago

I think an important factor is the salary disparity. Unless you live in the middle of nowhere, academic salaries cannot provide an upper middle-class lifestyle anymore. Academics are only human and it is natural to want the lifestyle all of their peers from grad school, college (or even their recently graduated student who works for FAANG) seem to enjoy. Unless academic salaries in CS increase significantly (and match say, business school salaries), this trend will continue.

s0rce 8y ago
I'm guessing salaries may come down somewhat CS industry jobs as supply of people with software development training increases. Salaries are much lower in physical science, engineering and biology even for PhDs compared to software development/CS/"tech". Although in industry salaries are still higher than academic ones, although the difference is not as dramatic.

andyidsinga 8y ago

snip snip: > The proposal harms our students directly. Our faculty at their best secure everyone’s future by teaching talented students how to understand the challenges facing the broader world. Such mentorship is enriched by the courage, independence, security, and trained judgement of senior scholars to guide students’ perspectives on what is worth doing, what is likely irrelevant, and what is wrong. Engaging with a student body requires an all-in commitment, both in teaching and advising roles. Faculty primarily working elsewhere means cancelled classes. Faculty wedded to a company means advice that’s colored by the interest of the company. I'm not sure I agree with the implications of what follows the first sentence in the paragraph above - these are rather broad generalizations. Academia may certainly help students understand challenges of the larger world but in my experience this is as mixed a bag as other settings: working in the private sector, working in non-profits and volunteering. Finally, faculty working elsewhere seems like a very common thing. I've hired academics as consultants in the past and worked in companies where this was common and seemed encouraged by their universities. Note that they weren't primarily working for us - so this is a good distinction - but it also begs for a more clear definition of what "All-in commitment" means above. (edits : grammar etc)

AndrewKemendo 8y ago

You can’t do disruptive entrepreneurism if 80% of what you do is owned by a big company. This should be the headline. The most critical issue here is Intellectual Property. In academia the IP is owned by the academic institution and has traditionally found its way into published research before being put through a technology transfer office or taken out of the universities by their creator. Don't forget Stanford still gets HUGE annuities from their licensing of the tech to Brin/Page[1]. Alternatively, corporations own the IP from any research from the outset, and history would indicate that trade secrets or patents that can monopolize a technology made from the research, will be pursued before or simultaneous to any publishing in research journals. You have to pay one of them eventually if you want to make a product with it. So the question is, do we want corporations or academic institutions being the primary driver/owner of new knowledge? Or is it just totally pragmatic, and we let the one with the most money win? [1]https://www.redorbit.com/news/education/318480/stanford_earns_336_million_off_google_stock/ https://www.redorbit.com/news/education/318480/stanford_earn...

kiallmacinnes 8y ago

I feel lots of this applies to Open Source too. The notion of wearing the company or community hat is pretty common, and often used to persuade others of your good intentions. The number of times I've read a sentence that started with something similar to "Wearing my community hat, .." and felt the sentence was anything but community orientated is way higher than I would like. I'm sure a certain percentage of this is actually my own biases, but I'm also pretty sure that percentage isn't 100%.

gweinberg 8y ago

Yeah, working 80% of your time in industry would be catastrophically destructive to most academics' intellectual freedom. You know what else would be catastrophic to their intellectual freedom? Working 20% of their time at a university.

vkou 8y ago
Where exactly do I sign up to get paid to do research on topics that don't have immediate business application? Pick your poison here. Either you're a servant to teaching, training grad students, chasing grants, and academic politics, or you only get to work on things that will make Facebook, Google, etc, money.
- throwaway_bob 8y ago
  FAIR, DeepMind, Brain, MSR and many others all employ large numbers of people working on pure research with no immediate business application, and with at least as much freedom as their academic counterparts.

vowelless 8y ago

Semi orthogonally, in my opinion, Ben Recht is one of the most important voices in ML and AI. I highly recommend people follow him.

PAClearner 8y ago
I agree-he is a very crisp and clear thinker.

gwbas1c 8y ago

When I took computer science in 1999-2003, the best professors had rather significant industry experience. The worst professors were completely clueless because they never worked with a large computer program in their life. I would have been thrilled if my freshman and sophomore computer science classes were taught by guest "professors" who had legitimate careers, and occasionally took the time to teach a class. I'm sure their feedback to my department would have been extremely valuable, because, at the time, every class was some professor's half-baked experiment on teaching computer science. Now, almost 20 years later, I'd really enjoy the opportunity to take a school's almost complete syllabus, and teach it to students. How does this apply to Artificial Intelligence? I'm sure there are lots of unwritten lessons from industry that haven't make their way back into academia.

