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The tech industry controls CS conference funding. What are the dangers?

133 points by imartin2k 5y ago

srvmshr 5y ago
The basic premise that the author is expounding is "CS research will be guided by industry interests". This is good to most extent, save a few very remote situations. Conference funding in particular has a very tenuos relationship to what directions get a nod of approval in overall CS research. CS (and EE) is a field which has seen great advances and adoptions due to the tighter integration between industry and academia. The tech has advanced much due to the fact that researchers manage to work on hard & real problems. Many of the avenues of research emerge & advance from industry adoption - e.g. bandwidth compression, codecs, recommender systems, crytocurrency etc. In my observation, whenever there has been a significant push by a single corporate entity, it has seen a palpable pushback. One example that comes to my mind is Amazon engineering vs. Rust foundation. Also, if any company tries to cut some major research's lifeline, there is always a competition grabbing that opportunity to secure it to its own future advantages. There are no shortages of 500-pound gorillas when it comes to corporate sponsorship. Everyone wants a piece of the cake. As mentioned, the only time this could suffer is when a company of the size of Google, AWS establishes complete monopoly on that research & ultimately sends to some academic graveyard, much to everyone's horror. But in my limited knowledge, that kind of black swan event doesn't seem to have ever happened. Corporate sponsorship aren't inherently evil. University researchers get a taste of real world tech issues & companies advance their tech by sponsorship. Conferences also become a good hiring venue for jobs or internship. It's a win-win from what I see. Conference sponsorship is in no way going to change the fate of ongoing research.
- rapnie 5y ago
  I don't know about CS conferences but I've heard people complaining about free software conferences with a lot of Big Tech sponsoring where speakers were kindly requested by conference organizers not to talk too much about subjects "that may upset the sponsor" and things like that. If there's that kind of forces at play, then it is quite detrimental to receiving objective information.
  - srvmshr 5y ago
    I have attended a few PyCon, and fleetingly visited/watched several similar conferences. There seems to be enough instances where presenters have pressed companies like FAGMA to correct certain implementations in their product stack. Even CPP conference has on several times called out MS VC++ on their compiler peculiarities in the distant past. Whitehat security conferences are usually full blown on the offensive in showing how compromised some platforms could be. I am not discounting your concern, but unless evidence exists, this could be more hearsay or anecdotal. (I dont work for any of these companies and on several occasions declined to interview. Full disclosure: no relationship).
    - abnercoimbre 5y ago
      It's hard to provide evidence for this type of thing, but it's very much a concern to be believed. Companies giving you a corporate sponsorship will definitely influence your decision making. Always. Choices are made, often literally behind the curtain, to appease them. Seeing a few public examples of push back doesn't eliminate this fact. (Full disclosure: I am an indie conference maker [0], so I'm biased against corporate sponsors.) [0] https://handmade-seattle.com https://handmade-seattle.com
    - saagarjha 5y ago
      > Whitehat security conferences are usually full blown on the offensive in showing how compromised some platforms could be. Until recently it was common for sponsor companies to threaten conferences to pull talks that demonstrated security flaws in their products. They’ve realized that the PR hit from this usually outweighs any “benefits” now but it used to be a whole thing.
    - ghaff 5y ago
      I'm honestly not sure that a conference stage is typically the most appropriate place to go after companies for specific issues. I can think of one of two examples where (to me) it was called for. But I certainly wouldn't want it to be the norm. ADDED: What I mean by this is that a conference filled with talks where people are badmouthing competitors or others sounds pretty unpleasant.
- bigcat123 5y ago
- cjfd 5y ago
  You are saying that the risks of industry interests have not come true. There has been much talk about companies trying to influence what products are being used in education, which for universities, is closely related to research. Even if we assume this to be true a risk that has not happened (much) is by no means guaranteed to not happen in the near future. Also the examples that you name "bandwidth compression, codecs, recommender systems, crytocurrency" are really quite sexy. They sound like things academics would research all on their own without corporate involvement. The thing is that basically these things can be researched if one just has a computer, or in the case of bandwidth compression, a few computers, and enormous amounts of money are not really necessary so the corporate involvement would not seem to be strictly necessary. And then, when a corporation is involved one runs the risk of the findings disappearing behind a copyright or a patent wall. It is much better for all of us if they become available to everybody. That is, by the way, one of the reasons to have academia in the first place.
  - srvmshr 5y ago
    > There has been much talk about companies trying to influence what products are being used in education, which for universities, is closely related to research. I will speak for ML & Systems. I am not an expert on all domains. Most tools that researchers use in ML are open-sourced e.g. Pytorch TF Keras etc. Foundational papers like GFS, BigTable, Hadoop etc are publicly available now. There is a moratorium on how soon it appears, but it isn't behind walls forever. Academia tends to choose more open source over closed source. I'd have argued MATLAB to be more successful than Python in that case. It is not. In industry the practice may be more of 50-50 or even more towards closed source. > They sound like things academics would research all on their own without corporate involvement. The thing is that basically these things can be researched if one just has a computer. How can you emulate operation involving scale with just a computer or a bunch of computers. Hence, that is where industrial efforts come in play. A lot of things work well for a dozen, and then a completely different problem emerges when we talk about hundreds or thousands of users. I am only alluding to the fact that CS, in contrast to many other disciplines, has a more symbiotic relationship with industry. Companies do have incentives of using copyright & trade secrets, but there is enough trickle-down effect that gives academia to pursue newer challenges. The cycle repeats over and over. Academia cannot replace industry and likewise. If there is any pressing problem of this symbiosis, it is more of labor attrition. More people are leaving academia for better pay. But that is not what the topic was about.
- black_puppydog 5y ago
