You Cannot Serve Two Masters: The Harms of Dual Affiliation • Hacker News Board

Re: You Cannot Serve Two Masters: The Harms of Dual Affiliation

#81

Post by PAClearner » Sun, Aug 12, 2018, 1:34 AM UTC

mattkrause wrote: post #80

PAClearner wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the moment a 'grant' has concrete deliverables (to a private firm?) it ceases being a grant and starts being some kind of consulting. I think people try to do this around ucla pretty often i.e. (I give a professor money -they do the research- I keep the IP)- it is pretty frowned upon in that context. In ML and CS I think this is probably more kosher-Michael Kearns seems to have a pretty thriving consultancy.

DARPA structures a lot of its research funding like this. The 'award' is a contract, typically for data, models, etc. For example, the statement of work for my last project has about a dozen deliverables of the form "tabulated data comparing [outcome] against [experimental variable 1], [exp. variable 2], ...." or "a computational model relating...." As far as I can tell, they are not actually interested in the data i…

mmmm today i learned something new-thanks.

Re: You Cannot Serve Two Masters: The Harms of Dual Affiliation

#82

Post by Nasrudith » Mon, Aug 13, 2018, 1:17 AM UTC

tialaramex wrote: post #34

gwbas1c wrote: post #23

When I took computer science in 1999-2003, the best professors had rather significant industry experience. The worst professors were completely clueless because they never worked with a large computer program in their life. I would have been thrilled if my freshman and sophomore computer science classes were taught by guest "professors" who had legitimate careers, and occasionally took the time to teach a class. I'm…

> The worst professors were completely clueless because they never worked with a large computer program in their life. Seems like what you needed was a trade school. Maybe having a degree from a more prestigious university helped you get an initial job, but in terms of the things you were actually looking for, that's trade school stuff and barely overlaps with Computer Science.

That reminds me of the foibles of some of the Greek philosophers and thinking that checking if the theory has anything to do with reality would pollute the purity of thought and thus concluding that projectiles must have triangular paths where they drop at the end once they run out of impetus and women must have fewer teeth then men because they have smaller heads and all teeth are clearly the same size. Their 'wisdom' was clearly the height of foolishness despite lifetimes of thinking because they insisted upon their alienation as an inherit good.

Keeping in contact with industry is important even for those who work with the theoretical as a source of inspiration and applications. Even if the computer science itself should be technically divorced from language watching it in action and understanding it helps realize what is important so they don't spend all of their effort on minimizing memory footprint at the cost of other constraints. Following what they are doing informs both the industry and the professor.

Theory without reference to reality can easily lead to a solipsistic spiral that leads nowhere to put it politely. While it is good to explore the theoretical foundations breakthroughs come from noticing what exists in reality and understanding it. An immortal's eternity with classical physic in an infinite white walled room with infinite ink would not come up with quantum physics much less subatomic particles. Alienation from industry should be something to be ashamed of not to be proud of.

Re: You Cannot Serve Two Masters: The Harms of Dual Affiliation

#83

Post by Nasrudith » Mon, Aug 13, 2018, 1:42 AM UTC

sharemywin wrote: post #6

I find the idea odd. if you want to contribute to academic research create a grant(s) with your budget.

The real question is why should they? The cynical golden rule is in force here - the one with the gold makes the rules. There needs to be some sort of carrot or stick to get them to go along with 'their way' such as getting the best results or people judging their output as biased. "It is the way we have always done things." is a statement of complacency not a justification.