Most industry engagement professionals can only dream about having one of the world’s richest men helping to create a research program that could become a powerful magnet for industry in one of the hottest tech sectors. But that’s exactly what happened at the University of Washington as it set about to make a big splash in artificial intelligence research.
UW’s leadership began its efforts in AI about eight years ago, when its computer science department looked to recruit machine learning and AI “superstars” to lead the department into this new frontier of technology, according to school’s computer science chair Hank Levy. At the time, Stanford and MIT held sway as the top shelf of AI research, but UW had something those storied institution didn’t: Jeff Bezos in its backyard.
“So we thought, what the hell? We’ll send Jeff an email,” Levy said at a recent AI policy meeting in Seattle. UW was trying to recruit the married duo Carlos Guestrin and Emily Fox from Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pennsylvania, respectively, as well as other tech experts.
Within 24 hours of receiving the call, Bezos responded with two $1 million professorship endowments for Fox and Guestrin, and spent a half hour schmoozing the researchers – which ultimately helped seal the deal, Levy recalled.
That was the start of a new era for UW’s computer science department, he said, followed by more donations, like Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s $40 million gift to create a new computer science department in his name. It also helped UW to triple its number of computer science majors.
“This was the beginning of propelling our department to being one of the very best and best-known in the country,” Levy said.
The recruiting efforts also paid unexpected dividends to Apple. A startup that Guestrin spun out of UW was eventually acquired by Apple for $200 million in 2016, the biggest start-up exit the department had ever experienced.
“It was a really big deal. One of the reasons that it’s a big deal is Apple did not have much presence in the region at that point,” Levy observed.
Now, Apple is planning to grow to 2,000 employees at its new Seattle campus in Amazon’s backyard. And on the eve of the Apple acquisition, the start-up gave the UW computer science department a $1 million professor endowment, like the ones Amazon provided to lure Guestrin and Fox in the first place.
Source: GeekWire