  > "CS research will be guided by industry interests". This is good to most extent, save a few very remote situations. You start out with a pretty strong statement there... The point (for me) is not so much that a single company might try to push through some evil villainous plan. It's that all the companies that tend to sponsor such conferences (or more generally "guide" the research) have specific incentives. Take as the most glaring example the way that machine learning and statistics have been developing over the last years. The industry has an interest in collecting and knowing as much about their customers as possible. Most prominently, facebook and google are both pretty openly based on surveilling every detail of their users' (and everyone else's) lives. ML research has been co-developing with this. The big money (grants, hardware support, PhD funding, conferences, ...) has been overwhelmingly in domains that directly benefit these players. A lot of "cutting edge" research at the moment is of little benefit to anyone who is not a surveillance capitalist megacorp, simply because of the compute & datasets needed to power these methods. "Causality" has been a big topic over the last years. And yes, it will benefit a lot of things. But where does the actual research start? With the question "why did the user click that search page ad, and what ad should we show them next?" Sure, there is a little research into privacy preserving ML, into "small data" ML, into federated learning (i.e. user-centric ML, not "distributed training" as in spreading computation over a big corp's cluster) and you can always argue "yeah but in a few years this will be commodity." That sounds like trickle down ML research to me. I'm not convinced. But you'd kinda have to make that case, because otherwise "this is good to most extent" doesn't seem so believable. One big aspect of what industry-guided research has given people is all the burn-out, anxiety, sense of loss of agency, UI dark patterns, polarization, and dumbing down of the internet. Along some huge upsides, yes, but I wouldn't call that these are "a few very remote situations".
  - srvmshr 5y ago
    You have several fair points. The overall direction of course gets some incentives from industry. But there are government sponsorships & private fellowship too. ELLIS, DARPA, NSF, NIH invest several billion dollars each year to R1, CAREER, MRI, SURF programs which takes care of fledgling topics until they see more adoption. Simons Foundation e.g. similarly hosts several hundred researchers to work on CS theory. Also Google and AWS in particular have put in a lot of money on ML/RL based solutions - on reducing electricity grid loads, Alphafold protein & drug discovery, neuroscience, precision agriculture, personalized education & even interplanetary science/astronomy. You could argue these could be glamorized CSR programs. But in net effects, they are advancing our understanding in several discipline which do not directly feed their bottomlines. (Full disclosure again: I am not affiliated to any FAGMA or benefitted from any of these grants)
- kkfx 5y ago
  Seeing modern tech {e,in}volution, all on big of IT interests and almost zero for users and other not-so-big companies interests... I disagree. Actual tech came from the big lab era starting from Xerox PARC, since them no real evolution was made, just improvements and new way to make people bound instead of being empowered by IT, IMVHO that's means just a thing: private-company made IT evolution is harmful for the society and then must be erased so badly that no one in the future will even think for an instance to try re-proposing it. The solution IMO does not goes much through conferences but through universities that must be publicly founded, and ONLY founded by the public no to research "for business" but "for society", not to form "workers of the future" but "citizens of the future", doing so left a healthy business world and a healthy society.
rhaksw 5y ago
I completely agree with the concern over CS research being too heavily influenced by industry. An area I feel is underresearched is social media moderation, especially in the more open systems like reddit where anyone can moderate. There has been no research that I've found that looks at the impact of Reddit's style of comment moderation: by default, authors are not notified of removals and the content is presented to them as if it's still live [1]. You can try and see it yourself here [2]. Some people in-the-know may brush off this behavior, assuming it wards off bad actors. However, bad actors have access to the same tool. The question is, what is the result of that? [1] https://i.imgur.com/E3bFvKh.png https://i.imgur.com/E3bFvKh.png [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/CantSayAnything https://www.reddit.com/r/CantSayAnything
- srvmshr 5y ago
  Just curious: What is the relationship between Reddit moderation and conference funding. I seem to have missed your point. Could you please elaborate further?
  - rhaksw 5y ago
    The article suggests conference funding influences what gets researched, which is the wider concern. The link is between conference funding and research. Reddit moderation is an example of something I feel is underresearched. Thanks for your question, I edited my original comment to hopefully be more clear on this.
    - srvmshr 5y ago
      There are enough significant impact conferences like FOCS or the TCS+ symposium, which have no/minimal corporate funding. In the initial years, even ICLR didn't have corporate sponsorship. That actually does not stop people from probing pressing issues. Reddit censorship may not be a great simile of corporate funding. Maybe even anecdotal. There are more academics on Twitter, and I havent seen evidence of censorship. (I have active accounts in both of them and the difference is quite visible of engagement in Twitter)
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
robert_foss 5y ago
Bad keynotes!
blackbear_ 5y ago
Related (no affiliation): http://arxiv.org/abs/2009.13676 http://arxiv.org/abs/2009.13676 Abstact: > As governmental bodies rely on academics’ expert advice to shape policy regarding Artificial Intelligence, it is important that these academics not have conflicts of interests that may cloud or bias their judgement. Our work explores how Big Tech can actively distort the academic landscape to suit its needs. By comparing the well-studied actions of another industry (Big Tobacco) to the current actions of Big Tech we see similar strategies employed by both industries. These strategies enable either industry to sway and influence academic and public discourse. We examine the funding of academic research as a tool used by Big Tech to put forward a socially responsible public image, influence events hosted by and decisions made by funded universities, influence the research questions and plans of individual scientists, and discover receptive academics who can be leveraged. We demonstrate how Big Tech can affect academia from the institutional level down to individual researchers. Thus, we believe that it is vital, particularly for universities and other institutions of higher learning, to discuss the appropriateness and the tradeoffs of accepting funding from Big Tech, and what limitations or conditions should be put in place.
- WalterGR 5y ago
  Is the capitalization “Big Tech” widely used or is it a shibboleth? I would guess that I can anticipate the tone of the paper based on that - I’m curious if that holds up. (Of course, mentioning “Big Tobacco” does give its own hint.)
saagarjha 5y ago
