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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.
out of academic transparency
See all of those corporate logos all over Red Team's vehicles? Do you really think CMU published the coolest stuff they developed?
https://www.fastcompany.com/10...
http://www.equipmentworld.com/...
https://www.saic.com/
https://www.tttech.com/
jealously-guarded corporate secrets.
Patents are anything but that. In fact they tell the world exactly how you do something.
Why did they even have to compensate for people? Was it a slave-purchasing transaction?
The entire write-up (and, likely, TFA as well) can be rewritten with the opposite spin: about Uber offering wonderful opportunities to the researchers allowing the school to concentrate on what universities do best — educate.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
They proved that by their collaboration with the FBI while attacking the TOR network ... which they created in collaboration with the Department of Defense.
https://yro.slashdot.org/story...
If Uber wants a partner to secretly develop 'jealously-guarded corporate secrets' Carnegie Mellon is where it's at. A student looking for an education might best look elsewhere as CMU priorities have changed.
...omphaloskepsis often...
I've known of this for many years. For they came for NREC, but I said nothing because I was not a robotics engineer. Then they came for the infrastructure team at my current company, but I said nothing because I wasn't INFRA. When they came for me, I had no one... other than the myriad friends who work for them and say nice things like "competitive salary", "great benefits", and "flexible work schedule." On a more serious note, I have multiple friends who work for them now, and it sounds like a halycon environment. They make you work hard, but when they overwork you, you get time off a possible and maybe a stipend. They're fair. If you need something to do your job, you don't need to speak weeks in meetings justifying $200 worth of software. Not to mention how smart these guys are, but daaaaamn.
Short story long: Uber took the lion's share of awesome engineers in Pittsburgh because they pay very well, they take care of you, and it's a place you want to show up every day. Other companies are having a hard time competing.
That being said, I know people who still work at NREC/CMU (mostly older folks). CMU, for tenured folks, ain't a bad place, but it can't compete for 25-35 year old engineers at their prime. CMU needs to up its pay and benefits to attract the people they used to, Otherwise Uber, Facebook, and Google will take over Pittsburgh.
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.
"I've worked in the private sector! They expect results!"
I thought the point of all of this research was to better mankind. How is this research going to help mankind if all they produce are some papers that they file in the university library where the likelihood of someone reading it again is small? We would hope that at some point this research evolves into products and services that make our lives better. I mean that's why we spend our tax dollars on this, right? Even private schools get a lot of money from the government even if it is only the fact that they get taxed at a lower rate than any other corporate entity.
So what if a university has had a mass exodus of researchers. It's a university, they can make more. If they cannot create more researchers from their students and staff then perhaps the school is lacking in some way and needs to disappear, or at least get out of the research business.
But we don't have to think of a big picture of improving society, what of the individual? That person was doing this research for some reason. I'd expect, if asked, these people would state they were doing this research out of some personal desire to improve themselves. If they find a means to increase their happiness by leaving the university then there is nothing wrong with that.
I recall my time studying computer engineering and there were a lot of graduate students and faculty that left the university to find more profitable work during the dot-com bubble. The quality of the instructors took a dive. In one class we had a professor take over a lecture for one of the graduate student instructors to announce to the class that they realized the guy was not teaching well. They offered all students in that section to change to another section with no questions asked. It took a couple years but they got more and better instructors.
Now that I think about it this is just a different way to say, "Those who can, do, and those that can't, teach."
This might suck for CMU and the students that attend there but in the long run more people came out ahead on this.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Of course, you can adjust your adjustment and replace Facebook with MySpace and the OP's point holds true.
-Chris
What bothers me most about this situation is that these 40 researchers likely just threw away promising careers. Let me explain...
Uber, love it or hate it, is currently fueled up by large amounts of venture capital. The vast majority of that money is spent on lawyers and lobbyists working to change the laws to allow Uber's core business (software for transportation and delivery networks) to continue to exist. Some of it is used to subsidize their independent contractors to allow the contractors to provide downstream services at a price that customers will accept. The rest of the money appears to be spent on research projects to replace humans contractors.
