
Scientists plan huge European AI hub to compete with US - charlysl
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/apr/23/scientists-plan-huge-european-ai-hub-to-compete-with-us
======
Systemic33
I believe that a contributing factor to the pay gap in Europe is the fact that
we have so many languages, that we are too segregated to create the same level
of competitiveness as seen in the US. This means that each country is fairly
protective of its people, and even though EU has free movement of labour, the
language and culture barrier is strong, and internationals have a harder time
to get hired, unless the speak the local language.

So the end results is that talent is spread across, and no single country has
ability to become the place to be.

~~~
Joeri
It also means that despite being a single market you can’t realistically
launch a product across the EU. A SV startup can immediately address the whole
US (if they don’t have a physical presence), but an EU startup has to go
country by country. That means growth is slower, and talent is less competed
for.

After brexit I’d like to see business & gov across the EU standardize on
english as lingua franca to enable faster growth.

~~~
simias
>After brexit I’d like to see business & gov across the EU standardize on
english as lingua franca to enable faster growth.

Do you imply that brexit might make it easier for that to happen? That sounds
counter-intuitive to me, once the UK leaves I believe that the only country in
the EU who has English as an official language will be Ireland and even there
it's cohabiting with Irish Gaelic.

Beyond that I've always been torn on this issue, on one hand having a lingua
franca across the EU would be amazing and English is probably closest to
achieving that, on the other hand English is effectively the language of
American imperialism and its cultural hegemony. In an ideal world I'd prefer
something less politically loaded and tied to a foreign superpower, like
Spanish, Swedish or Romanian for instance (I'm picking random European
languages who cannot be suspected of having any kind of cultural overreach in
present day Europe).

Of course in this case maybe practicality trumps ideology and we should just
accept our English speaking overlords for the sake of convenience.

~~~
FractalLP
Esperanto is surprisingly easy to learn and is meant to be a secondary
language. Realistically, it's probably going to be English. Some say Mandarin
in 20 years, but there are a lot of practical reasons why I find that hard to
believe.

~~~
mtgx
> Some say Mandarin in 20 years, but there are a lot of practical reasons why
> I find that hard to believe

English has been taught in European schools for decades and most European
citizens still don't use it much or know it that well (the biggest reason is
that it's not the official language of the countries).

Virtually nobody teaches Chinese in European schools _now_ , so I find it very
hard to believe that Mandarin will be anywhere close to the language of the
internet in 20 years. It's really only the Asian countries (except India)
where a larger percentage of their populations can speak or understand
Mandarin, but that's always been the case anyway, so I don't think that's
going to change much.

~~~
kk58
Except singapore and taiwan no other country has mandarin as its national
language. Infact more countries have tamil and hindi (ex british colonies)
than mandarin. Food for thought

------
jamesblonde
Our big problem in Europe is not basic research, it's systems research. We
have a European platform for Big Data and AI - Hops. It's open-source. It has
nice properties, but it is harder to bootstrap an ecosystem outside the
valley:

(1) HDFS compatible FS with distributed metadata

(2) GPU support in HopsYARN

(3) UI to develop Keras/TensorFlow apps in jupyter, deploy on tensorflow
serving. Spark support, too.

However, getting it 'out there' is still a challenge from Europe. Here is a
talk on the platform at CERN last week:

[https://indico.cern.ch/event/716743/](https://indico.cern.ch/event/716743/)

More talks here:

[http://www.logicalclocks.com/eventscustom/](http://www.logicalclocks.com/eventscustom/)

~~~
chrisseaton
> Our big problem in Europe is not basic research, it's systems research.

Hmm maybe we mean different things by 'systems research', but I'm in systems
research and we're relatively strong in this area in Europe! Notable systems
groups at Cambridge, Kent, Oxford, Glasgow, Manchester, EPFL, ETH, Linz, lots
of smaller ones. Major influential systems projects started in Europe like
Graal. Conferences which attract Americans to fly over like ECOOP and Curry
On.

~~~
nopinsight
Except ETH and EPFL, other names you mention do not seem to be very
competitive in CS systems research with top departments in the US and even
some in Asia. I am not in systems so please let us know if the ranking based
on conference publications skews American or it is a fair reflection of
reality.

[http://csrankings.org/#/fromyear/2012/toyear/2018/index?arch...](http://csrankings.org/#/fromyear/2012/toyear/2018/index?arch&comm&sec&mod&hpc&mobile&metrics&ops&plan&soft&da&bed&world)

~~~
chrisseaton
Three in the top ten when I select programming languages which is my sub-
field. That's really not bad for Europe. I said it was _relatively_ good.
Compare it to something like AI and it's good.

