from the can-you-recruit-some-more-please? dept.
Uber poached around 50 scientists working on self-driving car technology at Carnegie Mellon University's National Robotics Engineering Center earlier this year. Uber had been partnering with CMU to research building its own autonomous vehicles. But then it pulled from a massive venture funding war chest to hire away a lot of CMU's talent for its Uber Advanced Technologies Center.
Now, Uber appears to be publicly trying to win back the good graces of the academic community by announcing a $5.5 million gift to CMU. The money will support hiring a new robotics faculty chair and three fellowships.
"Poached around 50 scientists." CMU scientists are like the King's Deer.
Related Stories
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.
Original Submission
Uber will pick up ride-hailing passengers with autonomous cars in a test beginning in Pittsburgh next month. Pittsburgh is the home of Carnegie Mellon University:
Starting later this month, Uber will allow customers in downtown Pittsburgh to summon self-driving cars from their phones, crossing an important milestone that no automotive or technology company has yet achieved. Google, widely regarded as the leader in the field, has been testing its fleet for several years, and Tesla Motors offers Autopilot, essentially a souped-up cruise control that drives the car on the highway. Earlier this week, Ford announced plans for an autonomous ride-sharing service. But none of these companies has yet brought a self-driving car-sharing service to market.
Uber's Pittsburgh fleet, which will be supervised by humans in the driver's seat for the time being, consists of specially modified Volvo XC90 sport-utility vehicles outfitted with dozens of sensors that use cameras, lasers, radar, and GPS receivers. Volvo Cars has so far delivered a handful of vehicles out of a total of 100 due by the end of the year. The two companies signed a pact earlier this year to spend $300 million to develop a fully autonomous car that will be ready for the road by 2021.
Uber also acquired self-driving truck startup Otto.
It is not clear whether Uber users will be able to opt out of getting the surprise autonomous Volvo SUVs sent to them (due to privacy or safety concerns), but rides in the autonomous cars will be free during the Pittsburgh test.
Also at NYT, WSJ, TechCrunch, and The Verge.
Previously: Uber Testing Driverless Car in Pittsburgh
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 16 2015, @07:05AM
First they want to pay untrained unqualified untrustworthy drivers to drive strangers around in their cars because cheap labor is cheap. Now they want the cars to drive themselves because no labor cost means more profit. Fuck the evil capitalist pigs. Fuck Uber.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 16 2015, @07:07AM
Mod down the troll because User uses Apps and Apps are Trendy! Trendy! Trendy! Trendy! Trendy! Trendy! Trendy! Trendy! Trendy! Trendy! Trendy! Trendy! Uber is the greatest!!!!!!!
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 16 2015, @07:11AM
Work is for losers, I monetize my blog and I got 100000000000000000000000000000 followers. Such win! I'm like totally social on those interwebs. I do nothing and still get paid because I'm a cyberbeggar!
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 16 2015, @08:44AM
So 2% of all bacteria [sciencedaily.com] are on your blog? Must be a really filthy blog! :-)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 16 2015, @07:42AM
The fact that it's in business in the first place is remarkable. I never really understood why they are required at all. I mean if I would create an app that can be used to connect people for getting a ride and gave it away for free, then people could get / offer rides. There's a marketplace and no middleman is required, is there? Except it's illegal to do this and I already have some telephone numbers on which to call up a 'black' taxi, if I want a cheaper fare. But somehow if a company owns the marketplace (but *isn't* a taxi company) - things are magically different and it's ok for them to make a profit.
It must be something fundamental I'm missing. Don't need uber though, not using their service.
(Score: 2) by penguinoid on Wednesday September 16 2015, @07:52AM
A coupon for "We'll give you 500,000 free car rides once we develop driverless cars"
RIP Slashdot. Killed by greedy bastards.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 16 2015, @08:38AM
I didn't even know that Carnegie Mellon owned those scientists. I thought slavery was history by now.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by TheRaven on Wednesday September 16 2015, @09:24AM
The problem is that universities don't offer salaries that are competitive with industry. Fun fact: in the UK, to qualify for visa category that is used for high-skill employees, you must be coming to a job earning at least £35K/year. There is only one exemption for this rule: university postdocs. We have a very hard time hiring, because our undergraduates leave with multiple job offers earning about as much as a senior lecturer (very roughly equivalent to associate professor in the US), and people leave the PhD programme with job offers that match a professor's salary.
It's a bit easier in the USA, because academic salaries can vary between fields to compensate for industry wages, but they're still quite a bit lower than the same person could get in industry. The usual compensation is that you get a lot more freedom in academia (that's why I'm still here!), but if a company comes a long and says 'we want you to work on the stuff that you're working on now, with no need to apply for grants, long-term funding, and a higher salary' then most people would probably leave.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 16 2015, @10:06AM
That still doesn't make it stealing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 16 2015, @12:44PM
It still is figuratively. You partner with someone, then they decide to walk away and take all your resources, well yeah you just had your resources "stolen" and that harbors a feeling of ill will. Is it literally stealing? No, of course not. But good luck with them trying to partner with anyone else in the academic community, which is why they're trying to buy themselves back into their good graces.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 16 2015, @01:17PM
The problem is that with this kind of "figurative" use they imply that they own those workers, while in reality there's only some amount of unwritten trust broken. This is a dishonest and manipulative way of rounding towards home.