I don’t really have any insights to provide on “big companies are using sponsorships to whitewash their impact on society” but something I’ve seen is presentations and research often done in the context of the company’s unique circumstances that are not necessarily broadly applicable. It’s only natural of course that a company will optimize their research into things that are relevant to them but when you’re listening to them you need to keep “what is the context that this was written in” in the back of your mind at all times. For example, if you ever attend a C++ talk by Googlers, you’ll notice that they basically only talk about C++ as they use it, silently ignoring things they don’t care about. By virtue of google3 and their style guide, things like ABI compatibility are of very little consequence to them, and they can take away expensive-to-support APIs and present about how they “optimized” some part of the STL, or how support for exceptions is something they’ll look into later or (when they’re feeling uncharitable) bad actually™. Similarly most talks about Linux networking are driven by e.g. Facebook, who seem to slowly just be converging on running their entire stack using eBPF in the kernel. Apple presents their ML research about on-device learning and somewhere in the middle they’ll be like “oh also we have specialized silicon to do this efficiently otherwise it isn’t practical”. Microsoft will present virtualization research and you’ll find that their threat model is trying to prevent people from jailbreaking the Xbox. I’m not trying to say this research is bad or not useful, but it’s important to put them in the context of where they’re coming from or who they’re being funded by, because the entire thing-from the premise, to the execution, all the way to the conclusion-is going to be dependent on the circumstances the research was done in, and often it’ll be presented as a general result when it really only make sense in the context of that particular company’s needs. If you’re being cynical, it’s a way to appear open and exercise soft power through mindshare, but for most cases I think the alternative (no research) is probably worse so I’m not generally concerned.
- srvmshr 5y ago
  I sort of agree with whatever you just said. Perspective is very important as solutions emerge from the problems in play for these companies. I will probably extend this a bit further : these solutions also increase our understanding and mental models for better & secure products. What company X does is not only limited to X, but benefits others too. For corporate sway in research - its my personal opinion (any only limited to me), that citizen awareness is generally high. HN and similar communities are quick to spot gaping holes or flaws, and alternatives are plenty as well. There is fortunately a still healthy ecosystem of indie developers who contribute everything from Linux kernel to iOS patches. As you mention, as of present this does not seem a big concern and the alternative scenario (no academia-industry symbiosis) could be worse.
ComradePhil 5y ago
If you think that is bad, you must be horrified by how the drug industry operates.
- js8 5y ago
  Or the oil industry - American Geological Union was one of the last scientific institutions to accept the reality of anthropogenic global warming.
  - teddyh 5y ago
    That’s not really surprising; they simply operate on geologic time.
  - ComradePhil 5y ago
    Probably because it is not as big an issue as the CleanTech industry PR wanted people to believe?
reissbaker 5y ago
The article seems like it's conflating philosophy/social science analysis of the impact of technology with academic computer science. Would papers on "the social justice impact of the atom bomb" be reasonable physics conference topics? I... really don't think so. That's social science. I'm not saying it shouldn't be talked about, but it seems pretty weird to complain that hard science conferences don't have a lot of social science topics, and then blame that on capitalism. Academic computer scientists or physicists aren't even likely the best people to be researching that! I don't think the physicists in the USSR were primary attendees of social science or philosophy conferences either. Aside from that — and I suppose this part is capitalism's fault — where do they propose the money come from, if not the industry benefitting the most from the research? Big Tech has a lot of money, so conferences and research they sponsor gets a lot of funding. Banning tech companies, or restricting them, from funding research doesn't magically make other research get funded. If there was anywhere close to the ability to get funding from other sources, the article wouldn't exist. But that's where the money is now, and absent some societal upheaval and replacing capitalism with... ?... that's where you can get the money from. Yes yes government research projects, but realistically those were all DARPA projects, and having the military be the primary funding source for research isn't exactly getting rid of conflicts of interest when it comes to determining social impact of said research.
- bannedbybros 5y ago
nonrandomstring 5y ago
Go to smaller independent conferences and make sure they're organised along ecological and ethically sound lines. First you'll have a better experience. Since the pandemic I haven't been on any academic jollies, but for years I've had a personal policy not to go to large conferences. They are too hectic. Everything is rushed and talks are squeezed. They value form over function and slick presentation uber alles. No time for slow conversation, precarious demos, mooching and mingling. There are two kinds of conferences, the ones where people go to actually confer, and massive industry extravaganzas that are indistinguishable from trade shows. A friend who is a medical doctor once told me of a endocrine conference she attended, 5000 miles away in Africa, with 10,000 attendees that ran for 12 days. She said it left her drained, bewildered and overwhelmed. People don't attend conferences like that to learn anything, they go to be seen, as a footnote in the proceedings, so they can put it on their CV. As a seasoned, senior academic secure in myself and my work I don't need to chalk up creds like fresh post-docs, but my advice to anyone is don't be cowed into thinking big impersonal conferences are "prestigious". Really no one cares. Pick a small gathering, somewhere nice (by a beach, forest or mountain venue), not too distant, where you can mingle and make acquaintances that will last for life. Truth is, many of the most _influential_ "conferences" are really cliquey gatherings where you will meet the "right" people. So get involved in the conference organisation. See who you can invite. That reduces costs, and it gives you some rights/leverage to say what you feel, and to understand the network in your field. If you object to Big Tech being sponsors say so - conference organisers need _people_ as much as they need funding. If you must attend a giant extravaganza, and you seriously, credibly object to funding by big tech, say so in your presentation. There is little or no comeback from politely dissing unethical big corps in your talk - in fact in some places it's de rigueur. Your disapproval ends up in the proceedings online etc, and that's not something company PR likes. Next year they won't offer mission accomplished. As an academic you have a platform, and rights to speak your mind, so use it. Ethics is a very important part of research and you are not restricted in speaking about it. Best of all, start hosting your own small conferences. It's a great learning experience. Many great conferences are hosted on a shoestring.
bin_bash 5y ago
