Slashdot Mirror
How Uber Turned Carnegie Mellon Into a Minor Nursery For Its Research Division (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: A year after Uber announced a collaboration with the Robotics Department of Carnegie Mellon University, not a single project has been developed. The ride-sharing company set up its Advanced Technologies Center on CMU's doorstep in 2015 and promptly 'compensated' the poaching of 40 of the University's best talent with a $5.5 million grant, leaving CMU with a staff crisis. The university is taking the appropriation philosophically, and considering the relationship as symbiotic. In the meantime Uber is rapidly co-opting Carnegie Mellon into a feeding ground for its own labs, moving a great deal of robotics research out of academic transparency into the realm of jealously-guarded corporate secrets.
A fair thing to do would be to lose all public funding and projects as soon as a corporation controls the educational system. If you want to be a private school then you don't get the benefits of public funding through projects. From a quick Google search, it looks like the US Federal Government is pumping a whole lot of cash into this school.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
It is not merely legal — it is a very good outcome indeed.
As a result of the partnership, Uber is now up 40 researchers. And those 40 people are happy having a (much) better job.
Quality education requires a chalk, a blackboard, and some notebooks (the paper kind). You don't need researchers for education — you need professors. Researchers you get for free — they are called "grad students". And as soon as they can find gainful employment, you replace them with new ones.
The purpose of a university is to teach — any research done is coincidental to that primary purpose.
So long as nobody is forced into doing something they don't want to, there is no damage whatsoever. People change jobs all the time and we congratulate them, when they move up.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
They aren't a technology company. They are nothing more than a normal online service.. not special at all. There is nothing unique about Uber. It's just silly hype and the value is most certainly going to crash because nothing Uber does represent intellectual property. Their choice of simplistic direct business model works in low skilled industries that are corrupt, have price fixing issues or just lack realistic price competition for some reason.
That's all good and fun, but Uber itself is not actually worth anything. It's just a name and it's probably more likely to die than evolve into a long term brand. First off.. it doesn't in any way represent it's business model. It's just a word.
Anybody can copy that model, use a better name, use better industry clout and eat Uber's market up easily. It would in no way be hard and in the big picture electric autonomous cars will be made by many vendors and Uber will have no ability to compete against the endless pockets of automotive and software giants. Uber should keep their business model simple and just make as much money while they can, expanding makes no sense other than to scam people out of capital.
Yep - CMU, like most Universities these days, are as patent litigation hungry as anyone else...
http://www.post-gazette.com/lo...