And this website does seem to exclude the major European conferences like
ECOOP... which obviously doesn't help European institutions.

~~~
nopinsight
You noted about programming languages I see. Several names you mentioned are
in the top 10 or 20 in the subfield.

------
alexhutcheson
The headline seems misleading. They're not planning one "huge hub" in one
location. Instead, they're planning a bunch of mid-sized institutes spread
across different countries, each with "hundreds of computer engineers,
mathematicians and other scientists".

That approach is understandable politically, but it seems much less likely to
have the intended effect. If the goal is to kick-start a knowledge cluster in
Europe that can compete with the Bay Area, then it seems much more likely to
succeed if the funding and talent is concentrated in a single site. "Hundreds
of computer engineers" is equivalent to a mid-size remote office of a major
tech company.

That's just an observation, though. I realize that the choice probably isn't
this plan vs. one mega-site. More realistically it's this plan vs. nothing at
all, or vs. competing piecemeal efforts by various EU member states.

~~~
Eridrus
I think a hundred researchers/engineers is well beyond a midsize company
remote office, because the caliber of people and mission will be very
different. DeepMind is less than a thousand people, and was probably on the
order of a few hundred when it became famous.

~~~
alexhutcheson
For comparison, the Fraunhofer Society has 72 institutes in Germany, all
focused on applied research. Collectively, these institutes employ ~25,000
scientists and engineers[1], which gives us an average of ~350 scientists and
engineers per office. This seems very comparable to what's being proposed,
both in mission and in scale of individual institute.

This seems to be an effective model for applied R&D, but I haven't seen anyone
argue that a Fraunhofer Institute is sufficient to be a seed for a major tech
cluster. The scale just isn't big enough.

[1] [https://www.fraunhofer.de/en/about-fraunhofer/profile-
struct...](https://www.fraunhofer.de/en/about-fraunhofer/profile-
structure/facts-and-figures.html)

------
gaius
_the scientists say the proposed Ellis institute is essential to avoid brain
drain to big tech firms_

They don’t say tho’ the mechanism by which it will accomplish this. What’s in
it for the individual researchers who choose this path over an industry job?
ITER only exists because there is no well-funded private-sector fusion
research. If Musk or Bezos or Gates entered that game it and CERN would
evaporate overnight.

I’m no AI guru but I’m a pretty decent infra engineer who can wrangle storage
and compute at scale, and they’ll need people like that too, why would someone
like me choose this path? What’s the offer?

Genuinely curious.

~~~
molteanu
Well, a nice office in a "culturally rich city with dozen of events, museums
and world-class cuisine"?! Like it's done for all other industries. Some nice
polished marketing and the fear of missing out if you don't go to the place
where all the "exciting things happen".

~~~
gaius
_Well, a nice office in a "culturally rich city with dozen of events, museums
and world-class cuisine"?!_

I have been thinking about this today, and I'd take a cut in pay of say 25% in
exchange for a private office in which to do interesting work, and absolute
job security followed by a final salary pension. The way it used to be.

But that actual deal would be a pay cut _to_ 25%, crammed into a office too
dingy for Civil Servants, at risk of being TUPE'd at the drop of a hat. No
thanks.

------
thaumaturgy
Question for people knowledgeable on the topic: are there many examples of
planned efforts like this actually working, where some group is able to
attract top talent in some industry and keep it for the long term? The article
mentions CERN; are there others?

I would guess that most concentrations of talent are an unpredictable side-
effect of some environmental factor.

~~~
mjfl
I don't even think CERN, Higgs boson included, is worth the man hours or cash
invested...

HBP doesn't seem worth it. ITER is a huge failure that is scheduled to receive
billions more euros for more than 25 more years. I don't know... Europe seems
to fall victim to these sort of things very readily.

~~~
stctgion
Are you defining "worth it" as whether there is a profit to be made at some
point? How much would you have paid for the higgs? Are some pieces of science
best left in the dark because they cost too much?