> Industry is the main consumer of academic CS research, and 84% percent of CS professors receive at least some industry funding. What's the percentage in other fields? I suspect chemical engineering is driven by the oil industry, pharmacy by drug companies. I imagine aerospace is heavily driven by very few companies. Of course you could go get a liberal arts degree and be free from the tendrils of Big Dictionary but I think if we limit ourselves to STEM this is likely the standard. Is there an alternative? Or is my hypothesis wrong here?
unglaublich 5y ago
I think this is a good, relevant read: The Death of Corporate Research Labs https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24200764 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24200764
SeanLuke 5y ago
This article bases a large portion of its incentive for being written on the claim that "84% percent of CS professors receive at least some industry funding". To do this it cites a paper which, as far as I can tell, says no such thing. There are three problems with the claim and I think they ruin the rest of the article. First, the original paper only looked at UT, MIT, Stanford, and Berkeley. But a fair bit of industry funding is an exercise in prestige sharing: "I'm funding a professor at MIT". As a result, in my experience the top universities receive the lion's share of tech industry funding, and this very severely biases this claim. Second, the paper compiled faculty who ever received funding over the course of their career, no matter how small: but the article doesn't say "received": it says "receive". That is a huge difference. Looking back on my own career, I guess I'm in the list: once a VP of a local company chipped in maybe $15K to help my advisor fund me for my last PhD year simply because he was excited by the research work; and I think once Google funded some undergraduate students of mine working on RoboCup. I realize some faculty are funded more by industry: but I think my situation is typical. Third, because it is often meant for prestige rather than quid pro quo, and because Google and friends don't like paying overhead/indirect, the actual size of funding from industry tends to be very small and in the form of gifts. Not always, but usually. While Google might pay something like $30K to run a new program for Diversity in CS, DARPA is awarding a grant for $1.5 million to build a new multirobot architecture. The total industry funding of computer science, as a proportion of total funding, is probably somewhere south of 5%. I'd guess AI is about the same, but let's say 10% to be generous. See the following NSF graph. https://media.nature.com/lw800/magazine-assets/d41586-019-01734-1/d41586-019-01734-1_16762934.jpg https://media.nature.com/lw800/magazine-assets/d41586-019-01... So what are we left with? I don't think the article can claim that industry is of any significant consequence in CS academic funding. At most we could say that the industry may have funded faculty over the course of their careers, in some context, often minor and with a bias towards prestige universities. That seems to be a pretty weak hook to hang one's hat on.
aaron695 5y ago
traceroute66 5y ago
Its all very well to bitch and moan about "tech industry controlling conference funding", but the reality is that conferences are expensive and the money needs to come from somewhere. Speaking from experience. Even a decent sized "basic" conference (i.e. no fancy stage setups etc.) will still cost you an arm and a leg. You need to: - Pay the venue for the space - Pay the venue for the refreshments during breaks and meals (unless you are mean and don't feed people !) - Pay for a basic AV setup - Deal with registration - Pay for hotel rooms and travel for your team - Pay for various other things that soon add up (e.g. transport storage costs if you are shipping stuff there a few days before) So you might say, well, how about going 100% digital. Well, trust me, the good platforms know they are good and they charge accordingly. Ok you might say, "well, we'll charge registration fees". Well sure you might, and sure that might well cover 100% of your costs. But have you ever seen how registration goes for a conference ? It takes time for the numbers to ramp up. In the mean time, you need money in the bank to pay for stuff you need to pay for "now". And you need money in the bank as security for the contracts you'll be signing with the venues (if nobody turns up or fewer people than expected, the venue will still want some money off you). So, its then a question of where the money comes from. And like it or not, corporate sponsorship is typically the easiest way. The corporate structure "understands" what a conference is, so you won't get bogged down in discussions. The corporate way is also the easiest way to get nice big chunks of cash instead of having to beg tens or hundreds of different people.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- ericmay 5y ago
  Yep. I created a “hackathon” style event at a university for students pre-pandemic. The space was free and given by the university engineering college. For one day of 3 meals and t-shirts it was like $5,000. Partly because we had to go through the university catering service. And that was for about 60 students (we planned on I think around 90?). If we needed event space and the university charged us that would have been 3x at least. And this was run with nothing but volunteers. We had lots of corporate sponsors and honestly it was great. They mentored students, they set up career fair style booths and just had fun and shared good info about their companies. Without their partnership, frankly, a lot less would have been achieved. It was a win-win for everyone.
fastaguy88 5y ago
This argument suggests that by sponsoring conferences, companies can shape their content. That may be true for big commercial exhibitions, but I don’t see how it works for academic meetings. For those meetings, the financial backing is confirmed years in advance, while the actual program is set six months or so before the event. And at CS like conferences, the content is determined by independent reviewers. So I can imagine that corporate sponsors might shape content by stopping support of conferences with low quality papers, but otherwise they have essentially no role in what is presented, other than providing some high profile keynote speakers that might increase conference visibility.
- eslaught 5y ago
  I came here to say the same thing. I've been on multiple program committees for multiple conferences and it would be laughable to claim sponsors have any influence over what gets published at a conference. Sponsors have much more direct (and visible) influence over, you know, sponsorship of the research itself. But even there, corporate sponsorship is only one slice (and a relatively small one) of overall CS funding. There are plenty of government or independent sponsors who would be happy to fund research that is contrary to big corporate interests.
- ghaff 5y ago
  Yeah. It's truer of non-academic conferences which often even have sponsor slots. But even there, there's at least some effort not to have product pitches because if they tilt too far in that direction, people just won't attend. Conferences need to maintain some base level of quality/utility or they fade away.
partido3619463 5y ago
It’s really shitty to use the acronym “FAGMA” instead of “FAANG”. It’s clear homophobia and sucks to read. (I assume it’s a joke because (1) “FAMGA” works just as well and has no slur and (2) quick search for it yields very few results). Hopefully someone will take it down for this or other reasons.
- saagarjha 5y ago
  I've heard "GAFAM" in the past with is significantly less problematic.
geoalchimista 5y ago
The worse thing is to let academia control conference funding.

