Repeat after me, the biggest change to business and American culture is about to happen, the driverless car. Sounds like Carnegie Mellon is now understanding how important this trend.
And don't buy the 15 years away talk. The one constant in technology is how fast it comes.
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Carnegie Mellon Reels After Uber Lures Away ResearchersUber staffs new tech center with researchers poached from its collaborator on self-driving technology
The Wall Street Journal
By Mike Ramsey and Douglas MacMillan
May 31, 2015 11:03 a.m. ET
http://www.wsj.com/articles/is-uber-a-friend-or-foe-of-carnegie-mellon-in-robotics-1433084582Carnegie Mellon University is scrambling to recover after Uber Technologies Inc. poached 40 of its researchers and scientists earlier this year, a raid that left one of the world’s top robotics research institutions in a crisis.
In February, Carnegie Mellon and Uber trumpeted a strategic partnership in which the school would “work closely” with the ride-hailing service to develop driverless-car technology.
Behind the scenes, the tie-up was more combative than collaborative.
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 with enough talent to build a team instantly: Carnegie Mellon’s National Robotics Engineering Center, or NREC.
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. Uber declined to comment on that.
The hiring spree in January and February set off alarms. Facing a huge drain of talent and cash, Herman Herman, the newly elevated director of NREC, made a staff presentation May 6 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 laid out the issues. 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.
The presentation said NREC’s funding from contracts to develop technology with the U.S. Department of Defense and other organizations was expected to sink as low as $17 million from the $30 million originally projected for this year. Some contracts scientists were working on disappeared when the researchers left, accounting for the drop in funding.
And it appeared the center would have to raise salaries significantly to prevent more exits. A few scientists left NREC for other companies in Pittsburgh because of concerns the center might be shut down, said two people familiar with the departures.
Since then, departures have tapered off, and new scientists and professors are being hired.
“If you want to do autonomous vehicles—we have a lot of people here doing that,” said Jeff Legault, the head of business development for NREC. “I would have preferred [Uber] just come to us” to develop the vehicle rather than hire away scientists, he said.
‘There was a tough period of three weeks where we were trying to figure out how we are going to move forward with our research’ —Andrew Moore, dean of Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science
Uber and Carnegie Mellon have yet to work jointly on any projects. School officials say Uber has committed to working with faculty and has agreed to pay to support several professorships, though that commitment hasn’t been completed. The school’s main partnership for autonomous vehicle driving technology remains with General Motors Co.
“Our hope and intent by creating a local presence near the CMU campus and working closely with the university is to foster a thriving entrepreneurial ecosystem in Pittsburgh,” said Jeff Holden, Uber’s chief product officer, in a statement. Uber declined to make Mr. Holden or anyone else available for an interview. News of some of the faculty departures was earlier reported by the Pittsburgh Business Times and the Verge.
Uber’s lead recruiter was John Bares, who ran Carnegie Mellon’s NREC from 1997 through 2010. He now heads Uber’s new tech center, whose home will be a 53,000-square-foot former restaurant-supply center on the Allegheny River, less than a mile from NREC. For now, Uber is working out of a temporary facility a few blocks from NREC.
Mr. Bares, who is also the founder of robotics-components maker Carnegie Robotics LLC, didn’t respond to a request for an interview.
While the tech center is closed to the public, there are signs of Uber’s presence in Pittsburgh. A car strapped with sensors and emblazoned with an Uber logo was recently spotted driving the city’s streets. The company said the car was driven by a person and part of its early research efforts.
Uber also put up a billboard outside Carnegie Mellon’s computer-sciences building that said: “We are looking for the best software engineers in Pittsburgh.”
Graduate students are being approached to work at the company. “I have been approached, and others I know have as well,” said Tianyu Gu, a doctoral student working on algorithms that help vehicles’ computer brains plan their next moves on the road.
Taxis and ride-sharing services could become one of the first widespread applications of fully autonomous vehicles, an area of increasing focus for auto makers such as Daimler AG’s Mercedes-Benz and tech companies from Google Inc. to Uber. Google said earlier this year a safe self-driving car could be available to consumers as soon as 2020, though consultants McKinsey & Co. estimates it could take up to 15 years to develop the technology and overcome regulatory challenges.
Every car maker is adding technology that will keep cars in their lanes and brake automatically, and most major auto makers are working on autonomous vehicles. But car makers are skeptical of near-term technology that would eliminate the need for drivers. Uber CEO Travis Kalanick said last year that self-driving cars are likely to some day replace the company’s human drivers.
Uber is pushing to develop its own technologies in Pittsburgh, in part to lessen its reliance on Silicon Valley giants. Uber currently relies on a mixture of technology from Google, Apple Inc. and its own software for maps and navigation, an executive said in February. Google and Apple are also pushing to control the computing in cars, while Google is now building a few hundred prototypes of a fully autonomous car.
Some Carnegie Mellon officials remain hopeful the Uber partnership will ultimately bear fruit.
“There was a tough period of three weeks where we were trying to figure out how we are going to move forward with our research,” said Andrew Moore, the dean of Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science. He said he expects the agreement with Uber to be completed in the next few weeks.
Mr. Moore said his department, which has administrative control over NREC, was buffeted by the departures but said these also point to the school’s prowess. “We are really proud that Uber has decided to come here rather than those guys in Boston,” he said, referring to Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
NREC operates as a self-funded division of Carnegie Mellon’s computer sciences school. Established in 1994, it has been the key driver behind development of autonomous military aircraft and the most advanced autonomous commercial vehicles in the world—giant Caterpillar Inc. mining vehicles at work in Australia.
Carnegie Mellon is one of the few places in the world where students can earn a Ph.D. in robotics. It was also the first to offer such a degree in machine learning, and a pioneer in artificial intelligence.
The school developed its first autonomous vehicle in 1984, a machine called Terregator that could move a few centimeters per second. By 1995, it was able to take a Pontiac Trans Sport from Pittsburgh to San Diego hands-free.
Carnegie Mellon has many big minds in the field, including Raj Reddy, who pioneered speech-recognition software, and Red Whittaker, whose robots were used to clean up Three Mile Island and other disaster sites and later led Carnegie Mellon’s award-winning autonomous-vehicle project for the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
Sebastian Thrun was a groundbreaking machine-learning professor at Carnegie Mellon before moving to Stanford University and later to G oogle. He helped to develop Google’s Street View mapping feature and its advanced-projects division called Google X. His protégé, Chris Urmson, was a student and professor at Carnegie Mellon and now runs Google’s self-driving-car program.
Mr. Thrun declined to comment on Uber’s recruiting foray in Pittsburgh, other than to say it was “rational” for Uber to seek out talent where it abounds.
Carnegie Mellon likes “to focus on the fringe of science, not the center of it,” Mr. Thrun said. “It is easier to do something crazy and get it done. You could do almost anything at Carnegie Mellon and get away with it.”
