Facebook AI Research Expands with New Academic Collaborations

https://code.fb.com/ai-research/facebook-ai-research-expands-with-new-academic-collaborations/

by TamoC • 8 years ago

115 64 8 years ago

code.fb.com

mlthrowaway19532• 8 years ago

How is IP handled in this situation? Especially given the recent discussion [1] on HN about how the recently announced DeepMind Patent Portfolio could be a problem, how is it that state employees (Washington, California) are "co-employed" by an organization to do _exactly_ the research that their home universities work on ? Who owns the IP in this case? Are these sorts of agreements FOIA-able?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17266951

chrisseaton• 8 years ago

how is it that state employees (Washington, California) are "co-employed" by an organization to do _exactly_ the research that their home universities work on

They will work part-time for the university, and part-time for Facebook. I don't see why that's so shocking? Presumably the university only funds them part-time for part-time work, so it's not like they're not getting what they're paying for if that's what you're asking. This is a very conventional set up for academics.

mlthrowaway19532• 8 years ago

Most employer agreements have fairly draconian claims around IP. And I believe that many universities require their faculty to run consulting, etc. gigs through their legal teams, and the university gets a "right of first refusal" of sorts on the generated IP. Many academics get around this by claiming that they are doing research X at company (more applied, etc.) and research Y at the university (more theory, technically different projects under different grants). But with ML it seems like it would be harder. Regardless, I'd love to figure out if we can get these agreements through freedom of information act requests, to shed light on what state-employees are doing.

naturalgradient3• 8 years ago

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 collaborations with FB as an academic in ML.

mikert56712• 8 years ago

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.

naturalgradient3• 8 years ago

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.

zoul• 8 years ago

In the long run the scientific advancements from these companies is a much higher positive than the negatives they have in the present.

That’s really the main question, isn’t it?

cryoshon• 8 years ago

tell that to the royhinga who were betrayed by facebook and subsequently killed.

i'll be waiting for the scientific advancements to be useful to the public. so far they've increased rates of depression, anxiety, etc while enabling totalitarianism.

astazangasta• 8 years ago

This is incorrect, in my opinion. FB and Google are where capital is currently concentrated in the software industry; therefore, they are able to hire a lot of the top software talent out there. This talent is responsible for pushing the industry forward, and it often does so in a manner that is largely company-agnostic. This is why we get React help pages telling us to use Enzyme from AirBnb for running tests - because the work is being done by software developers who are building general infrastructure for the web, and who would probably end up doing the same basic work regardless of who was paying their salaries.

It's best to think of Silicon Valley as two entities: a mass of technology workers who build software, and a financial extraction function that attempts to extract value from the work they do.

yaseer3• 8 years ago

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). Together they pioneered computing revolutions, and I'm confident history will judge them for making a positive contribution (on the whole).

Amazon is a leviathan whose societal value I find more difficult to classify, but I genuinely derive lots of value from their service personally. It's good for my lifestyle.

Facebook on the other hand, is a waste of my time, mental energy and a drain on society. As an academic, how can you turn your mind to furthering its goals?

visarga• 8 years ago

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.

sharcerer• 8 years ago

History will also judge Alphabet with a positive mindset (T&C apply!). Google did to web what Apple,MS did to computing. Google files patents but doesn't extract royalty from it unlike MS. I think next 10 years will be really crucial to Alphabet( not talking about Google here). The work Calico, Verily,Loon, Dandelion Energy are doing takes time to create impact. I think Google, Calico,Verily are going to make considerable contributions to healthcare.

schrep• 8 years ago

Our products aren't perfect, and we understand that we have a lot of work to do.

However, the fundamental purpose of our products is to allow people to efficiently communicate with each other. Hard for me to square that with "drain on society." I have many friends who, via Facebook, found a connection that was life changing: from finding a job, a spouse, to a community to deal with the loss of a loved one or support after being diagnosed with a terminal illness.

One of the things that draws AI researchers to come work at Facebook is the opportunity to see their work make a positive impact on billions of people around the world.

The research done by FAIR is helping us do things like deliver billions of translations a day, provide automatic photo captions for people who are visually impaired, and help bring blood donors and people in need together. It also helps us spot when someone is expressing thoughts about self-harm so we can alert first responders.

