
Leaving CMU - taylorbuley
http://blog.smola.org/post/145983963411/leaving-cmu
======
glup
"At Amazon we will be investing an order of magnitude more resources towards
this problem. With data and computers to match this. This is significant
leverage. Hence the change."

The research questions will be in the interest of Amazon, which may not align
with the public good (though, admittedly, the logic of the university doesn't
always align with the public good). He'll get more leverage, but I'd be
surprised if he works on the same problems.

How about updating the academic funding model before everyone goes to
industry?

~~~
eva1984
In academia most professors are doing some or most of their projects for the
source of funding, which I think is not too much about public good anyway.

I think it is about time for machine learning researchers to go to industry,
there isn't that much data in academia. Good public datasets are rare, like
ImageNet, and have been basically overfitted to the core. In industry, it is
totally another story.

~~~
adrianN
So maybe we need to start funding the acquisition of large public datasets in
academia?

~~~
newjersey
The fact that Stanford University creates patents from publicly funded
research then turns around and sells them to non manufacturing entities makes
me wary of pumping any new public money into research at universities. They're
clearly corrupt to the core now.

~~~
thansharp
I haven't heard of this before. This is pretty interesting. Do you have a
source?

~~~
rhinoceraptor
There was recently an episode of Planet Money about one instance of it:

[http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/06/10/481597112/episo...](http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/06/10/481597112/episode-705-the-
muscle-patents)

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aerioux
HN: Is the future of engineeirng research private? e.g. OpenAI or
Amazon/Facebook/Google/Baidu - who seem to have taken many of the world's top
AI researchers.

~~~
Qworg
A big chunk of it is already. MSR is the one of the largest corporate research
organizations.

~~~
raziel2701
What is MSR? Google gave me a bunch of weird results...

~~~
swang
I'm guessing Microsoft Research.

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terravion
Does anyone know where we can find out more about what the AWS roadmap in this
space is?

Based on [https://aws.amazon.com/machine-
learning/](https://aws.amazon.com/machine-learning/)

It seems like some of the competing cloud offerings might be slightly ahead in
Machine Learning / Computer Vision type stuff out of the box, but I would be
AWS has a plan to do more than catch-up.

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hobaak
Amazon is playing catch-up here in machine learning. Comparing the offerings
between google cloud and aws, google cloud has a lead. Not to mention
TensorFlow in cloud, you can use their ready-to-use model in voice,
translation and image. Does AWS have image tagging? I haven't seen yet.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ja2hxBAwG_0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ja2hxBAwG_0)

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mknocker
Maybe he will work on Amazon's newest project : Nucleus :)

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harry8
I wonder how big his pay increase is. I actually find all the "reasons that
aren't $bigpayrise" crap that people go on with in these personal PR things a
bit dishonest. I'd bet it's a very large pay increase. I'd be amazed if he
isn't getting paid in excess of 350k Which I think is more than CMU pay.

Yeah sorry to be rude and mention money, I just find it more rude to lie and
make pretence it's not important when it so clearly is. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe
he's such a bad negotiator it's not a pay increase, maybe CMU pay in bushels
of gold? But if it isn't a pay increase, it's possible to say so.

~~~
beambot
Academics are necessarily optimizing for something other than money. Nobody
spends 4-7 years obtaining a PhD and then another 5-7 years pursuing tenure if
their primary motivation in life is money.

The reality is: Academia can be a real shitty gig when it comes down to it. A
vast majority of a professor's life is spent dealing with politics,
administrative minutiae, "service", pedantic peer review, teaching, and
writing grants. By the time all of that's done, you have no time left for the
"fun" parts: doing the research, communicating results and having impact, and
seeing its effects on the world. Not to mention the abysmal funding climate,
changing role of universities, and the fact that many fields (esp. in CS) are
now being pushed further, faster, and better by industry...

There's a mass exodus going on right now. At least 25% of the professors I
know (I'm friends with many) have either left or are thinking about leaving
academia.

~~~
mattkrause
Bingo.

CS is lucky in that it's relatively cheap to study. Other than compute time,
all most people need is a good coffee maker and a white board. Biology
professors need to bring in an order of magnitude more grant money to keep
their labs running. As a result, most of them do very little of their own
research; they may look at data or plan an experiment with a grad student or
postdoc, but the vast majority of their time is spent raising money or
reviewing other people's work.

~~~
danieltillett
Having been a biology professor this is 100% accurate except most of your time
is spent dealing with politics and administrative garbage.

~~~
mattkrause
From your profile, it looks like you got out. Any regrets (or advice)?

~~~
danieltillett
Yes I regret every day leaving science as I love it. In an ideal world I would
still be a professional scientist, but we don't live in an ideal world so you
have to make the best of what opportunities you have - I certainly can't
complain about my life.

My only advice is seize the chances that come your way and make the most of
them. It is all too easy to stay in the warm cocoon of academia even when you
know you should leave.

~~~
jawilson2
I got out a little over a year ago. I was a BME PhD and did a lot of software
engineering and signal analysis of brain signals for brain-computer
interfaces. I was a neurology professor for a few years (after a 4 year
neurosurgery postdoc), and decided academia wasn't for me. I now work at a
trading firm as a quant researcher/trading system software engineer. I have
never been happier, but definitely miss the science part of research (i.e.,
NOT grant writing, politics, etc). I have been doing part time consulting work
on Upwork focusing primarily on helping with biomedical signal analysis and
software/app design. I still get to be involved in that niche, but now I have
money left to feed my kids after all my student loans have been paid. We are
actually able to buy a house, which was going to be more than a decade away
had I stayed in academia (and got NIH funding, and tenure, etc). I guess I
value financial security and that of my kids too much to sacrifice my life for
doing science.

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c_m_u
CMU, CMU...

Surely that acronym must mean something...

Clock Multiplier Unit?

Oh well, I guess we'll never know because the author never explains the
intended meaning.

~~~
jsolson
It seems to assume people who read a CS professor's blog or a site called
Hacker News will know Carnegie Mellon University, given that it has
consistently hosted a top-5 CS program for the last 20+ years.

~~~
countryqt30
Yeah, but it is VEEERY poor in all the other fields. World rank eighty
something? xD

~~~
Arcten
Not all the fields; both its Drama and its Robotics programs are very good,
among others.

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tropo
They work well together. The drama students like wearing costumes (for
example, robot costumes) and even the dumbest drama student is still way
better than the typical robot AI. It's all an act.

