In academia most professors are doing some or most of their projects for the source of funding, which I think is not too much about public good anyway.

I think it is about time for machine learning researchers to go to industry, there isn't that much data in academia. Good public datasets are rare, like ImageNet, and have been basically overfitted to the core. In industry, it is totally another story.

They are usually private datasets and details of the training are not usually disclosed. There could also be duplicated effort by every company competing in the field.

There is also the side that it would make it harder for startups to compete as the progress is made on training on large datasets using huge clusters of machines. Such datasets and compute power is impossible to acquire for small companies.

So maybe we need to start funding the acquisition of large public datasets in academia?

The fact that Stanford University creates patents from publicly funded research then turns around and sells them to non manufacturing entities makes me wary of pumping any new public money into research at universities. They're clearly corrupt to the core now.

I haven't heard of this before. This is pretty interesting. Do you have a source?

There was recently an episode of Planet Money about one instance of it:

http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/06/10/481597112/episo...

Or somehow incentivize companies to follow an academic model.

There's a trade-off here: You have to do things that have immediate value to the company (which, at Amazon, corresponds exactly to things that have value to your customers), but you pretty much have the power of the entire internet to do this (AWS). Not to mention more data than most researchers could ever dream of. It's not just monetary.

Since research at Amazon is new, I have no idea how well they're going to handle giving back to the community long-term. But I'm interning with a verification group there and the gist seems to be that if the group wants to give back and there's at least one person who's influential enough to get what they ask for, the group will give back.

I think it's actually problematic that research and industry concerns don't correspond more often. Yeah, it's not our job to be engineers and ship products, but it seems like there are important questions we ought to be answering as researchers that we consider industry ground, but that engineers don't actually have the background to solve. Some of these are totally arbitrary, chosen by the community, deemed "uninteresting" if you want to get published anywhere decent, even though there's plenty of interesting work left.

This sort of thing goes in cycles though. In the late 1990s when I was a postdoc, it seemed everyone in academia who could program or even just knew HTML was running off to a dot.com. A couple of years later most of them came crawling back on their knees begging for their old jobs.

its not just about the data. academia doesnt pay the other workers well and have high turnover. If your a professor trying to run a research lab, your stellar employees wont stay for very long and you'll have high turnover.