Uber can do the latter for one simple reason: they have more money than needed for their core business. It's the same reason Google/Alphabet and Apple can invest in self-driving cars and other fun projects. The difference is that Google has a solid revenue stream from their advertising business, Apple has a strong hardware business, and neither rely on the VC community to fund their moonshots. Uber is not Google or Apple for one simple reason: they are not supported by revenue and won't be for a while.
Now, at some point in the near future Uber's investors need an exit. Uber does not have the revenues to pay back investors using dividends. The billions put into the company need to be converted into tens or hundreds of billions at the next round. The IPO market is not terribly strong at this point and there are few hedge funds or private equity firms that could finance a private round of that scale. There will be pressure soon on Uber to find a way out.
And, if you think Uber will suddenly find the revenue, consider this: the entire US taxi industry is worth around $11B. Given that Uber tends to undercut taxi rates by at least 20%, that's around $8B total Uber could expect if they cornered the entire market. Almost all of that will be paid to contractors, leaving a low margin business for Uber. I think Uber's investors know this, which is why they're currently letting Uber play around with moonshots while they still have cash in the bank. Ride sharing alone, the only thing Uber's been successful at, can't justify the investment and valuations. And at some point, Uber's contractors will need new cars, which their current paychecks don't really allow for.
tl;dr up to now: Uber spends a lot of other people's money on things not directly related to its current core revenue-generating business. Those investors need an exit soon or they will cut their loses and move on to the Next Big Thing. There letting Uber try to find the NBT, but that won't last.
Back to the researchers... They all left academic careers to pursue riches in the private sector. There's nothing wrong with that (it's exactly what I've done - I have a Ph.D. in CS and run a tech company). However, if they're like most academics I know, they don't really understand business enough to appreciate the consequences of this decision.
As outlined above, Uber as a bottomless source of capital is not long for this world. When Uber starts reigning in projects to find out which ones can generate sustaining revenue (or worst case, gets sold for parts), research projects will be the first to go. No company that's not wildly profitable has been able to sustain that level of research spend. And even profitable companies tend to cut their research staff when they need to improve the numbers. This is just the reality of corporate research.
Uber's cuts will likely coincide with the downturn in this business cycle, which will also mean fewer corporate research jobs, even for roboticists. As everyone with a Ph.D. knows, academic jobs are few and far between, even in the hottest fields. CMU will likely have their positions filled by the time their old staff wants their jobs back. What's worse is that there will be fewer jobs available and many of the researchers will have to take a step back in their careers to continue working in their chosen field.
If only a few researcher
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.
I once thought as you did. Mind you, not that I'm disagreeing with you, but rather the reality of the situation.
As someone that once tried to become a professor and navigate the academic system, I can say from direct experience that you will not become a professor unless you have a very strong research resume and are involved in research (meaning, you regularly apply for and receive grants from federal government, etc.). When you interview, you come in to meet the department and explain your research interests; its not very focused on your teaching style (you have to fill out a "teaching philosophy" statement, but I think its mostly a formality). The university administration expects to see dollar signs flow in, and so the emphasis is on bringing in dollars. In your more STEM-related fields that don't have as many students (as compared to say, the business school), since you don't have enough students to bring in significant tuition dollars, they expect significant research dollars or threaten to downsize your department (yes, this happened at one university I worked at for a while).
The result of this system is that a very large amount of university professors have little to no interest in teaching (I've had a few in school that were outright hostile to the idea of teaching, and acted like children when the department assigned them classes), and the teaching actually gets shoved off on to the teaching assistants. The TAs are of course also expected to do research and work on a dissertation, so we're talking 80 hour work weeks in some scenarios, which they have to put up with in order to graduate. Big name schools aren't really worth it, particularly at the bachelor's level, because many of your classes will be taught by TAs, or if you're lucky, you will get an upperlevel class taught by a professor that thinks that teaching undergraduate classes is beneath him (again, personal experience).
In some ways, CMU's students might be better off if professors that wanted to be researchers bailed ship. In theory, people focused on teaching could be hired... but then again, I sadly know better than that. I hope it changes in the future, but right now, quality education is really at the end of the priority list for all higher education in the country. I am glad to be away from academics.