~~~
mjfl
YES. There is no limit to the cost of modern science, but resources are still
scarce in the real world and we cannot afford to spend unlimited funds on
projects that will not pay off in human flourishing in the near future. To
answer your first question that is the profit to be made and it absolutely is
necessary to consider when directing tax dollars which could otherwise be
spent feeding starving people or curing dying people. I would have paid $80
for the Higgs.

~~~
ben_w
While you are correct to say that scarce resources means we can’t do
everything, pure/fundamental research like the LHC tends to have extremely
high payoffs several decades after it is completed. Nobody knows what exactly,
if we did we could focus on that stuff in particular, but its one of the best
things we can do to grow the economy.

(Also, if everyone in the EU paid $80 for the Higgs, that’s about three LHCs
depending on where in its history you take the exchange rate).

~~~
mjfl
Actually, good basic research has a much quicker payoff scale, like 10-20
years. Transistors, fiber optics, lasers, paid off almost immediately- and
were invented ON PURPOSE by the way, in order to facilitate better
communication for AT&T. And I would pay $80 because I'm personally interested,
but I'm the 1%, and I don't think you should force people to pay for it,
therefore you should revise your estimate to .03 LHCs.

~~~
ben_w
You’re taking a bunch of things deliberately invented to solve an existing
problem as an example of fundamental research paying off quickly?

Counterexamples: one of the early prime number researchers was proud that his
work had no use at all, and now it’s the foundation of a major class of
encryption. That was a century or two.

Or, Maxwell published “A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism” in 1873, and
it took another 30 years to become voice radio.

Of course, as the LHC only discovered the Higgs in 2012, even your 10 year
lowball would be four years in the future.

------
candiodari
If you had any idea what scientists make in the EU, you'd see

1) why this is happening

2) why this effort won't change a thing

They could, you know, pay competitive wages. Ridiculous suggestion, I know, at
this point that'd be a 5x and more (500% and more) raise.

~~~
dmichulke
I fully agree.

German media constantly complains about "IT expert shortage" yet salaries grow
like 3% per year. So IMO it's either not a shortage or the German industry
doesn't know how to attract good people.

To put some data points there (in EUR)

1\. Germany Uni Doctorate Position: 32k, 22k after deductions

2\. Germany AI / Data Scientist Position: 80k, 50k after deductions

3\. Luxembourg Uni Doctorate Position: 32k, 26k after deductions

4\. Luxembourg AI / Data Scientist Position: 80k, 60k after deductions

Source: Friends and family and me

The above two countries belong arguably to the economical top tier, yet they
can hardly compete with a US Senior Software developer (>= 100k$?)

Now imagine how the non-top tier countries fare (i.e., 80% of the EU
population)

I was an AI researcher and now work as ML/AI/Data Scientist consultant (mostly
for non-European companies) and I yet have to see that European job offer of
120k€ per year, hell, make that 100k€.

~~~
ben_w
I’m in the UK, intending to move out for obvious reasons (would’ve gone a year
ago but relative got an Alzheimer’s diagnosis early 2017). Considering Berlin,
Silicon Valley, or a PhD just about anywhere if the cost is in my range.

Once healthcare (at NHS level) and rent are accounted for, $100k in Silicon
Valley isn’t as good as £37k in the UK. Germany has more expensive healthcare
than the UK’s NHS, but significantly lower rent and overall is only slightly
more expensive than the UK… unless you intend to eventually buy a house, in
which case it’s suddenly much cheaper.

~~~
north_east_dev
> I’m in the UK, intending to move out for obvious reasons

I thought you meant pay by this, but then you include Berlin in your list of
potential places... Is there other reasons I'm missing out on? Genuinely
curious

~~~
ben_w
Brexit. I could go on for ages about specifics, but experience says that
nobody outside the UK really cares (it’s _so_ 2016), and nobody inside the UK
is changing their minds.

~~~
north_east_dev
Haha! Oh right. I'm an immigrant in the UK myself. Curious as to why the
natives would leave :)

~~~
ben_w
Ah! Partly the total incompetence of the people who are in charge of making
Brexit happen, partly because I don’t trust the UK government with human
rights unless bound by international convention (a bind which looks like it
will be a lot weaker after Brexit).

It’s unfortunate, really, there’s a lot of nice stuff in the UK too. And I
know I’ll miss it.

------
tormeh
Doesn't this happen to US universities as well? I bet Mercedes et al could do
the same as Google if they didn't require you to move to company towns in the
middle of nowhere.

~~~
carlmr
I think you're thinking of Audi (Ingolstadt, Neckarsulm) or Volkswagen
(Wolfsburg) middle of nowhere towns with a severe lack of estrogen.
Mercedes/Daimler and Porsche are in Stuttgart, a major city (for Germany at
least). BMW is in Munich, doesn't get much more major city than that.

