The tech industry controls CS conference funding. What are the dangers?
The basic premise that the author is expounding is &quot;CS research will be guided by industry interests&quot;. This is good to most extent, save a few very remote situations. Conference funding in particular has a very tenuos relationship to what directions get a nod of approval in overall CS research.<p>CS (and EE) is a field which has seen great advances and adoptions due to the tighter integration between industry and academia. The tech has advanced much due to the fact that researchers manage to work on hard &amp; real problems. Many of the avenues of research emerge &amp; advance from industry adoption - e.g.  bandwidth compression, codecs, recommender systems, crytocurrency etc.<p>In my observation, whenever there has been a significant push by a single corporate entity, it has seen a palpable pushback. One example that comes to my mind is Amazon engineering vs. Rust foundation. Also, if any company tries to cut some major research&#x27;s lifeline, there is always a competition grabbing that opportunity to secure it to its own future advantages. There are no shortages of 500-pound gorillas when it comes to corporate sponsorship. Everyone wants a piece of the cake.<p>As mentioned, the only time this could suffer is when a company of the size of Google, AWS establishes complete monopoly on that research &amp; ultimately sends to some academic graveyard, much to everyone&#x27;s horror. But in my limited knowledge, that kind of black swan event doesn&#x27;t seem to have ever happened.<p>Corporate sponsorship aren&#x27;t inherently evil. University researchers get a taste of real world tech issues &amp; companies advance their tech by sponsorship. Conferences also become a good hiring venue for jobs or internship. It&#x27;s a win-win from what I see. Conference sponsorship is in no way going to change the fate of ongoing research.