Leaving CMU
blog.smola.org
blog.smola.org
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?
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.
There is also the side that it would make it harder for startups to compete as the progress is made on training on large datasets using huge clusters of machines. Such datasets and compute power is impossible to acquire for small companies.
http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/06/10/481597112/episo...
Since research at Amazon is new, I have no idea how well they're going to handle giving back to the community long-term. But I'm interning with a verification group there and the gist seems to be that if the group wants to give back and there's at least one person who's influential enough to get what they ask for, the group will give back.
I think it's actually problematic that research and industry concerns don't correspond more often. Yeah, it's not our job to be engineers and ship products, but it seems like there are important questions we ought to be answering as researchers that we consider industry ground, but that engineers don't actually have the background to solve. Some of these are totally arbitrary, chosen by the community, deemed "uninteresting" if you want to get published anywhere decent, even though there's plenty of interesting work left.
Based on 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.
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.
However, it probably feels wrong to write a blogpost and say "I did it for the money". So people conveniently leave the money part out but I think we can all agree that it's probably definitely a non-trivial factor in their decision. It just happens to make more sense to tactfully focus a blog post on the better opportunity at hand rather than the 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.
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.
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.
This seems to be a common sentiment. I wonder if someone has done the statistics on this.
Being able to start to avoid the "service" of donating my time to support the paywalled journal system and actually enjoying open source development again (even though I get to do less of it) is the best part.
Nonetheless, top professors get paid decently (although obviously they could make 5x in industry). Michael Jordan at UC Berkeley makes ~320k. Newly tenured CS profs make ~160k at UC Berkeley. Source: https://ucannualwage.ucop.edu/wage/
Something I didn't mention earlier is also the fact that if they really needed extra money they can easily consult on the side, as well, which is totally okay in academia (unlike most employees at companies).
It is very rare to be outright prohibited from consulting on the side as an employee. I currently do exactly that (work for a company that sells consultants and developers to its clients on contract) and we are only prohibited from doing the same on the side if it is a conflict of interest. I've never heard of someone going to their supervisor with a lead and being told they could not pursue it.
It is extremely common for CS professors to consult. And there are absolutely no conflict of interest restrictions. CS professors will consult in their direct area of research.
a CS professor with enough seniority to have a family
[...] is going to be pulling [...] more than enough to
comfortably raise a family
And if the country's policy is "well of course you're struggling to support your family, it's your own fault for not waiting until you achieve tenure at average age 39" [1] well I can understand academics leaving academia for industry. The average age of first childbirth in the US is 26, with steep rises in complications beyond age 35 [2].
Unless you're a man planning to have a child with a woman 10 years your junior, getting tenure before having a child doesn't sound like a great idea to me.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professors_in_the_United_State... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_maternal_age
Unfortunately, moving because you believe Amazon will throw resources at a problem shows a distinct lack of familiarity with the "frugality" aspect of Amazon's culture.
Besides, it sounds like the resource he's particularly interested in is compute (and maybe storage) and AWS has this in spades...
The compensation was ok at the time, but starting to lag their peers by the time I left (within a year of leaving my comp had a little more than doubled). My understanding is that they've made an effort to catch up there. Regardless, Pittsburgh is a staggeringly cheap place to live (I grew up there) while Seattle is decidedly not (I live there now). Unless he's tripled his comp, he'll be making effectively less. That wasn't my point, though, I assume he's not moving for the money.
I was actually talking about resources to dedicate to research.
What makes you think Amazon will be willing to supply compute (assuming they actually have substantial excess cycles to sell, particularly on GPUs, FPGAs, or ASICs) to internal development efforts? Simply having the resource doesn't mean making it available. Actually making appropriate resources available to people trying to solve problems would run completely counter to my experience there.
As the lab head, I imagine he won't have a hard time getting resources--they must have given him something like a startup package to lure him there.
As a big name, they have a strong incentive to keep him happy: if he were to leave in a justifiable huff (e.g., "they promised me tons of compute and all I got were these Fire Phones"), it would make recruiting much harder.
Perhaps Amazon has changed, or AWS is simply different/better in this regard.
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.
At that point, if you haven't already guessed that CMU means "Carnegie Mellon University" -- an acronym that's not quite "MIT" but still well-known in engineering circles -- you'll get the definition in the very first Google search result, even for just "CMU"
So, by and large, it's actually a fantastic university if you want to be an engineer, a computer scientist, an artist, or a business person. It certainly isn't "VEEERY poor" in all other fields.
Like at the same level.