The bigger problem I see is German company's unwillingness to pay engineers
more for performance. You basically get the same salary whether you're pulling
the whole team or slacking off.

~~~
tormeh
Stuttgart is not a world-class city and Munich is filled with Bavarians (I.e.
conservative, burgeois). Cologne is too small, Hamburg has no tech scene.
Germany only really has Berlin for the kind of tech and city that I imagine
the HN audience is interested in.

>Munich, doesn't get much more major city than that

San Francisco, Shenzhen, Paris, London, Berlin? Because the competition is
international. Regional/National thinking is part of the problem.

~~~
allendoerfer
The cities you listed are 3 times older than even the idea of an American
continent. They are culturally rich and unique in their own way. They have
survived several countries around them and are historically significant
regardless of their size today. Cologne for example is the 4th biggest city in
Germany and 2000 years old. They have traditions the rest of Germany finds odd
and a strange beverage they seem to think of as beer. If that isn't enough for
you culturally, than Germany really cannot compete. I don't see any reason to
create some artificially big city for the sake of competing world-wide.

Also you forgot that those cities are often very close to each other. The
Rhein-Neckar (Mannheim, Heidelberg, Ludwigshafen), Rhein-Main (Frankfurt,
Darmstadt, Wiesbaden, Mainz etc.) or Ruhr (too many to count really) area do
form hubs, which can compete worldwide and are economically MUCH stronger than
Berlin ever will be.

~~~
DanielleMolloy
Berlin is the only true international city of Germany, and with its active
startup and IT culture - ~20 hackerspaces, countless IT MeetUps, startup
events, well-known STEM research labs spread across 3 full and several applied
universities and research institutes like MPI or Fraunhofer; industry research
(Amazon) - the only place in Germany and one of the few places in Europe that
is interesting for the HN audience.

The areas you mention are only places to go if your startup wants to tap into
the (indeed very established) mechanical engineering industry, or very
specific areas of research. But definitely no place for people who have a more
international view on things.

------
ageofwant
> Meanwhile, some universities had been hit so hard that they > had lost an
> entire generation of talented young researchers.

The schadenfreude is strong with this one. Maybe next time try treating your
researchers less like cattle and start paying them market value salaries.

~~~
Radim
Trouble is, it's not really a "market". EU universities are (mostly)
subsidized from other people's taxes, so calling for "market salaries" is
essentially calling for increased taxation. A tough sell, especially given the
distant, lukewarm connection between the people paying and the people being
paid.

------
giardini
I want to thank everyone who contributed to this thread. The variety of
experiences and viewpoints provided an incredible insight to someone who's
been mostly in the USA for the last 2 decades. My conclusions:

a) There's not a snowball's chance in Hell that a European AI hub compete with
the US,

b) Europe remains far more fragmented than I thought it was; even more
fragmented than it appeared when I was in high school. "Brexit" may actually
increase Europe's (and Britain's) organization.

c) Britain and Europe have tons of good people but a lack of organization
suitable for pure research, be it by governments, corporations, "hubs", or
non-governmental organizations.

d) China is similarly SNAFU'd but worse in some respects (unsettled markets,
lack of transparency & property rights). Luckily, there doesn't appear to be a
ghost of a chance of having one of China's many languages adopted as a
scientific "lingua franca". [Note to self: cross the (formerly) relevant item
off my "bucket list".]

e) Perhaps restoring near-universal use of the character encoding UTF-16 or
even US-ASCII is not a completely dead idea but merely one to be delayed until
the adoption of English as the "lingua franca" of the Internet and Europe,
salvaging much-needed bandwidth. Time will tell.

------
throw2016
SV has always been heavily subsidized. A lot of the fundamental tech comes
from government research projects. Startups have access to easy capital and
there is no transparency of the 10/1 or 100/1 failures, how this is sustained
and where all the money is coming from.

There is definitely govt money including from the CIA, NSA at work here. So
there is no reason the EU cannot do the same, infact they are late.

The open source movement has also played a key role in most of the SV success
stories in the recent past. Zuckerberg, Page and others are the celebrated
'free market' 'wealth creators' but the work of Stallman, Torvalds, Rasmus and
thousands of others have undeniably added billions of dollars of value.

Our currently ideological narrative of 'wealth creators' and 'free markets'
completely fails to account and value these and other critical social
investments. We make the narratives we want.

All the SV money further subsidizes companies like Uber and other startups
hungry for market share, who can under price and run out competition in other
markets which is dumping. Its just that no one is going after them in Europe
and elsewhere yet but the rules are there and can be enforced when needed.