wellpast 8y ago
> The worst professors were completely clueless because they never worked with a large computer program in their life. Completely clueless? I think you mean: clueless about working as a practitioner on a large, messy code base. No?
- deanCommie 8y ago
  I don't get this narrative (and memes) that University code is clear and perfect and real life code is ugly dirty and hacky. My experience shows the opposite. Academics write code that only they need to understand. And the type of deep thinking required for academia lends itself nicely to fewer context switching, ie massively long classes and functions and procedural execution of steps. On the other hand, in real life you have to worry about others modifying your code, sometimes at the same time as you, meaning abstractions, decomposition, decoupling, etc.
  - wellpast 8y ago
    You misunderstood me. I wasn’t implying academics write clean code, just exactly what you’re saying usually it’s small & dirty code. However Dijkstra, of course, always wrote impeccable code.

btilly 8y ago

Their response is different from my first thought. Which is that Facebook wants the freedom to embed their employees inside universities where they are in a position to get the best and brightest students into Facebook's hiring pipeline.

sgt101 8y ago

Why does "faculty working elsewhere mean cancelled classes" - if the faculty is paid for 100% by facebook, but works 20% at the university does this not mean that the students receive a bonus teacher? Is there no scope for enrichment of computer science by industry? And what is "academic computer science"? I mean, look down at your keyboard - nothing in computer science is purely academic; it's the most applied of domains! The only exceptions I can think of are the fringes of physics attacked by complexity analysis - but these really are fringes!

Fomite 8y ago
Working 80% for Facebook basically precludes the time commitment for teaching classes.
- sgt101 8y ago
  As per many other comments - doing admin and applying for grants takes up ~80% of normal academic time - and yet classes get taught.
  - Fomite 8y ago
    So I'm actually a professor. And while admin and grants is a lot of my day, they're built into the assumptions of having an academic appointment. We know. Packing all of your university-related duties into 20% of your time? That means classes won't get taught.
  - sgt101 8y ago
    Ok - let's say that the departmental budget for professors is $1m, and you pay $100k to fund 10 professors, who then teach 50 classes. All is well. Now, one of these professors announces that Facebook will pay them $500k instead, but they will allow 20% of time at the university, and will pay you $50k Now you have $150k, and 1 class per year already in the bank. You need to find 4 more classes taught, and by spending $120k you are able to do that, you also have $30k for TAs.

austincheney 8y ago

> This model assumes people can slice their time and attention like a computer, but people can’t do this. I disagree. Perhaps the most famous exception is Grace Hopper, a naval reservist who had both a civilian employer and a separated military career. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper I too am an officer reservist, though Army not Navy. Two separate careers with often unrelated skills in unrelated industries. Yes, there are challenges to division of effort in this regard. To say humans are incapable of doing this, though, is ignorance from people who have never tried it or magnificently fail at it. Another example I worked with personally: MG Scottie Carpenter. He is also an Army Reservists with two separated careers. When I worked with him in his first general command he was a senior leader of the North Carolina State Troopers (state police). He is now the deputy commanding general of the Army Reserves. http://www.usar.army.mil/Leadership/Article-View/Article/1262474/maj-gen-scottie-d-carpenter/ http://www.usar.army.mil/Leadership/Article-View/Article/126... Yes, competent and career minded individuals can achieve dual affiliation serving two masters. It is completely possible and some people excel very well at it. --- What people don't see about dual affiliation is that there is extra insight gained from these struggles that other people cannot relate to. I have tried to explain this to people many times before and it is often utterly incomprehensible. My civilian employment is a senior JavaScript developer at a big bank. The military considers itself a profession, and like other professions there is mandated education and certification to do anything. Other civilian careers, nearly everything I can think of, has this but software does not. As a result there are somewhat fewer incompetent people that get promoted to higher responsibility compared to the corporate world. Trying to explain this kind of incompetence to software developers is like shooting yourself in the face. In the civilian corporate world software development is a big common thing. In the military it is nearly nonexistent. The primary reason for this is workplace culture and the near absence of a professional nature around software in the civilian world that the military can model internally. By professional nature I mean there is no widely accepted definition of skills (even in an ad hoc defacto way), licensing, or code of conduct that defines the profession. Trying to explain how the military is behind the times and could save hundreds of millions of dollars a year by aggressively building an internal professional culture of its own around software development is equally frustrating. Another example is that people in the civilian world are sometimes easily offended. This is incredibly frustrating when every conversation is a midnight tip toe on egg shells. This accepted degree of sympathy and sensitivity are what, in my opinion, allow the Dunning-Kruger effect to occur (sometimes rampantly). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect Conversely, in the military you want to be just kind enough to avoid crushing someone's soul and destroying their self-esteem, unless they have honestly earned a good soul destroying moment. Kindness has a far lower value than honesty, which is a wildly different work culture. Jumping between these work cultures can be disorienting. Brutal honesty is a pretty simple thing to figure out, even if emotionally scaring, compared to guessing at people's self-serving emotional motives. So in the corporate world you really have to slowly test the waters before challenging peoples' opinions even if you have 20 years experience and they have none. Perhaps the most similar quality between the military and the corporate software world are the various irrational things people do to assert job security. In the military it is hard to fire people, but it is easy to cancel a contract and swiftly eliminate a large swath of civilian contractors. This can result in some software products that are massively complex and hardware bound so that they need continued, exclusive, and highly specialized support from particular vendors. In the corporate world, on the other hand, it is very person for themselves resulting high doses of invented here. God forbid software developers ever expose their incompetence by writing original software, so instead write as little software as possible and simply glue third party products together as much as possible. This is why many developers in the web world spend their careers painfully specializing around framework/libary APIs instead of spending a few hours learning the standard APIs that everything compiles to. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invented_here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invented_here

