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posted by janrinok on Monday June 01 2015, @05:35PM   Printer-friendly
from the driving-them-away dept.

While Uber Technologies Inc. and Carnegie Mellon University announced a partnership to develop autonomous car technology in February, Uber's actions earlier in the year have left Carnegie Mellon's robotics research in jeopardy:

Carnegie Mellon University is scrambling to recover after Uber Technologies Inc. poached at least 40 of its researchers and scientists earlier this year, a raid that has left one of the world's top robotics research institutions in a crisis.

Uber envisions autonomous cars that could someday replace its tens of thousands of contract drivers. With virtually no in-house capability, the San Francisco company went to the one place in the world with enough talent to build a team instantly: Carnegie Mellon's National Robotics Engineering Center.

Flush with cash after raising more than $5 billion from investors, Uber offered some scientists bonuses of hundreds of thousands of dollars and a doubling of salaries to staff the company's new tech center in Pittsburgh, according to one researcher at NREC.

The hiring spree in January and February set off alarm bells. Facing a massive drain of talent and cash, Herman Herman, the newly elevated director of the NREC, made a presentation May 6 to staff to explain the situation and seek ideas on how to stabilize the center, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

The short presentation at the school here laid out the issues. In all, Uber took six principal investigators and 34 engineers. The talent included NREC's director, Tony Stentz, and most of the key program directors. Before Uber's recruiting, NREC had more than 100 engineers and scientists developing technology for companies and the U.S. military.


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  • (Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Tuesday June 02 2015, @04:28AM

    by MichaelDavidCrawford (2339) Subscriber Badge <mdcrawford@gmail.com> on Tuesday June 02 2015, @04:28AM (#191023) Homepage Journal

    admittedly I should, I apologize that I don't.

    I had just started quantum field theory in grad school when I became profoundly psychotic, admitted myself into a psych hospital, then upon my discharge dropped out of school.

    I'd like to go back sometime but I'm not so sure I'll do particle physics. There are many reasons I would enjoy the work but I want to solve more pressing problems, like how to feed hungry people.

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    Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 02 2015, @06:05AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 02 2015, @06:05AM (#191052)

    I'm pretty sure grad school drives a certain type of person crazy.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 03 2015, @12:42AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 03 2015, @12:42AM (#191357)

    I thought that feeding hungry people was all about distribution (logistics) -- the food is available, just not getting to all the places it's needed? In some cases, local despots may be grabbing the food for themselves, or to starve out their enemies?

    • (Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday June 03 2015, @02:10AM

      by MichaelDavidCrawford (2339) Subscriber Badge <mdcrawford@gmail.com> on Wednesday June 03 2015, @02:10AM (#191396) Homepage Journal

      we have lots of food but it's not equitably distributed.

      Why just today I read in The Columbian of Vancouver, Washington that yellowfin sole trawlers throw back 82,000,000 pounds of halibut each year, because one is required to catch halibut with hooks and lines whereas yellowfin is caught with nets. Why don't they feed that fish to the poor?

      In the developing world a very common problem is official corruption. That's not just the case for foreign aid; India has always struggled to feed its own poor but the vast majority of the money or food or what have you is taken by corrupt officials.

      There are many approaches one might take. I'm not completely clear how I could do it with a physics phd - if I were so clear, then I'd already be in grad school.

      The US Agency for International Development contracted with a former employer of mine - "Geonex, the Nation's Largest Mapping Company" - to perform aerial photography of the Nile River so as to improve crop production there. It's hard to explain in a quick comment but there are lots of things that multispectral remote sensing can do to improve agriculture. Among the benefits of this is that Geonex was working directly with the farmers, rather than through the government or corporate business structure.

      Consider that just recently someone invented a novel one-wheel plastic tank, in which the tank is also the wheel, one can fill it with ten or twenty gallons of water then pull it by a handle. For millenia, women have traditionally carried pots of water on their heads.

      There are ways this can go terribly wrong. A massive foreign aid project dug hand-pumped water wells all over Bangladesh. In the short term this was unpopular as the women regarded carrying water as a way to get away from the men. In the long term, the water was found to be laced with arsenic.

      --
      Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]