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".

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.