133 points by imartin2k 5y ago

The basic premise that the author is expounding is "CS research will be guided by industry interests". This is good to most extent, save a few very remote situations. Conference funding in particular has a very tenuos relationship to what directions get a nod of approval in overall CS research. CS (and EE) is a field which has seen great advances and adoptions due to the tighter integration between industry and academia. The tech has advanced much due to the fact that researchers manage to work on hard & real problems. Many of the avenues of research emerge & advance from industry adoption - e.g. bandwidth compression, codecs, recommender systems, crytocurrency etc. In my observation, whenever there has been a significant push by a single corporate entity, it has seen a palpable pushback. One example that comes to my mind is Amazon engineering vs. Rust foundation. Also, if any company tries to cut some major research's lifeline, there is always a competition grabbing that opportunity to secure it to its own future advantages. There are no shortages of 500-pound gorillas when it comes to corporate sponsorship. Everyone wants a piece of the cake. As mentioned, the only time this could suffer is when a company of the size of Google, AWS establishes complete monopoly on that research & ultimately sends to some academic graveyard, much to everyone's horror. But in my limited knowledge, that kind of black swan event doesn't seem to have ever happened. Corporate sponsorship aren't inherently evil. University researchers get a taste of real world tech issues & companies advance their tech by sponsorship. Conferences also become a good hiring venue for jobs or internship. It's a win-win from what I see. Conference sponsorship is in no way going to change the fate of ongoing research.

rapnie 5y ago
I don't know about CS conferences but I've heard people complaining about free software conferences with a lot of Big Tech sponsoring where speakers were kindly requested by conference organizers not to talk too much about subjects "that may upset the sponsor" and things like that. If there's that kind of forces at play, then it is quite detrimental to receiving objective information.
- srvmshr 5y ago
  I have attended a few PyCon, and fleetingly visited/watched several similar conferences. There seems to be enough instances where presenters have pressed companies like FAGMA to correct certain implementations in their product stack. Even CPP conference has on several times called out MS VC++ on their compiler peculiarities in the distant past. Whitehat security conferences are usually full blown on the offensive in showing how compromised some platforms could be. I am not discounting your concern, but unless evidence exists, this could be more hearsay or anecdotal. (I dont work for any of these companies and on several occasions declined to interview. Full disclosure: no relationship).
  - abnercoimbre 5y ago
    It's hard to provide evidence for this type of thing, but it's very much a concern to be believed. Companies giving you a corporate sponsorship will definitely influence your decision making. Always. Choices are made, often literally behind the curtain, to appease them. Seeing a few public examples of push back doesn't eliminate this fact. (Full disclosure: I am an indie conference maker [0], so I'm biased against corporate sponsors.) [0] https://handmade-seattle.com https://handmade-seattle.com
  - saagarjha 5y ago
    > Whitehat security conferences are usually full blown on the offensive in showing how compromised some platforms could be. Until recently it was common for sponsor companies to threaten conferences to pull talks that demonstrated security flaws in their products. They’ve realized that the PR hit from this usually outweighs any “benefits” now but it used to be a whole thing.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    I'm honestly not sure that a conference stage is typically the most appropriate place to go after companies for specific issues. I can think of one of two examples where (to me) it was called for. But I certainly wouldn't want it to be the norm. ADDED: What I mean by this is that a conference filled with talks where people are badmouthing competitors or others sounds pretty unpleasant.
bigcat123 5y ago
cjfd 5y ago
You are saying that the risks of industry interests have not come true. There has been much talk about companies trying to influence what products are being used in education, which for universities, is closely related to research. Even if we assume this to be true a risk that has not happened (much) is by no means guaranteed to not happen in the near future. Also the examples that you name "bandwidth compression, codecs, recommender systems, crytocurrency" are really quite sexy. They sound like things academics would research all on their own without corporate involvement. The thing is that basically these things can be researched if one just has a computer, or in the case of bandwidth compression, a few computers, and enormous amounts of money are not really necessary so the corporate involvement would not seem to be strictly necessary. And then, when a corporation is involved one runs the risk of the findings disappearing behind a copyright or a patent wall. It is much better for all of us if they become available to everybody. That is, by the way, one of the reasons to have academia in the first place.
- srvmshr 5y ago
  > There has been much talk about companies trying to influence what products are being used in education, which for universities, is closely related to research. I will speak for ML & Systems. I am not an expert on all domains. Most tools that researchers use in ML are open-sourced e.g. Pytorch TF Keras etc. Foundational papers like GFS, BigTable, Hadoop etc are publicly available now. There is a moratorium on how soon it appears, but it isn't behind walls forever. Academia tends to choose more open source over closed source. I'd have argued MATLAB to be more successful than Python in that case. It is not. In industry the practice may be more of 50-50 or even more towards closed source. > They sound like things academics would research all on their own without corporate involvement. The thing is that basically these things can be researched if one just has a computer. How can you emulate operation involving scale with just a computer or a bunch of computers. Hence, that is where industrial efforts come in play. A lot of things work well for a dozen, and then a completely different problem emerges when we talk about hundreds or thousands of users. I am only alluding to the fact that CS, in contrast to many other disciplines, has a more symbiotic relationship with industry. Companies do have incentives of using copyright & trade secrets, but there is enough trickle-down effect that gives academia to pursue newer challenges. The cycle repeats over and over. Academia cannot replace industry and likewise. If there is any pressing problem of this symbiosis, it is more of labor attrition. More people are leaving academia for better pay. But that is not what the topic was about.
black_puppydog 5y ago
> "CS research will be guided by industry interests". This is good to most extent, save a few very remote situations. You start out with a pretty strong statement there... The point (for me) is not so much that a single company might try to push through some evil villainous plan. It's that all the companies that tend to sponsor such conferences (or more generally "guide" the research) have specific incentives. Take as the most glaring example the way that machine learning and statistics have been developing over the last years. The industry has an interest in collecting and knowing as much about their customers as possible. Most prominently, facebook and google are both pretty openly based on surveilling every detail of their users' (and everyone else's) lives. ML research has been co-developing with this. The big money (grants, hardware support, PhD funding, conferences, ...) has been overwhelmingly in domains that directly benefit these players. A lot of "cutting edge" research at the moment is of little benefit to anyone who is not a surveillance capitalist megacorp, simply because of the compute & datasets needed to power these methods. "Causality" has been a big topic over the last years. And yes, it will benefit a lot of things. But where does the actual research start? With the question "why did the user click that search page ad, and what ad should we show them next?" Sure, there is a little research into privacy preserving ML, into "small data" ML, into federated learning (i.e. user-centric ML, not "distributed training" as in spreading computation over a big corp's cluster) and you can always argue "yeah but in a few years this will be commodity." That sounds like trickle down ML research to me. I'm not convinced. But you'd kinda have to make that case, because otherwise "this is good to most extent" doesn't seem so believable. One big aspect of what industry-guided research has given people is all the burn-out, anxiety, sense of loss of agency, UI dark patterns, polarization, and dumbing down of the internet. Along some huge upsides, yes, but I wouldn't call that these are "a few very remote situations".
- srvmshr 5y ago
  You have several fair points. The overall direction of course gets some incentives from industry. But there are government sponsorships & private fellowship too. ELLIS, DARPA, NSF, NIH invest several billion dollars each year to R1, CAREER, MRI, SURF programs which takes care of fledgling topics until they see more adoption. Simons Foundation e.g. similarly hosts several hundred researchers to work on CS theory. Also Google and AWS in particular have put in a lot of money on ML/RL based solutions - on reducing electricity grid loads, Alphafold protein & drug discovery, neuroscience, precision agriculture, personalized education & even interplanetary science/astronomy. You could argue these could be glamorized CSR programs. But in net effects, they are advancing our understanding in several discipline which do not directly feed their bottomlines. (Full disclosure again: I am not affiliated to any FAGMA or benefitted from any of these grants)
kkfx 5y ago
Seeing modern tech {e,in}volution, all on big of IT interests and almost zero for users and other not-so-big companies interests... I disagree. Actual tech came from the big lab era starting from Xerox PARC, since them no real evolution was made, just improvements and new way to make people bound instead of being empowered by IT, IMVHO that's means just a thing: private-company made IT evolution is harmful for the society and then must be erased so badly that no one in the future will even think for an instance to try re-proposing it. The solution IMO does not goes much through conferences but through universities that must be publicly founded, and ONLY founded by the public no to research "for business" but "for society", not to form "workers of the future" but "citizens of the future", doing so left a healthy business world and a healthy society.

