Uncovering the Role of Research in Machine Learning Industry

Research plays a crucial role in the development of machine learning technology. With the advancement of machine learning, the research community has adopted a “bigger, better” approach, requiring a massive amount of data and computing power, which costs tens of millions of dollars. Unfortunately, most companies and academic institutions cannot afford to pursue pure research due to these high costs.

Fortunately, there are only a handful of machine learning research labs in the world, and most of them are funded by corporations such as Alphabet, Microsoft, Facebook, and Tencent. These labs can be found by browsing the affiliations of published papers at major academic conferences, including NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, CVPR, and ACL. In 2019 and 2020, Alphabet accounted for over 10% of all papers at NeurIPS.

Some companies might have roles that involve applied research, which is somewhere between research and production, but much closer to research than production. Applied research involves finding solutions to practical problems but doesn’t involve implementing those solutions in actual production environments.

Applied researchers are researchers who come up with novel hypotheses and validate them, but they need to have subject matter expertise since their hypotheses and theses deal with practical problems. For example, in machine learning, a research project would be to develop an unsupervised transfer learning method for computer vision and experiment on a standard academic dataset. An applied research project, on the other hand, would be to develop techniques to make that new method work on a real-world problem in a specific industry, such as healthcare.

There is much confusion about the roles of a research scientist and a research engineer. A research engineer is a rare role often seen at major research labs in the industry. If the role of a research scientist is to come up with original ideas, the role of a research engineer is to use their engineering skills to set up and run experiments for these ideas. While the research scientist role typically requires a Ph.D. and/or first…

Related posts:

It was in my first year of undergrad when I first heard my Teaching Assistant (TA) say that to the class. For many of us, it was our first attempt at writing an academic paper. All throughout my…

My cat resembles a nun. It’s why I named her Noone and forced-fed her a diet of religion and end-of-the-world preaching. She’s smitten with the idea of resurrection and hopes that at least one life…

The button below should look familiar. We use it all the time to upload photos, add attachments to emails, submit homework, etc. I decided to make a React component that lets you choose an image…