“Facebook’s chief AI scientist says than Silicon Valley needs to work move closely with academia to build the future of artificial intelligence”

http://uk.businessinsider.com/facebook-yann-lecun-dual-affiliation-model-ai-experts-2018-8?r=US&IR=T

Hi everyone. I was on LinkedIn and just found out that Facebook’s AI scientist wants to build the future of Artificial Intelligence and academia. To make real progress, Facebook need the best, brightest and diverse minds to exchange ideas and build on each others work. According to Nature Index Science Inc. 2017, publications resulting from collaborations just among academics, but between academia and industry more than double from 12, 672 in 2012 to 25, 962 in 2016. The burgeoning dual-affiliation model-where academics actually work inside industry for actually while maintaining their academic position where possible not only technological advances like better speech recognition, image recognition, text understanding, and language translation system. Dual affiliation is a boon. It benefits not just the AI economy but individual academics both researchers and students.

The Economies of Industry-Academia Collaboration:

The dual affiliation model allows researchers to maximize their impact. Certain ideas only flourish in academia environments, while others can only be developed in industry where larger engineering teams and larger computing resources are available. Today’s world of fast-paced internet services deployment, owning IP has become considerably less important than turning research results into innovate products as quickly as possible and deploying them at scale.

Academia and AI:

So investment in basic researching industry, and the practice of open research, open-source software, together with a more relaxed attitude towards IP, have made industry- academia collaborations considerably easier and more fruitful than in the past. What drives technologies like AI is the speed of adoption by the general population, and what often controls that speed is the number and diversity of talented people who can apply themselves to the problem. Industry partnerships with academic institutions can help. They increase the net number of students who can be expertly trained in AI giving them the benefit of access to significant computing power and training data with the expectation only that they contribute to the field in the future.

Dual Affiliation, Exponential Progress:

For everyone academics, industry affiliation offers any number of benefits: resources in the form of compute power and funding more collaboration with others and the opportunity for immediate real-world application of research. In fact, fundamental research  really benefits when it is untethered from the resource hunt. The dual affiliation model lets academics control their own agenda timelines. They identify research trends in both academia and in industry, and act upon whichever most promising.