Carnegie Mellon Launches Undergraduate Degree in Artificial Intelligence
<i>&gt; Lesson: Practical problems, taken seriously, can result in some of the most important problems in pure research, and some of the progress in pure research can help get solutions to some practical problems. The motivation from pressing practical problems can help drive the research in both pure and applied research.</i><p>I&#x27;m pretty sure I <i>explicitly</i> agreed that this is <i>often</i> the case in my original post, so we must be talking past one another :)<p>What I&#x27;m arguing for is basically just academic freedom: the freedom of faculty and students to make choices about where they should resarch agenda. As your extensive history demonstrates, <i>THIS APPROACH WORKS</i>! All of those people <i>chose</i> to engage with industrial because <i>it made sense for their research agenda</i>!<p>More importantly, we can come up with an equally lengthy wall of text detailing accomplishments that would not have been possible without the freedom to work on things that industry isn&#x27;t all hot and bothered about. E.g., neural nets until about 5 years ago!<p>And an even lengthier wall of text describing silly research agendas that only existed because of industry hype (AOP anyone?)<p>Industry collaboration can be a tremendous impetus. However, it can also be a distraction from more important problems or even an impetus to focus on silly problems. Professors and students should be incentivized and encouraged to <i>do good research</i>; industrial collaboration can sometimes be a useful tool, but it is a means, not an end.<p>Finally, IMO, the central premise of your argument (that there&#x27;s not enough collaboration) is not factually accurate in the current climate. Read the proceeds of any major AI conference. Filter out papers written at top universities. Count the number of papers with vs. without an industrial collaborator named in the acks or even in the author list. Failure to collaborate isn&#x27;t a failing of modern mainstream AI research.