rhaksw 5y ago

I completely agree with the concern over CS research being too heavily influenced by industry. An area I feel is underresearched is social media moderation, especially in the more open systems like reddit where anyone can moderate. There has been no research that I've found that looks at the impact of Reddit's style of comment moderation: by default, authors are not notified of removals and the content is presented to them as if it's still live [1]. You can try and see it yourself here [2]. Some people in-the-know may brush off this behavior, assuming it wards off bad actors. However, bad actors have access to the same tool. The question is, what is the result of that? [1] https://i.imgur.com/E3bFvKh.png https://i.imgur.com/E3bFvKh.png [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/CantSayAnything https://www.reddit.com/r/CantSayAnything

srvmshr 5y ago
Just curious: What is the relationship between Reddit moderation and conference funding. I seem to have missed your point. Could you please elaborate further?
- rhaksw 5y ago
  The article suggests conference funding influences what gets researched, which is the wider concern. The link is between conference funding and research. Reddit moderation is an example of something I feel is underresearched. Thanks for your question, I edited my original comment to hopefully be more clear on this.
  - srvmshr 5y ago
    There are enough significant impact conferences like FOCS or the TCS+ symposium, which have no/minimal corporate funding. In the initial years, even ICLR didn't have corporate sponsorship. That actually does not stop people from probing pressing issues. Reddit censorship may not be a great simile of corporate funding. Maybe even anecdotal. There are more academics on Twitter, and I havent seen evidence of censorship. (I have active accounts in both of them and the difference is quite visible of engagement in Twitter)

deleted 5y ago

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robert_foss 5y ago

Bad keynotes!

blackbear_ 5y ago

Related (no affiliation): http://arxiv.org/abs/2009.13676 http://arxiv.org/abs/2009.13676 Abstact: > As governmental bodies rely on academics’ expert advice to shape policy regarding Artificial Intelligence, it is important that these academics not have conflicts of interests that may cloud or bias their judgement. Our work explores how Big Tech can actively distort the academic landscape to suit its needs. By comparing the well-studied actions of another industry (Big Tobacco) to the current actions of Big Tech we see similar strategies employed by both industries. These strategies enable either industry to sway and influence academic and public discourse. We examine the funding of academic research as a tool used by Big Tech to put forward a socially responsible public image, influence events hosted by and decisions made by funded universities, influence the research questions and plans of individual scientists, and discover receptive academics who can be leveraged. We demonstrate how Big Tech can affect academia from the institutional level down to individual researchers. Thus, we believe that it is vital, particularly for universities and other institutions of higher learning, to discuss the appropriateness and the tradeoffs of accepting funding from Big Tech, and what limitations or conditions should be put in place.