(Score: 2) by mmcmonster on Wednesday September 16 2015, @12:49PM
No, the problem is universities are generating a lot of PhDs. Too many to go into academia. So some of them get poached and the university recruits some others (or creates new ones) to fill the positions.
It's the natural order of things. Supply and demand. If the supply was low, the universities would be paying enough so that they wouldn't be poached away.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by mmcmonster on Wednesday September 16 2015, @12:53PM
(Replying to myself)
...But that still doesn't make what Uber did right. It's downright unsociable to hire away a whole programming team from a single place. If you want to take the head and a couple underlings, fine. Whatever. But 50 scientists from a single institution is a bit much.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Wednesday September 16 2015, @01:32PM
No, the problem is universities are generating a lot of PhDs. Too many to go into academia.
That may be true across all subjects, but it isn't in computer science. Getting people to stay in academia to do a PhD is hard, after the PhD is even harder. Our PhD students go on internships where they get salaries higher than their supervisor - it's pretty difficult to persuade them that staying is a good idea after that.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Wednesday September 16 2015, @02:45PM
That's not the problem at all.
The real problem is that funding for pure research has not kept pace with the ability of the educational system to churn out people capable of doing pure research. It's not like the resources don't exist to put these would-be scientists to work: the US current has the highest GDP and highest worker productivity of any nation that has ever existed in human history, and whether you're measuring in money or physical goods there's no major lack of the necessities of life like food, water, and housing on a national scale.
Now, you might argue: "They would be getting all kinds of investor funding if there was an ROI!". But the thing is, pure research could very easily have no ROI at all for the foreseeable future, or could have an absolutely astounding ROI that nobody could have predicted. On average, it's a huge benefit to both the country and humanity as a whole, but because the risk of failure of individual projects is so high nobody really wants to take the risk and instead will focus solely on applying other people's pure research to turn them into products that will make big bucks.
You might also argue: "But won't they just waste the money?" But the thing is, that's never been borne out in practice. The best way to generate scientific results, both historically and today, is to set up a place where you have a whole bunch of smart people working with little-to-no direction about what they do and access to the best equipment anyone can get their hands on. There are lots of different places like this that have existed historically: Library of Alexandria, Bayt al-Hikma, Oxford University, and Bell Labs to name a few.
So in my humble opinion, what we're actually seeing is a massive mis-allocation of resources away from potentially revolutionary scientific discoveries in favor of a tiny number of rich people having the best yachts. We're making those would-be physicists work as paper-pushers or even sometimes broom-pushers when we'd all be much better off if they could work as physicists.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday September 16 2015, @11:52PM
The real problem is that funding for pure research has not kept pace with the ability of the educational system to churn out people capable of doing pure research. It's not like the resources don't exist to put these would-be scientists to work: the US current has the highest GDP and highest worker productivity of any nation that has ever existed in human history, and whether you're measuring in money or physical goods there's no major lack of the necessities of life like food, water, and housing on a national scale.
Because we have better things to do with our society and resources than welfare for scientists.
You might also argue: "But won't they just waste the money?" But the thing is, that's never been borne out in practice.
Actually, it has. Consider the research boondoggles, like the International Space Station, ITER, or the SSC. There is no historic parallel to these sorts of programs. Thus, there is no historic analogue to the waste either.
We're making those would-be physicists work as paper-pushers or even sometimes broom-pushers when we'd all be much better off if they could work as physicists.
Well, we need paper pushers and broom-pushers too. You really should have a better argument than more money means more research.
The best way to generate scientific results, both historically and today, is to set up a place where you have a whole bunch of smart people working with little-to-no direction about what they do and access to the best equipment anyone can get their hands on. There are lots of different places like this that have existed historically: Library of Alexandria, Bayt al-Hikma, Oxford University, and Bell Labs to name a few.
This is the lack of accountability fantasy. If only we gave people a bunch of money to do research without any desire or effort to see that money used productively. My view is that scientific research is no different than any other human activity. It's subject to the same economic constraints and the same temptations.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Thursday September 17 2015, @05:04PM
Like what? Do you want more money for USAF planes that don't work like the F-35? Maybe luxury yachts or a higher price for Rembrandts?
The basic argument here follows these steps:
1. More scientists working as scientists means more scientific research happens.
2. More scientific research means more information about how the universe works.
3. More information about how the universe works means more technology to take advantage of that information.
4. More technology means more wealth and health for everybody with access to that technology.
What makes that a boondoggle? Last I checked, we've done all sorts of research up there about all sorts of subjects. I don't expect every single experiment they run to immediately turn into lots of wealth or anything, but they're definitely doing work that can't be done on Earth.
