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Facebook AI Research Expands with New Academic Collaborations

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Re: Facebook AI Research Expands with New Academic Collaborations

#21

Post by chriskanan »

To summarize why I think professors are going with this arrangement (in order):

1) Much less, if any, grant writing. A standard NSF $500K 3 year grant provides a lab about $100K per year (due to university overhead). This will support 1-2 PhD students on a pittance of a stipend.

2) Less teaching (1 course once a year)

3) Computing resources that are far greater than you could get a grant for. One NVIDIA DGX-1 is about $100K. Very hard to get a grant for something like that. Companies have far greater resources than just one DGX-1

4) Access to software engineering personnel to help with research

5) Access to data, and the ability to create new datasets. Many datasets cost over $100K to make (e.g., those for semantic segmentation). Very hard to get a grant to make a dataset (I've tried)

6) Much better media relations to popularize your research

7) Bigger salary

A big part of this, in my opinion, is just that FB funds their labs. Getting government funding for a lab is difficult and frustrating and must be done continually, especially for these professors that run huge labs. NSF has a 7-15% success rate, and it can take a lot of effort to write a decent proposal. Including teaching regularly, this takes a lot of time from actual research. What these professors, I think, are negotiating is only teaching one semester a year and having a spigot of cash to fund their labs. They also gain access to massive amounts of data and computing resources.

Other companies don't seem to be as open to this arrangement as FB, but it has a lot of appeal to me (although I'm not a lover of FB).

Re: Facebook AI Research Expands with New Academic Collaborations

#22

Post by Kyragem »

As usual FB and other companies only collaborates with the "elite/Ivy League" schools. IMHO there are plenty of great researchers at non-elite schools and it would have been great if FB would start collaborating with those to reduce this vast concentration of academic research that has been happening for the past decade.

Re: Facebook AI Research Expands with New Academic Collaborations

#23

Post by s-shellfish »

cube2222 wrote: post #17
yulaow wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my area first everyone dropped messenger because some people had no accounts and moved instead to Whatsapp that guarantee that if you had a phone you could have easily an account in a matter of seconds (download and install) without having to create a full profile on some site you could not care less ( at this point of time in my old account no one is writing anymore in his home but instead using it just as a news…

I'm not denying that at all, we've moved on from telcos too. But it isn't a "just drop it" situation. It's a "gracefully transition when the social dynamics are in your favor" situation.

Social dynamics being in your favor can work for you and against you. It's delusional to think that just because you can make that graceful transition that that doesn't mean people aren't going to get pissed off at it. All you've done is silence their perspective as you are making that graceful transition. That builds up over time, and this is why this stuff goes in circles. You have to actively listen to people and make an effort to understand that the social dynamics being in your favor is not something you control. It controls you. You are the head of the crowd therefore all your actions must be aligned with the interests of the social dynamic. If you silence any single one of them you create a different dynamic. So you have to make the effort to be aware of alternative perspectives instead of choosing blind ignorance in the face of valid arguments. That's just the business of politics.

Re: Facebook AI Research Expands with New Academic Collaborations

#24

Post by [deleted] »

yaseer wrote: post #10
naturalgradient wrote: post #4

I understand the call of money but I cannot help but feel very negatively towards academics doing this with facebook of all organisations. After recent events, they cannot pretend not to know the impact and damage their work may have here. Excusing yourself with "I am just a researcher, I don't have anything to do with how my work is used" is just not good enough any more. I would categorically reject any collaborati…

Completely agree with this. I see Facebook as the least ethical, and least useful from a civilization standpoint of all the big tech firms. Google is driven by the same ad-clicking incentives, but the one-tricky pony has been developing other extremely societally useful tech, like self-driving cars and other moonshot projects. Apple and Microsoft sell products, they do not make users the product (on the whole). Toget…

[deleted]

Re: Facebook AI Research Expands with New Academic Collaborations

#26

Post by throwawayjava »

I think Facebook hate is clouding out reasonability in this thread. E.g., there's even a comment asserting that people who collaborate with facebook (a.k.a., Jessica Hodgins, Andrea Vedaldi, and Jitendra Malik) are "not worth their salt" (?!?!?!).