WalterGR 5y ago
Is the capitalization “Big Tech” widely used or is it a shibboleth? I would guess that I can anticipate the tone of the paper based on that - I’m curious if that holds up. (Of course, mentioning “Big Tobacco” does give its own hint.)

saagarjha 5y ago

I don’t really have any insights to provide on “big companies are using sponsorships to whitewash their impact on society” but something I’ve seen is presentations and research often done in the context of the company’s unique circumstances that are not necessarily broadly applicable. It’s only natural of course that a company will optimize their research into things that are relevant to them but when you’re listening to them you need to keep “what is the context that this was written in” in the back of your mind at all times. For example, if you ever attend a C++ talk by Googlers, you’ll notice that they basically only talk about C++ as they use it, silently ignoring things they don’t care about. By virtue of google3 and their style guide, things like ABI compatibility are of very little consequence to them, and they can take away expensive-to-support APIs and present about how they “optimized” some part of the STL, or how support for exceptions is something they’ll look into later or (when they’re feeling uncharitable) bad actually™. Similarly most talks about Linux networking are driven by e.g. Facebook, who seem to slowly just be converging on running their entire stack using eBPF in the kernel. Apple presents their ML research about on-device learning and somewhere in the middle they’ll be like “oh also we have specialized silicon to do this efficiently otherwise it isn’t practical”. Microsoft will present virtualization research and you’ll find that their threat model is trying to prevent people from jailbreaking the Xbox. I’m not trying to say this research is bad or not useful, but it’s important to put them in the context of where they’re coming from or who they’re being funded by, because the entire thing-from the premise, to the execution, all the way to the conclusion-is going to be dependent on the circumstances the research was done in, and often it’ll be presented as a general result when it really only make sense in the context of that particular company’s needs. If you’re being cynical, it’s a way to appear open and exercise soft power through mindshare, but for most cases I think the alternative (no research) is probably worse so I’m not generally concerned.

srvmshr 5y ago
I sort of agree with whatever you just said. Perspective is very important as solutions emerge from the problems in play for these companies. I will probably extend this a bit further : these solutions also increase our understanding and mental models for better & secure products. What company X does is not only limited to X, but benefits others too. For corporate sway in research - its my personal opinion (any only limited to me), that citizen awareness is generally high. HN and similar communities are quick to spot gaping holes or flaws, and alternatives are plenty as well. There is fortunately a still healthy ecosystem of indie developers who contribute everything from Linux kernel to iOS patches. As you mention, as of present this does not seem a big concern and the alternative scenario (no academia-industry symbiosis) could be worse.

ComradePhil 5y ago

If you think that is bad, you must be horrified by how the drug industry operates.

js8 5y ago
Or the oil industry - American Geological Union was one of the last scientific institutions to accept the reality of anthropogenic global warming.
- teddyh 5y ago
  That’s not really surprising; they simply operate on geologic time.
- ComradePhil 5y ago
  Probably because it is not as big an issue as the CleanTech industry PR wanted people to believe?

reissbaker 5y ago

The article seems like it's conflating philosophy/social science analysis of the impact of technology with academic computer science. Would papers on "the social justice impact of the atom bomb" be reasonable physics conference topics? I... really don't think so. That's social science. I'm not saying it shouldn't be talked about, but it seems pretty weird to complain that hard science conferences don't have a lot of social science topics, and then blame that on capitalism. Academic computer scientists or physicists aren't even likely the best people to be researching that! I don't think the physicists in the USSR were primary attendees of social science or philosophy conferences either. Aside from that — and I suppose this part is capitalism's fault — where do they propose the money come from, if not the industry benefitting the most from the research? Big Tech has a lot of money, so conferences and research they sponsor gets a lot of funding. Banning tech companies, or restricting them, from funding research doesn't magically make other research get funded. If there was anywhere close to the ability to get funding from other sources, the article wouldn't exist. But that's where the money is now, and absent some societal upheaval and replacing capitalism with... ?... that's where you can get the money from. Yes yes government research projects, but realistically those were all DARPA projects, and having the military be the primary funding source for research isn't exactly getting rid of conflicts of interest when it comes to determining social impact of said research.

bannedbybros 5y ago

nonrandomstring 5y ago

Go to smaller independent conferences and make sure they're organised along ecological and ethically sound lines. First you'll have a better experience. Since the pandemic I haven't been on any academic jollies, but for years I've had a personal policy not to go to large conferences. They are too hectic. Everything is rushed and talks are squeezed. They value form over function and slick presentation uber alles. No time for slow conversation, precarious demos, mooching and mingling. There are two kinds of conferences, the ones where people go to actually confer, and massive industry extravaganzas that are indistinguishable from trade shows. A friend who is a medical doctor once told me of a endocrine conference she attended, 5000 miles away in Africa, with 10,000 attendees that ran for 12 days. She said it left her drained, bewildered and overwhelmed. People don't attend conferences like that to learn anything, they go to be seen, as a footnote in the proceedings, so they can put it on their CV. As a seasoned, senior academic secure in myself and my work I don't need to chalk up creds like fresh post-docs, but my advice to anyone is don't be cowed into thinking big impersonal conferences are "prestigious". Really no one cares. Pick a small gathering, somewhere nice (by a beach, forest or mountain venue), not too distant, where you can mingle and make acquaintances that will last for life. Truth is, many of the most _influential_ "conferences" are really cliquey gatherings where you will meet the "right" people. So get involved in the conference organisation. See who you can invite. That reduces costs, and it gives you some rights/leverage to say what you feel, and to understand the network in your field. If you object to Big Tech being sponsors say so - conference organisers need _people_ as much as they need funding. If you must attend a giant extravaganza, and you seriously, credibly object to funding by big tech, say so in your presentation. There is little or no comeback from politely dissing unethical big corps in your talk - in fact in some places it's de rigueur. Your disapproval ends up in the proceedings online etc, and that's not something company PR likes. Next year they won't offer mission accomplished. As an academic you have a platform, and rights to speak your mind, so use it. Ethics is a very important part of research and you are not restricted in speaking about it. Best of all, start hosting your own small conferences. It's a great learning experience. Many great conferences are hosted on a shoestring.