Absolutely. But there are plenty of people who aren't capable of being physicists that can do that work.
My point is that the value of scientific research is basically impossible to quantify before you do it, and the timeline for a return on your investment may be decades or even centuries long. For example, genetics will likely take about 160 years to go from initial experiments to useful technology in the form of treatments for genetic disease - the value of those treatments will be far more than the time and money spent on genetics for the last 160 years, but nobody could have predicted that in 1865. Because private economic activity is looking for maximizing short-term return on investment, no private investor would have funded any of this until very recently.
And the thing is, smart people just fooling around get some really good results. The most obvious example of this is a couple of guys fooling around trying to get a game running on an old computer lying around the lab - from that, we got Unix and C, both of which are far more valuable to humanity and industry than the cost of paying and supplying Dennis Ritchie et al.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday September 17 2015, @11:28PM
Like what? Do you want more money for USAF planes that don't work like the F-35? Maybe luxury yachts or a higher price for Rembrandts?
So because we waste money, we should waste money on your special interests? How about we not do that? And it's worth noting here that most funding of scientific research is just status signalling like luxury yachts.
What makes that a boondoggle? Last I checked, we've done all sorts of research up there about all sorts of subjects. I don't expect every single experiment they run to immediately turn into lots of wealth or anything, but they're definitely doing work that can't be done on Earth.
$100 billion makes that a boondoggle. As I've said elsewhere, a key problem here is considerable economic ignorance. And I have a long standing offer, if you want science at any cost, then give me a huge pile of money and I'll make sure science gets done.
Because private economic activity is looking for maximizing short-term return on investment, no private investor would have funded any of this until very recently.
No, this is wrong. It's the presence of considerable public funds to minimize any long term risk which created this short-term ROI trend. If you reward people to think short-term, then don't be surprised when they do. The huge public funding of scientific research is a key part of this problem BTW. Why risk your own research when you can get someone, who doesn't care whether you do anything or not, to fund it for you? That's why so many private research institutions, particularly in the business world, have declined in the past half century.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 16 2015, @10:32AM
Agreed, this inflation of s-word needs to be stopped. The definition of stealing or theft is not "anything that somehow violates someone's unwarranted expectations". It ought to be "unlawful transfer of real, legally protected, recognized property in such a manner that the original owner does not possess said property anymore".
It goes particularly ridiculous when there's a word available that has even more negative connotations yet is also more accurate.
(Score: 2) by tibman on Wednesday September 16 2015, @02:30PM
You can't buy loyalty. Carnegie Mellon was mistaken if they thought those researchers were working there for love and taking the money as a nice side benefit. If you want loyalty then you have to cultivate it. Not an easy thing to do. The sword cuts both ways though. Carnegie Mellon may not hire a researcher because that person jumps from job to job every year. The University probably has no interest in investing training time in someone who will jump ship with all that organizational knowledge right around the time they finally become useful.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 16 2015, @03:48PM
Yes you can buy loyalty. The only caveat is the price must be high enough. Carnegie Mellon thinks they can buy loyalty with their prestige. Apparently they were just taken to school by Uber that money is worth more.
(Score: 2) by tibman on Wednesday September 16 2015, @05:10PM
I still say you can't buy loyalty. It's like an oxymoron. If you attempted to buy a loyal person then they should say no. No matter how much money was offered. Two competing offers to buy loyalty is a funny scenario in my mind : )
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 2) by arslan on Thursday September 17 2015, @11:31PM
True that. You can buy service/servitude, but not loyalty. If it can be bought its not loyalty.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday September 16 2015, @03:37PM
I had a nice starter herd of 30 scientists going, when the low-down, no-good varmint I partnered with a ways back showed up one night and poached half of 'em. Then, wouldn't you know it, hoof-in-mouth disease came along and took almost all the rest. Now I'm down to a scrawny kid named Wang and a pokey, peaky, fat kid named Ned. Animal husbandry of scientists ain't for the faint o' heart, friends...
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by VortexCortex on Wednesday September 16 2015, @04:30PM
"Poached around 50 scientists." CMU scientists are like the King's Deer.
As someone who has hunted in Canada, I prefer "the Queen's Beaver".
(Score: 2) by srobert on Wednesday September 16 2015, @08:19PM
I don't know what sort of employment contract those scientists had with CMU, but if they had none, or one that didn't stipulate very good working conditions, tenure rights, pensions and so forth, then I don't see any obligation on their part to be loyal to CMU. Loyalty between employers and employees should be a two way street.
Still, I'd be leary of going to work for Uber. I wouldn't trust them as far as I could throw them. They are nothing other than a taxicab company attempting to evade any existing regulations (especially labor laws) by denying that they fit the category of a taxi service.
(Score: 1) by SanityCheck on Wednesday September 16 2015, @11:42PM
I agree with the sentiment, but one fact is hard to overlook: They have money. Lot's and lots of money. I may be an idealist who wouldn't sell his soul for $1 million. But $10 million or $100million, that is a different story.