<story><title>Facebook AI Research Expands with New Academic Collaborations</title><url>https://code.fb.com/ai-research/facebook-ai-research-expands-with-new-academic-collaborations/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>chriskanan</author><text>To summarize why I think professors are going with this arrangement (in order):&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;p&gt;2) Less teaching (1 course once a year)&lt;p&gt;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&lt;p&gt;4) Access to software engineering personnel to help with research&lt;p&gt;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&amp;#x27;ve tried)&lt;p&gt;6) Much better media relations to popularize your research&lt;p&gt;7) Bigger salary&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;p&gt;Other companies don&amp;#x27;t seem to be as open to this arrangement as FB, but it has a lot of appeal to me (although I&amp;#x27;m not a lover of FB).</text></comment>
<story><title>Facebook AI Research Expands with New Academic Collaborations</title><url>https://code.fb.com/ai-research/facebook-ai-research-expands-with-new-academic-collaborations/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mlthrowaway1953</author><text>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 &amp;quot;co-employed&amp;quot; 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?&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=17266951&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=17266951&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>