------
JumpCrisscross
This reminds me of the European attempt at competing with the American BRAIN
Initiative [1]:

"The key difference between Europe's HBP and the U.S.'s BRAIN Initiative is
that the latter does not depend on a single scientific vision. Instead many
teams will compete for grants and lead innovation into different, unplanned
directions. Competition is happening via the nimh's traditional peer-review
process, which prevents the conflicts of interest that plagued decision making
at the HBP. Peer review is not perfect—it tends to favor known scientific
paradigms—and American science funding has plenty of problems of its own. But
the BRAIN Initiative's more competitive and transparent decision making is far
removed from the political black box in Brussels that produced the HBP."

[1] [https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-the-human-
bra...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-the-human-brain-
project-went-wrong-and-how-to-fix-it/)

~~~
DanielleMolloy
The BRAIN initiative started after the proposal of the Human Brain Project.
The Human Brain Project also followed the Blue Brain Project, which was
started in 2005. Leaving criticism of the HBP aside - it would be wrong to put
it as if the HBP is the "European answer" to the BRAIN initiative.

------
l5870uoo9y
The question is really if Europe can compete with the whole US ecosystem
without protectionist policies (and there justified). Nowhere is the US
domination more visible than in the tech sector, where Europe essentially is a
tech vassal state. The European countries need to build not only an AI hubs,
but also an competitive business ecosystem that attracts top talent through
salaries, opportunities, challenges and benefits. I don't think there is much
appetite in the European population for competing on lavish salaries and raw
capitalistic incentiments (both categories in which US leads).

European leaders can just look at China and see successful protectionist
policies. It makes sense to have some policies not only in US-EU relationship,
but also inside EU that spreads the talent on a regional level so regions
don't just get drained. This is also a big issue for East- and Central-
european countries.

~~~
adventured
There's actually something fascinating about the dominance / vassal premise:
it applies within the US, and it applies within Europe as well.

Silicon Valley, Boston, NY, Seattle, and a few others dominate the US on tech,
with the rest of the US mostly fitting into your tech vassal state premise.

The exact same thing is true within Europe for industry and tech. Germany
overwhelmingly dominates Europe on auto manufacturing for example. What kind
of cars are Russia, Spain, Portugal, UK, Poland, Ukraine, Greece, etc
producing? The Germans are out selling and out producing the rest of Europe to
an epic degree.

How many Airbus planes - and or what share of components - are manufactured in
Romania, Czech, Greece or Poland? In Europe these are industrial vassal states
to France or Germany.

~~~
dragandj
The headquarters are in Germany, but tiny Slovakia, for example, has huge car
production facilities.

------
tensor
US hardly has a monopoly on AI. Canada and China are also leading countries.
It's great that the EU wants to invest too, the more the better! Science
doesn't hold allegiance to any country and never should.

~~~
Al-Khwarizmi
The open letter does talk about North America in general (not only the US) and
China. The Guardian summarized all that to "the US" in their headline.

------
youpassbutter
This is great news. We need more tech hubs and more competition in the tech
industry. I'm still confused as to why europe decided to cede the entire tech
industry to the US. Do europeans love us this much? That they want us to have
all money/technology?

But this doesn't go far enough. Europe has 600 million people. They should
have 2 or 3 tech hubs.

Look at what china is doing. They are developing their own tech industry. That
is what europe should do. Foster their own tech industry.

------
icc97
Where this is shown up starkly is in Self-driving startups. This list of
startups [0] only has 1 or 2 in Europe out of 33.

Mercedes does most of it's self-driving research in the US.

[0]: [https://angel.co/job-collections/top-self-driving-cars-
start...](https://angel.co/job-collections/top-self-driving-cars-startups)

------
DoctorOetker
is it just me or does the guardian symbol in the browser tab (white G on a
black disc) always look like the pirate party symbol (black flag on white
background in a black circle)?

------
dosycorp
Ahem ....to compete with China.

------
tehlike
Unless it is supported by capitalist intent, it cannot compete with us.

~~~
ageofwant
You have already lost. Because 'us' almost certainly does not include you.

~~~
tehlike
Not sure i get you. Us=the us, and it does include me.

------
ocschwar
I don;t know about AI, but when it comes to using formal methods to nail down
software development and make it reliable, the EU is already outpacing the US.

~~~
ra1n85
This is an assertion without data to back it up. Care to elaborate?

~~~
ocschwar
INRIA, where Coq development takes place.

