The tech industry controls CS conference funding. What are the dangers?
I don’t really have any insights to provide on “big companies are using sponsorships to whitewash their impact on society” but something I’ve seen is presentations and research often done in the context of the company’s unique circumstances that are not necessarily broadly applicable. It’s only natural of course that a company will optimize their research into things that are relevant to them but when you’re listening to them you need to keep “what is the context that this was written in” in the back of your mind at all times.<p>For example, if you ever attend a C++ talk by Googlers, you’ll notice that they basically only talk about C++ as they use it, silently ignoring things they don’t care about. By virtue of google3 and their style guide, things like ABI compatibility are of very little consequence to them, and they can take away expensive-to-support APIs  and present about how they “optimized” some part of the STL, or how support for exceptions is something they’ll look into later or (when they’re feeling uncharitable) bad actually™. Similarly most talks about Linux networking are driven by e.g. Facebook, who seem to slowly just be converging on running their entire stack using eBPF in the kernel. Apple presents their ML research about on-device learning and somewhere in the middle they’ll be like “oh also we have specialized silicon to do this efficiently otherwise it isn’t practical”.  Microsoft will present virtualization research and you’ll find that their threat model is trying to prevent people from jailbreaking the Xbox.<p>I’m not trying to say this research is bad or not useful, but it’s important to put them in the context of where they’re coming from or who they’re being funded by, because the entire thing-from the premise, to the execution, all the way to the conclusion-is going to be dependent on the circumstances the research was done in, and often it’ll be presented as a general result when it really only make sense in the context of that particular company’s needs. If you’re being cynical, it’s a way to appear open and exercise soft power through mindshare, but for most cases I think the alternative (no research) is probably worse so I’m not generally concerned.