bin_bash 5y ago

> Industry is the main consumer of academic CS research, and 84% percent of CS professors receive at least some industry funding. What's the percentage in other fields? I suspect chemical engineering is driven by the oil industry, pharmacy by drug companies. I imagine aerospace is heavily driven by very few companies. Of course you could go get a liberal arts degree and be free from the tendrils of Big Dictionary but I think if we limit ourselves to STEM this is likely the standard. Is there an alternative? Or is my hypothesis wrong here?

unglaublich 5y ago

I think this is a good, relevant read: The Death of Corporate Research Labs https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24200764 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24200764

SeanLuke 5y ago

This article bases a large portion of its incentive for being written on the claim that "84% percent of CS professors receive at least some industry funding". To do this it cites a paper which, as far as I can tell, says no such thing. There are three problems with the claim and I think they ruin the rest of the article. First, the original paper only looked at UT, MIT, Stanford, and Berkeley. But a fair bit of industry funding is an exercise in prestige sharing: "I'm funding a professor at MIT". As a result, in my experience the top universities receive the lion's share of tech industry funding, and this very severely biases this claim. Second, the paper compiled faculty who ever received funding over the course of their career, no matter how small: but the article doesn't say "received": it says "receive". That is a huge difference. Looking back on my own career, I guess I'm in the list: once a VP of a local company chipped in maybe $15K to help my advisor fund me for my last PhD year simply because he was excited by the research work; and I think once Google funded some undergraduate students of mine working on RoboCup. I realize some faculty are funded more by industry: but I think my situation is typical. Third, because it is often meant for prestige rather than quid pro quo, and because Google and friends don't like paying overhead/indirect, the actual size of funding from industry tends to be very small and in the form of gifts. Not always, but usually. While Google might pay something like $30K to run a new program for Diversity in CS, DARPA is awarding a grant for $1.5 million to build a new multirobot architecture. The total industry funding of computer science, as a proportion of total funding, is probably somewhere south of 5%. I'd guess AI is about the same, but let's say 10% to be generous. See the following NSF graph. https://media.nature.com/lw800/magazine-assets/d41586-019-01734-1/d41586-019-01734-1_16762934.jpg https://media.nature.com/lw800/magazine-assets/d41586-019-01... So what are we left with? I don't think the article can claim that industry is of any significant consequence in CS academic funding. At most we could say that the industry may have funded faculty over the course of their careers, in some context, often minor and with a bias towards prestige universities. That seems to be a pretty weak hook to hang one's hat on.

aaron695 5y ago

traceroute66 5y ago

Its all very well to bitch and moan about "tech industry controlling conference funding", but the reality is that conferences are expensive and the money needs to come from somewhere. Speaking from experience. Even a decent sized "basic" conference (i.e. no fancy stage setups etc.) will still cost you an arm and a leg. You need to: - Pay the venue for the space - Pay the venue for the refreshments during breaks and meals (unless you are mean and don't feed people !) - Pay for a basic AV setup - Deal with registration - Pay for hotel rooms and travel for your team - Pay for various other things that soon add up (e.g. transport storage costs if you are shipping stuff there a few days before) So you might say, well, how about going 100% digital. Well, trust me, the good platforms know they are good and they charge accordingly. Ok you might say, "well, we'll charge registration fees". Well sure you might, and sure that might well cover 100% of your costs. But have you ever seen how registration goes for a conference ? It takes time for the numbers to ramp up. In the mean time, you need money in the bank to pay for stuff you need to pay for "now". And you need money in the bank as security for the contracts you'll be signing with the venues (if nobody turns up or fewer people than expected, the venue will still want some money off you). So, its then a question of where the money comes from. And like it or not, corporate sponsorship is typically the easiest way. The corporate structure "understands" what a conference is, so you won't get bogged down in discussions. The corporate way is also the easiest way to get nice big chunks of cash instead of having to beg tens or hundreds of different people.

deleted 5y ago
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ericmay 5y ago
Yep. I created a “hackathon” style event at a university for students pre-pandemic. The space was free and given by the university engineering college. For one day of 3 meals and t-shirts it was like $5,000. Partly because we had to go through the university catering service. And that was for about 60 students (we planned on I think around 90?). If we needed event space and the university charged us that would have been 3x at least. And this was run with nothing but volunteers. We had lots of corporate sponsors and honestly it was great. They mentored students, they set up career fair style booths and just had fun and shared good info about their companies. Without their partnership, frankly, a lot less would have been achieved. It was a win-win for everyone.

fastaguy88 5y ago

This argument suggests that by sponsoring conferences, companies can shape their content. That may be true for big commercial exhibitions, but I don’t see how it works for academic meetings. For those meetings, the financial backing is confirmed years in advance, while the actual program is set six months or so before the event. And at CS like conferences, the content is determined by independent reviewers. So I can imagine that corporate sponsors might shape content by stopping support of conferences with low quality papers, but otherwise they have essentially no role in what is presented, other than providing some high profile keynote speakers that might increase conference visibility.

eslaught 5y ago
I came here to say the same thing. I've been on multiple program committees for multiple conferences and it would be laughable to claim sponsors have any influence over what gets published at a conference. Sponsors have much more direct (and visible) influence over, you know, sponsorship of the research itself. But even there, corporate sponsorship is only one slice (and a relatively small one) of overall CS funding. There are plenty of government or independent sponsors who would be happy to fund research that is contrary to big corporate interests.
ghaff 5y ago
Yeah. It's truer of non-academic conferences which often even have sponsor slots. But even there, there's at least some effort not to have product pitches because if they tilt too far in that direction, people just won't attend. Conferences need to maintain some base level of quality/utility or they fade away.

partido3619463 5y ago

It’s really shitty to use the acronym “FAGMA” instead of “FAANG”. It’s clear homophobia and sucks to read. (I assume it’s a joke because (1) “FAMGA” works just as well and has no slur and (2) quick search for it yields very few results). Hopefully someone will take it down for this or other reasons.

saagarjha 5y ago
I've heard "GAFAM" in the past with is significantly less problematic.

geoalchimista 5y ago

The worse thing is to let academia control conference funding.