But we also believe there's even more we can do to help bring the world closer together, to give people a voice, and to open up new opportunities for everyone. AI is a key part of that and we believe pretty deeply in the power of open research to help not just us but the whole industry.

rhaps0dy• 8 years ago

Even if Facebook were completely evil, why not take their money? They will benefit from your research just as much even if you don't take it, because you're publishing it. Are you concerned that Facebook is telling the scientists what to work on?

yulaow• 8 years ago

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

ahartmetz• 8 years ago

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

tsieling• 8 years ago

Well said, and totally agree. They've had too many whoopsie moments and seem entrenched in not learning or changing what is fundamentally broken in their management and business model. They have no legitimate place in research or academia.

taneq• 8 years ago

It's a bit of a poisoned grail, though. On the one hand, you're selling your soul. On the other hand, they have data beyond your wildest dreams and you can use it all for anything as long as it might make money.

Would you take that offer? Would I? Probably not. But I can see the appeal, and plenty of people wouldn't hesitate.

gaius2• 8 years ago

But I can see the appeal, and plenty of people wouldn't hesitate.

It will keep happening until these companies are a black mark on your CV, like say a tobacco company might be. Will people be so eager if it means they will be shunned by the wider research and engineering communities?

mliker• 8 years ago

Fb's research in computer vision has produced works like training a neutral net on large datasets in 1 hour, instance segmentation neural nets, and many more, and made the code and research public with nonrestrictive licenses. These are pushing the state of art! Check out the work yourself and then come back and criticize these scientists if you feel that their work is a net negative on the world.

yaseer3• 8 years ago

Oh I am sure they add value.

The question as you so rightly point out is whether there is a net value added.

If we took their AI contributions and JS frameworks on one side of the equation, do you really think it balances the other side of the equation?

On that right side lies encouraging general disinformation leading to broken elections and even aiding genocide. Academic studies on happiness show using Facebook and Instagram correlates with poor mental health; that research has been replicated.

What product actively damages those that consume it?

Facebook is the digital equivalent of the Tobacco industry; good business that's bad for people.

chriskanan2• 8 years ago

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).

gimmeThaBeet• 8 years ago

Much less, if any, grant writing.

I don't know how it compares in software, I worked for a professor in undergrad who was in microelectronics. I was astonished at how much of their time was taken up by grant writing and applying for funding. The pressure for research professors to support their position was immense.

There's a lot of reasons to hate FB, a lot of reasons to be wary of what comes out of their research. But to castigate researchers that cash-spewing tech titans create a better environment and experience for researchers than the public and universities feels a bit asinine. I've known too many starving grad students, post docs, and non-tenure professors to prefer people subject themselves to the system we have rather than what a company like FB wants to provide.

Fomite2• 8 years ago

A couple notes:

1. Industry funding comes with its own set of hassles. And overhead is still a thing for industry funding - sometimes the overhead rate is less, but there's been a lot more pushback against this from universities (which I actually think is quite fair).

2. Being able to buy out teaching loads is a function of funding, not necessarily this funding

3. In many institutions, salaries are fixed - what this does is cover a percentage of your salary you don't have to cover from other mechanisms, or let you buy out teaching, as you note. It would be interesting to know if the dual FAIR appointments work like that or not.

While private funding is awesome, and these labs are in a very good position, it should be noted that in most cases in my experience between NSF/NIH-style funding and an industry grant, the government grants last longer, are more flexible, and less of a hassle administratively.

chriskanan2• 8 years ago

While all of what you say is correct for grants given to universities by industry, this isn't in the same class of activity. These professors are becoming FB employees, while still retaining their professorships. Some aren't even located at the same location as their university for 7 months of the year. Its almost like a yearly sabbatical with funding for your lab and far more resources.

projectramo• 8 years ago

Your list seems pretty complete, but I wonder which items are the most important. It might be counterintuitive.

For instance, I assume that grant writing is such a hassle, the average person would accept just to get out of writing grants. But the guys and gals that they picked up are at the top of their field. Would they also have the same constraints? Seems like they would have higher hit rates, less teaching and so forth.

