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> I'm glad to see these scientists directing their work to civilian concerns rather than military purposes

Is that what they were doing? Because I initially thought "what a waste... a lot of public research will now be locked up in one business's competitive advantage" - but if they were just building stuff for the military that would get locked up for decades anyway, this is better.

NREC definitely does some military work, but it also does quite a bit of civilian work (things like pattern recognition to improve industrial farming systems by discerning types or quality of produce).

But that research is generally privately-funded and privately-owned, too. NREC is not---in general---a hotbed of publicly-published common-use research.

Where has Uber set up shop in Lawrenceville?

Towards the strip district from NREC.

In the Bay Area houses that used to be valued at 300k are now over 1 million. $100k sounds like a steal in that case.

Exactly :)

40 new, very-well-paying tech jobs within city limits has to be good for Pittsburgh's tech ecosystem.

Only if CM replaces them. If they decide that the robotics lab is unrecoverable then the jobs will simply transfer from CM to Uber which has no direct benefit to Pittsburgh at all.

At double the salary, though