reality_czech 8y ago

Wow. I don't even know where to start on this one. My experience with academia is that everyone is scrambling to get grants and get published. Nobody ever asked questions about where the grants came from. A lot (probably even the majority at the time) was from the department of defense, and explicitly targetted to create weapons. Professors spent a huge amount of their time writing grant proposals. It's like pitching to a bunch of VCs, only you do it every month, and the amounts of money are much smaller. And this is the reward for a lifetime of achievement. If you're starting at the bottom today, conditions are positively Dickensian. The average (not the maximum, the average!) PhD in CS took 6 years. During that time you'll be paid almost nothing, no matter what the cost of living is around you. And you are essentially an indentured servant of the professor. If he wants you to do a routine task that has nothing to do with your research, you have to do it. Cumulatively these tasks could add up to years of delays. After you graduate, you'll probably have to take multiple postdoc jobs, often at very low salaries, in hopes of getting a faculty position. Sometimes the hopes come true, but very often not. And from what I understand, CS is actually one of the "good" subjects to go to graduate school for. Things are much, much worse in the humanities. It's truly incredible that anyone would hold this up as a better system than how industry works. Hmm, let's see... a two week interview process, after which the company will tell the applicant whether they're hired. Or, a two year postdoc after which the university may choose to throw them away like garbage. Spending half your time writing grants, versus spending a few minutes a week writing a status report. Come on. Also, the section about how "the students will suffer" from industry partnerships reads like a bad joke. Students suffer because the most universities hire faculty purely based on research, and not at all based on teaching. Full stop. The top research schools have contempt for teaching undergrads; that's why they hire adjuncts to do it at minimum wage. (Well, they also dump some of the burden on graduate students, too.)

azhenley 8y ago
It seems like once a week I see comments like this. This was not my experience at all. With internships, I made over 60k a year in grad school. I worked on projects of my choice. I did not do a postdoc after graduating. I graduated from a small, unranked department and got a tenure-track position at an R1 university in a top 75 department.

nicodjimenez 8y ago

Companies also have this problem...

killbrad 8y ago

Our government, and moreso, our society through cultural and government apathy has devalued anything academic that does not produce material gains - capital, wealth, patents, etc. I fear that the total commercialisation of academia means that we are unlikely to see meaningful material gains for society in terms of new cures to disease or technology advances outside of those that can be monetised for recurring revenue in the next decade. It's really an unfortunate but self inflicted American problem.

lsc 8y ago
It's a problem, sure... but the problem is that we're not funding schools. If we spent some tax dollars on our education system, academia would be more independent from business, and could focus more on the sorts of long-term and difficult-to-monitize research that business is not so great at.

listenYou 8y ago

Last time I checked, adjuncts make shit, get shat on, and have to work multiple jobs anyway. Without dumping blame on Universities, the point is that the cost of "teaching" gets passed on to students, saddling them with debt. Profit or no, the ratio of most tuitions often boils down to students paying what might be the cost of a 1:1 student:teacher ratio, effectively paying an entire adjunct salary (gross pay), for 4 years straight, single handedly. Take a look at what that means when the reality is a 30:1 ratio or worse. But, the rationalization being: they get a diversity of expertise, vetted for world class quality (hopefully) even if they don't get the one-on-one personal touch of a direct hands-on apprenticeship, with the personal attention of a mentor. But hey, yeah the campus grounds cost money, and accredation, and administrative bureaucratic overhead, and so one. But yeah, adjuncts make shit, work part time, and have more than one source of income anyway. So, suck it, ivory tower!

infinity0 8y ago

TL;DR some professors are worried that their poorly-paid students doing grunt-level work that professors find beneath themselves to do, will realise quite quickly what the better deal is after working 80% for a company and 20% for a university.