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Comment by exhilaration | Hacker News Reader

For anyone curious about why Apple is allowing its researchers to (anonymously) publish papers like these on an Apple blog, it's because of this:

Apple’s director of AI research Russ Salakhutdinov has announced at a conference that the company’s machine-learning researchers will be free to publish their findings. This is an apparent reversal of Apple's previous position.

Refusing permission to publish was said to be keeping the company out of the loop and meaning that the best people in the field didn’t want to work for Apple.

From: https://9to5mac.com/2016/12/06/apple-ai-researchers-can-publ...

We will see whether this move is sufficient to attract the top talent they're looking for.

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I think that is something that is worth repeating, telling and shouting: AI research is being open-sourced (arguably the most important research to make in the open, ever) because researcher DEMANDED it. And were ready to refuse job offers for ideological reasons.

As someone who has turned down offers in the military, I have often heard that it was childish and inefficient to have ideals when hunting for jobs. Well, here is the proof that it is not.

I really congratulate these researchers. By their perseverance alone they may be helping avoid one of the most worrisome dystopia ever anticipate by SF writers.

Meh, not really. You're expected to publish in the field and your future job prospects depend on it. These people just want to ensure they can easily go to other companies/orgs.

Yeah. Hard to develop a world class reputation squirreled away in the basement of Apple. This is the real reason Apple doesn't want their people publishing. Because Google will know who to snatch away!

It's very much a kick the ladder away type of company.

I guess the Apple should pay them well enough if they don't want them to leave.

But you know they'll just spearhead another collusion with other tech company.

> Well, here is the proof that it is not.

For people with top-rated skills in heavy, heavy demand.

If you're the unicorn that everyone's after, you've always been able to dictate your terms.

People in high demand can make their own conditions. They can ask for equity, more money, a company yacht... Them, they demanded open publication. And it was acceptable to the company because all the other competitors were facing the same demand.

I like the mixed metaphor

I wonder - is there really any prestige to be had from publishing anonymously?

It is not an anonymous publication!

1. The article is based on a paper submitted to the prestigious CVPR, which is obviously not anonymous. ( https://arxiv.org/abs/1612.07828 ) They mention this at the end of the post.

2. The blog's "journal" name is misleading. It means "journal" in the sense of a record of some of the stuff happening at Apple. My guess is that the blog post does not name authors because it was written by an Apple representative who manages public communications---probably because Apple is very very particular about managing their brand and what they say publicly. I wouldn't put it beyond Apple to hire someone well-versed in ML just for this role.

So, while they are starting to allow researchers to publish, they have quite some distance to go to encourage their researchers to communicate freely. One step at a time, I guess...

PS: Somehow the SNAFU of deliberately calling it a "journal" is very reminiscent of Steve Jobs's chutzpah.

Well, the "journal" in the sense of academic publishing and in the sense of a blog derive from the same root: a continuing first-person description of one's activities, updated periodically over a stretch of time.

> It is not an anonymous publication!

So who wrote this? You say it's "based on a paper" written by known authors, but did they write this publication? Why not put their names not on it? Or did a representative write it, as you suggest? We don't know. It's anonymous.

> The blog's "journal" name is misleading

The usage seems similar to that of "Bell Labs Technical Journal" or "Lincoln Laboratory Journal."

> You say it's "based on a paper" written by known authors, but did they write this publication?

I'm confused - for me the answer is quite obvious. The authors listed on the CVPR paper wrote the published paper or are you suggesting otherwise?

The question is who is the author of this post.

It is unattributed, and while clearly based on the CVPR it is different enough that if it were a traditional publication it would be counted separately. If someone wanted to cite this post, what would they cite?

By comparison, distil.pub is a properly citable journal: https://distill.pub/2017/momentum/#citation

That's how it seems, but OP suggested it was written by a communications department. I'm not sure. Why leave out the authors' names?

No, none. I suppose they want researchers to be motivated merely by the ability to contribute knowledge to the ML community?

