Uber poached people from Carnegie Mellon robotics lab to build self-driving cars

http://www.theverge.com/transportation/2015/5/19/8622831/uber-self-driving-cars-carnegie-mellon-poached

by joeyespo • 11 years ago

48 55 11 years ago

mturmon2• 11 years ago

It's nice to see this event get more attention, although this story did not add much to what has already been reported. I'm not sure how secure and plentiful the old NREC's funding was. My impression is that they were chasing a lot of small pots of money. Maybe that's part of the reason why CMU has not been bothered.

Clearly this move by Uber rewrote the book. They took the director of the center, Tony Stentz, and a lot of others besides.

That's not the only case of significant recruiting decimating robotics staff members recently, either. There have been a lot of departures from my own lab.

caminante• 11 years ago

Yeah, the NREC's 2013 budget was only ~$30M...

At your office, have you experienced any "lingering resentment" -- similar to that in the article?

mturmon2• 11 years ago

I have not experienced the resentment, but most of my friends were among those who left. I'm not in robotics, I do classification, but I worked with them. A new crop of graduates has taken their place.

The suddenness was rather amazing. Salary bumps were given but it was not enough.

nakedrobot2• 11 years ago

Uber's sleazy ways continue.... This company appears to be totally amoral and without remorse. The leaders of this company are winning, by stepping on the heads of everyone else. At least, that is what the headlines of the last year describe. Is this an inaccurate portrayal? I have to say, I am not tempted to patronize Uber because of this.

SilasX• 11 years ago

What's sleazy about hiring people away from a university research job? Why does it merit the "poaching" appellation?

If making competitive bids for labor is "sleazy poaching", god help us all.

Is the problem that they hired "too many" people? Is there some maximum rate at which you're supposed to hire employees at another organization before you're the bad guy?

People here rant about the anti-competitive no-poach conspiracies, and we're supposed to compartmentalize that away while we get outraged at the exact opposite?

Sorry if I'm missing the point here; I just don't get it.

onion2k3• 11 years ago

Would you feel the same way if GlaxoSmithKline went around hiring entire university cancer research departments so they could work for them instead? This is the robotics equivalent.

shalmanese3• 11 years ago

I'm not in favor of the line which the grandparent is arguing but perhaps there's an argument to be made that Uber is, in effect, "eating the seed corn" of the industry and valuing private gains over public losses.

Universities like CMU are responsible for recruiting and training the next generation of great roboticists and there's a difference between responsibly harvesting researchers from an institution in a way that allows the lab to maintain its culture and bounce back vs plundering it in such a way that would take many years to recover from.

It's a prisoner's dilemma style situation where all companies involved in robotics would benefit from a thriving academic robotics community, even if it would be more competitive if those researchers were in house. Uber was the first one to publically defect which might cause further defections to the detriment of everyone.

dylanjermiah8• 11 years ago

How is hiring (poaching isn't accurate whatsoever) talented people to aid in advancing technologies which will save millions of lives and billions of dollars 'sleazy'? 'That is what the headlines of the last year describe', it isn't wise to analyse a situation based on press headlines.

exo762• 11 years ago

You are writing as if the topic of group's research has changed. It has not. Actually those people were working for humanity as whole. Now they are working for Uber.

I agree that this situation hard to avoid, and its hard to blame Uber for being a better employer then public but still, there is nothing to celebrate about the fact that CMU got stripped of its research lab and that the tech will land in this company's sleazy hands.

akhatri_aus• 11 years ago

How is it sleazy? there's great deal of free will in everyone's choices. Also, it's likely Uber has more resources to get whatever they wanted to do done faster.

salmonfamine2• 11 years ago

Sleazy? I mean, they don't seem sleazier than any other large company. I would wager that they receive a lot of bad press because they threaten several industries simultaneously.

imglorp• 11 years ago

Wow, it must suck to be an Uber driver around now. The only people that like you are the customers.

You're a liability to the company who is now openly plotting your exit, a target for the old boy taxi network, and a target for government.

bliti4• 11 years ago

They shouldn't worry about self driving cars. The cost and complexity of developing a fleet of them is very high. In too of that, the technology is not quite there. Their biggest risk ae regulation and gun point robberies.

fennecfoxen• 11 years ago

What's a robber going to take from an Uber driver at gunpoint? Obviously not the cash he's earned from the rides, so... his personal wallet and the Uber smartphone? Most drivers have a wallet and a phone; why are Uber drivers a substantially better target than any other driver out there?

TYPE_FASTER• 11 years ago

I bet Uber can make autonomous taxis happen. They operate in urban areas. Uber can create the very detailed maps of these areas that autonomous vehicles need.

Right now, we have two conditions where autonomous systems work well: on the highway, where you can use products like Delphi's sensor package to do adaptive cruise control and lane assist, and in more urban environments with very detailed maps (see the Google autonomous cars).

I actually think there's a good chance Uber can create very detailed maps of places like Manhattan and San Francisco, and make autonomous vehicles that can use these maps to drive around.

Uber is under such a microscope when it comes to drivers that it makes a lot of sense for them to sink the R&D into this problem. All the cost going into paying people, paying to find people, and paying to clean up when people make a mistake, goes away.

smrtinsert• 11 years ago

Why do you need uber when cars drive themselves?

ch4s3• 11 years ago

So you don't have to own the car or worry about what to do with it when you aren't using it. Car sharing is the perfect use for self driving cars, because it increases utility. Idle private cars need expensive parking spaces, and are useless while sitting still.

dsiegel2275• 11 years ago

From a reliable source (my wife's coworker has a friend who was one of the defectors), apparently Uber offered folks a signing bonus equal to triple their yearly salary to leave NREC.

Damn, should have went into robotics.

robg• 11 years ago

Seems like a win-win for all involved. Uber can devote many more times the investment than the Feds are making. CMU and its people get to focus on the technologies, not writing grants. And CMU likely gets royalties for previous inventions. Plus the city of Pittsburgh will be showcased with 21st century tech. And DARPA helped launch the whole industry. Pretty amazing history when it's widespread. Might be a 15 year trend from first Grand Challenge to widespread acceptance.

waterlesscloud• 11 years ago

And companies like Google and Facebook hired all the top AI researchers away from universities. Good for the people hired, I say.

_greim_• 11 years ago

This is nothing new. High-end investment firms absorb many top computer science grads every year, sometimes even pulling them away from their PHDs, but it doesn't seem to raise many headlines.

Uber poached people from Carnegie Mellon robotics lab to build self-driving cars

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