Ride-hailing giant Uber has brought the company’s driverless-car efforts to Pittsburgh, snapping up Carnegie Mellon researchers to come along for the ride. If the Wall Street Journal is to be believed, this is something of a disaster for the acclaimed university, where I taught for nearly two decades.
“Carnegie Mellon University is scrambling to recover after Uber Technologies Inc. poached 40 of its researchers and scientists earlier this year,” the Journal reported this past Sunday, “a raid that left one of the world’s top robotics research institutions in a crisis.”
According to the report, Uber essentially stabbed the university in the back, luring “six principal investigators and 34 engineers” from CMU’s word-class National Robotic Engineering Center (NREC), including the center’s director, Tony Stentz, and most of its program directors—even after establishing a partnership with the university earlier this year. The pilfered researchers will work in Uber’s new driverless-car research facility, located just down the street from NREC’s laboratories.
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