Mitsubishi Breaks Up Famous Computer Science Lab

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday July 31, 2007 @03:37PM from the how-low-the-mighty dept.

Andrew Koyfman writes "Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories is falling apart. Top researchers and scientists are being poached by the competitors, including BAE, Adobe, and others. The lab was responsible for much breakthrough research in the areas of computer vision, computer graphics, AI, and machine learning. They were the first group to develop the Diamond Touch table, an early precursor to Microsoft's Surface Computing. Now it looks like the famous lab will be no more, at least not in their original glory."

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Re:Only Monopolies can Afford Pure Research by mOdQuArK! · 2007-07-31 18:02 · Score: 4, Interesting

There's a decent economic argument to made that it is in society's best interest to use public monies to fund pure research, and then allow the fruits of such research to be released into the public domain for any entrepreneurs to take it to a usable form. It spreads the large and long-term financial risks of such research over the entire society, but lets capitalistic forces figure out the most efficient way to make practical uses of the research available to the society.