> I suppose they want researchers to be motivated merely by the ability to contribute knowledge

I might phrase it more as "They want researchers who are already motivated by the contribution of knowledge"

I know that if I were an ML researcher I would not be happy with all my findings being horded by a single company when the field overall is making lots of progress.

All of them can claim the credit for any given article when looking for another job later!

I would think the proper way is to say you worked for that department and mention articles published from there.

One hand if ALL papers were forced to be published without authors then all shity papers would dissapear (which is 80% of current lot), there will be no "publish or perish" and lot of eliteness and egoism will go away.

On other hand, how do you decide if person is worth talking to? worth collaborating? worth giving tenure? The problem exacerbates when supply side dominates many magnitudes over demand side. This is precisely why we as human always keep establishing trust relationships that allows us to filter out signals from noise. You monitor writings of people you know have produced stuff on interests, not every random thing out there.

Who the hell publishes for prestige? Most people won't be able to understand, let alone care, about your research.

> Most people won't be able to understand, let alone care, about your research?

The intended audience is other researchers in your field, not the general public.

Your reputation as an academic or researcher rest on your publication record (plus your ability to land funding). If you publish highly-cited papers in prestigious journals or conference proceedings, you're considered among the best in your field. This opens the door to promotions, better job offers, etc.

Researchers at Apple have historically forgone the ability to publish. They have no reputation in the field. This significantly harms their ability to get a job elsewhere as a researcher.

When you get to college, you'll be very disappointed to discover that's that's literally the only reason people publish in most cases. It ain't for the money, that's for sure. It's how you make a name for yourself amongst your peers in the same field.

You might get a sneak peek at the publish-or-perish dynamic to a lesser degree when you get to high school- sometimes you can get into special programs where you have a chance to help out with research being done by college students. If you get into a really good program and really distinguish yourself, you can even get your name alongside theirs on the paper.

Unfortunately, you will find that believe it or not, those college students are not already working out which color of Ferrari to buy with their sweet advance from SIGGRAPH or wherever. I think they deserve it personally, because I really care really hard about pushing science and engineering forward, but sadly the big bucks are still going to NFL players and pop stars instead.

Professional prestige. If you need an ELY5 answer plese just request one...

> Most people won't be able to understand, let alone care, about your research.

This is what lead me to get out of research and start my first company.

I was in a research group at PARC doing work on programming language epistemology and semantics. The group papers were typically mostly predicate calculus. At a POPL our group lead presented a paper; I was in the audience. After the paper we got polite and even enthusiastic applause, but two people in front of my in the audience spoke during the applause: Q: "Did you understand that?" A: "Not a single word"

I realized there were perhaps a dozen people in the world who even understood what we were working on, and of those 12 at least 10, if not all 12 of them were smarter/understood the subject much better than I.

It really didn't seem like it was going to make a difference to the universe.

Why would I want to publish stuff if I cannot put my name on it? I guess that shows that "rich != smart".

The occasional blowhard professor aside, there is a thread of idealism in many research circles that advancing the field is more important than advancing one's stature. My favorite example of this is all of the research that went into the creation of Bitcoin and the still unknown identity of its creator.

Not to presume any motivations of Bitcoin's creator, but it doesn't hurt when the success of your research also nets you an incredible amount of wealth. Though, as far as I know the presumed wallet that he owns has not had any funds moved off of it so at least their interest is aligned with the success of Bitcoin.

That's a nice example. But putting your name on your research is not so much about stature. Publishing anonymously is more akin to giving your baby up for adoption. Sure, there are people doing this, and they even might have a good reason for it, but if you demand that upfront then most people never would have babies.

Fair enough. I know lots of researchers are very personally invested in their work and I can imagine the sting. I promise I wasn't calling you a blowhard or anything :)

Except that this is clearly only to keep the price of the researchers down. This is shameful.

I don't know. I think there's a benefit to having anonymized research. It forces the work to stand on its own. Sort of an extension to blinded peer-review processes. Plus, I highly doubt Apple researchers, or researchers at any other tech giants, are toiling away for peanuts.