IDK. Maybe -- just possibly -- there do exist researchers who have their choice of funding spigots and are choosing to work with Facebook. Either that or HN has some damn high standards for what it means to be "worth their salt".

There's nothing intrinsically wrong with industry collaboration, even when it involves companies whose impact on the world you might not like. The big oil companies are, unlike FB, an actual existential threat to humanity. But I wouldn't fault renewable energy researchers for taking research dollars from those companies.

The question is: will the funded research agendas push science forward in the direction it was headed anyways, or will this money distort the type of research being done?

In any case, in a week we'll be back to our regular programming bemoaning the fall of the industry research lab and the paltry salaries offered to phd students...

Re: Facebook AI Research Expands with New Academic Collaborations

#27

Post by visarga »

yaseer wrote: post #10
naturalgradient wrote: post #4

I understand the call of money but I cannot help but feel very negatively towards academics doing this with facebook of all organisations. After recent events, they cannot pretend not to know the impact and damage their work may have here. Excusing yourself with "I am just a researcher, I don't have anything to do with how my work is used" is just not good enough any more. I would categorically reject any collaborati…

Completely agree with this. I see Facebook as the least ethical, and least useful from a civilization standpoint of all the big tech firms. Google is driven by the same ad-clicking incentives, but the one-tricky pony has been developing other extremely societally useful tech, like self-driving cars and other moonshot projects. Apple and Microsoft sell products, they do not make users the product (on the whole). Toget…

That might be true, but don't confuse FAIR (their DL research lab) with FB. FAIR employs good people doing interesting and useful research. They promoted pytorch as a framework, and it is perhaps the best framework for non industrial applications.

On a parallel line of thought, I prefer FB's React to Google's Angular. In both React and Pytorch I see the same elegant design. TensorFlow and Angular on the other part are unnecessarily complicated.

Re: Facebook AI Research Expands with New Academic Collaborations

#28

Post by username_123 »

What level are these professors being hired at within Facebook? What sort of base salaries, stock options do they command? Any idea on total compensation numbers here?

With them being part-time professors what are their university salaries like?

In total compensation between industry and university I'd imagine this would be a good deal.

Lastly, how does recruiting work here? I assume they don’t make these people go through 5-6 algorithmic interview rounds.

Re: Facebook AI Research Expands with New Academic Collaborations

#29

Post by 394549 »

mikert5671 wrote: post #9
naturalgradient wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any researcher in this area worth their salt can easily get cloud credit grants and collaborations from Google, Microsoft, Amazon. I pose if you go to Facebook, it's very much about money.

But can they get the huge volumes of data they have tagged out? The real time pipelines and internal tools? The community of people they will be working with?

>>> FB and Google are the only ones pushing the industry forward. The huge amount of data and computing power is what brings these researchers, its not all about money. In the long run the scientific advancements from these companies is a much higher positive than the negatives they have in the present.

> But can they get the huge volumes of data they have tagged out? The real time pipelines and internal tools? The community of people they will be working with?

It's highly problematic when a researcher pushes ethics aside in order to gain access to data and chase "long run ... scientific advancements."

Re: Facebook AI Research Expands with New Academic Collaborations

#30

Post by ahartmetz »

yulaow wrote: post #11
naturalgradient wrote: post #4

I understand the call of money but I cannot help but feel very negatively towards academics doing this with facebook of all organisations. After recent events, they cannot pretend not to know the impact and damage their work may have here. Excusing yourself with "I am just a researcher, I don't have anything to do with how my work is used" is just not good enough any more. I would categorically reject any collaborati…

Honestly at this point it is also ethically "controverse" to work for facebook in any position. Obviously, in my personal opinion and I can understand that a lot of people don't care about it

Heck, you could even go as far as saying that Facebook is ethically "challenged".
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