I think the ability to launch the careers of their grad students, get them hired etc might be at the top, but I am just guessing.

whymauri2• 8 years ago

I'm not in CS research, but even 'top labs' can struggle to get government funding from the NIH/NSF. I worked at a lab that consistently publishes in Nature/Science, a few times front cover, and gets very good PR. It's a running joke that we've never gotten NIH funding despite translating our research to people several times. Majority of our funding comes from 3rd party private companies and DARPA, which people might find objectionable despite being a govt. agency.

There is no free lunch in raising money for research.

Kyragem• 8 years ago

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.

electricslpnsld4• 8 years ago

Half the schools on the list are publics, and none of them are Ivies.

whymauri2• 8 years ago

How does being a public school mean a college cannot be elite? Pretty sure his point is these schools are elite within this field, and people from lesser known schools (not just public) are rarely given these chances.

fatjokes• 8 years ago

It's a bit chicken-and-egg. These collaborators are also in cities where FB already has offices that they can lead teams out of. Of course, these offices were started because of the prestigious schools that were already there.

sonnyblarney• 8 years ago

The collab with McGill and U Montreal I believe.

U Montreal has the largest AI program going.

throwawayjava• 8 years ago

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...

naturalgradient3• 8 years ago

You are referring to my comment about 'worth their salt' in a gross misreading. I said anyone worth their salt has other choices, so going to FB is a deliberate choice on these professors.

username_1234• 8 years ago

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.

edhu2017• 8 years ago

Total compensation: Definitely a wide range, but a few hundred K would be the median. Recruiting: one of my labmates flat out refused to do algorithmic interviews for a research position and the company still gave him an offer. Your projects, papers, and ability to demonstrate your understanding of research topics are far more important then your ability to solve a small, defined problem in 45 minutes.

username_1234• 8 years ago

I assume there is a distinction between software engineering and research applicants in terms of their interviews at the Big 4s? I know two people with PhDs that were given algorithmic questions and had to go through the same process as regular software developers (this was at the same Big 4 company). The only exception is one had expertise in ML and during one of his interviews they brought in a ML expert and interviewed them on their dissertation, in addition to their 4-5 algorithmic interviews. Both of these people were interviewing for software developer positions despite having expertise in research. Wasn't sure if the research interviews would be different. Good on your lab mate.

braindongle• 8 years ago

I see similarities here with pharma and medical research. Conflicts of interest are endemic there, and they will be here, too, but this sort of sponsorship is inevitable. What can be done? In the case of pharma, I'm OK with them sponsoring peer reviewed, academic research, as long as policies are in place to make it immediately obvious where the money is coming from when I read the literature.

nemild• 8 years ago

A related quote from this fascinating interview with Jonathan Tow (media researcher)[1] on FB research:

Often, these companies [like FB] are open to research partnerships and things, but it’s always on their terms. If you do research with them, you’re dealing with IP issues, you’re signing over the rights to the research. It has to be reviewed completely and vetted by their legal process. They often handpick researchers that help them and help their purpose and help their cause — they maybe throw in some sprinkles of criticism. I understand why they would be hesitant to want to work with people like me.

[1] http://www.niemanlab.org/2018/02/news-in-a-disintegrating-re...

bradgnar• 8 years ago

cool, even better ads.

colmvp• 8 years ago

While I dislike FB, I don't blame researchers/profs for joining FB when the numerous advantages for joining them dwarf what you could get at a lot of other institutions.

Reminds me of how on the one hand it sucks that certain talented engineers/designers work for ad-driven companies, but at the end of the day the compensation is simply on another level compared to working for more benevolent causes.

peter303• 8 years ago

An important aspect in any research arrangement is PROTECT THE STUDENTS. Academic research is likely to have many student assistants. The students should be able to publish their results in a timely manner. Students will benefit from exposure to researchers and resources in industry. And potentially lucrative internships. My alma mater Stanford had a bumpy ride in the 1980s: over clingy patent policy, faculty startups not allowing publications. Lawsuits ensued. Ut by the time dot.com began the next decade it was much smoother, e.g. the Yahoos and Googles. And this not just comp-sci, but biotech, oil&gas, aero engineering too.

Facebook AI Research Expands with New Academic Collaborations

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