I don't quite understand the 'blowhard professor' and bitcoin references. There are are hundreds of thousands of attributed peer-reviewed publications per year by serious academics who want to further the field.

You're absolutely right. There are. Blowhard professors, in my opinion, are the ones that prioritize recognition over research. There's a thread in certain research circles that would eschew any such recognition in the hopes of putting their work on a pedestal in place of themselves (e.g., the Bitcoin people, again in my opinion).

There is also a thread of idealism in many research circles that the researchers would like to continue working on a liveable wage. Having some public work helps that.

It's pretty obscene that you equate any desire for recognition of your work with being a blowhard.

Livable wage? Researchers at Silicon Valley powerhouse companies aren't exactly toiling away for peanuts, are they? Also, the implication of my statement is that blowhards tend to prioritize their desire for recognition, not that the desire for recognition makes you a blowhard. Hardly an "obscene" assertion.

I would argue the Bitcoin author being secret has created more intrigue and possibly more noterriery. It is believed to be Nick Szabo, btw.

There is also a security issue as thought that he has a lot of bitcoins hidden away.

Fair enough. Maybe I'm being an idealist hoping for some idealism in the world.

And yeah, there've been several theories about who it might be. It's like the Banksy of the cryptocurrency world. Just as cool, but way less street cred :)

No, but "machine learning researcher working for a major company" = "smart".

I am assuming it is because they are getting paid by Apple.

> Apple’s director of AI research Russ Salakhutdinov has announced at a conference that the company’s machine-learning researchers will be free to publish their findings. This is an apparent reversal of Apple's previous position.

How about researchers in other fields?!?

Right?! I can't wait for the computer-human interaction research teams to jump on this trend and start publishing! The CHI/HCI/HCC community would flip out. My favorite example of how this sort of transparency would benefit the community: In 2009, Microsoft published an academic paper called "Mouse 2.0" (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/mouse-2...), where they walked through the research prototypes for touch-sensitive peripherals. The paper was met with awe and acclaim... A mere few months before Apple took the Magic Mouse to market.

> A mere few months before Apple took the Magic Mouse to market

Apple released the iPhone 2 years before the Magic Mouse and that paper was released.

Quite sure that it was also an inspiration.

Definitely.

Months? The Magic Mouse was released a few weeks later, not nearly enough time to develop the product based on the paper.

My implication was that Apple had been doing that research work behind the scenes the entire time.

> A mere few months before Apple took the Magic Mouse to market.

So you're implying that Apple saw the idea, copied it, and used it to bring a product to market—in months? That's not how any of that works.

No, the implication was that Apple had been working on similar ideas but hadn't published them.

Exactly!

Apple and many tech companies are a world where association is everything. “I work at Palantir” means a lot. “I work at Uber” at the moment may be both positive and negative. The academic world is not like this at all. Paper count is everything. Churn them out with all the power you have. Most universities allow their teachers to take sabbaticals on the hope (and sometimes mandate) that they will publish. So Apple was not going to find many academic researchers who were okay with not being allowed to interact in the same way with their community.

>“I work at Palantir” means a lot.

To who? When I hear that I just think that means you are a naive fresh graduate doing basic data cleaning tasks.

> When I hear that I just think that means you are a naive fresh graduate doing basic data cleaning tasks

Isn't that presumptuous?

Is it presumptuous if it's true with high probability?

Really, anonymously, wow. Apple going to crazy lengths to keep the price of their researchers down. I'm never stepping foot there again.

It's not anonymous. The end of the article says

> For more details on the work we describe in this article, see our CVPR paper “Learning from Simulated and Unsupervised Images through Adversarial Training” [10].

And the citation is

> [10] A. Shrivastava, T. Pfister, O. Tuzel, J. Susskind, W. Wang, R. Webb, Learning from Simulated and Unsupervised Images through Adversarial Training. CVPR, 2017.

So it looks like those are the authors.

It is not at all clear that this new publication indicates that researchers will not also be allowed to publish in existing journals.

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