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Comment by sokoloff | Hacker News Reader

> JHU should make these comments!, and also offer their designs for free given these are public orgs using mostly public dollars

JHU is private. It seems like this research may have been sponsored by Black & Decker, also private.

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Yes, these mechanical engineering senior design projects at JHU are all sponsored by some organization or another, and the sponsor gets to keep the end product (and in this case also patent pending). Source: did a mechanical engineering senior design project at JHU 6 years ago (though mine was less successful, haha)

Was yours the pizza transport box for Pizza Hut? ;)

"Johns Hopkins researchers' success in winning federal funding—which accounted for close to 87% of its 2022 R&D expenditure—enables them to pursue projects in an array of fields, from human genetics to artificial intelligence." [1] https://hub.jhu.edu/2024/01/05/nsf-higher-education-research...

Oh yes... "private" org using public dollars is more appropriate.

It appears as if this specific research was funded by Black & Decker. If they couldn't get the benefits from it, it's not as if they'd pay JHU to do and make public this research, but rather that they'd do the research a different way, likely robbing the JHU students of the real-world problem-solving experience as a capstone project of their engineering curriculum.

How JHU's other, unrelated research is funded doesn't seem terribly relevant to this privately-funded, patent-pending innovation.

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