Companies and universities are sabotaging each other by trying to corner the proceeds?of joint research into artificial intelligence, a conference has heard.

Microsoft machine learning expert Kuansan Wang said that a ¡°more aggressive¡± stance from universities was forcing his company to pay more attention to intellectual property rights assertion when it hosted doctoral students.

¡°If we are not careful, the university would want a claim on the IP,¡± Dr Wang told Times Higher Education¡¯s Research Excellence Summit: Asia-Pacific, held at the University of New South Wales. ¡°That creates lots of complications. It¡¯s certainly not helpful.¡±

Pascale Fung, director of the Centre for AI Research at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, said that industry should share the proceeds. ¡°Why should the companies own all the IP rights when the students are trained by us?¡± she asked.

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Professor Fung said that Bell Labs, where she was a doctoral student in the 1990s, had been ¡°a?lot more relaxed¡± about intellectual property than companies today. She had published jointly with Bell Labs at the time, but such opportunities were now unusual, and both sides ¨C companies and universities ¨C needed to show more flexibility.

She said that intellectual property protection was ¡°useless unless you make something out of it¡±, becoming a ¡°malicious kind of competition¡± that thwarted rather than encouraged technology development. ¡°It should be seen as some kind of seed to future innovation,¡± she said. ¡°We allow the students to do start-ups, and maybe the companies can have a stake.¡±

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Toby Walsh, Scientia professor of artificial intelligence at UNSW, said that he supported the University of California, Berkeley¡¯s approach ¨C making research widely available while providing recognition to individual researchers ¨C over intellectual property protection that generated minuscule earnings and did not incentivise technology development.

Berkeley had ¡°found in hindsight that they get far more in return in philanthropy than they would if they¡¯d tried to hold on to the IP themselves¡±, he said.

Professor Fung said that the biggest challenge facing academic artificial intelligence research was access to the massive datasets needed to improve the technology. ¡°Universities today cannot compete against the Facebooks, the Googles, the Microsofts and the Baidus of the world because we don¡¯t have access to that huge amount of data,¡± she said.

Hunger for data was making the laboratories of the internet companies so large that they monopolised researchers, Professor Fung said. ¡°Universities are having to compete with these industries to get talent. We have no problem getting students, but we don¡¯t have enough AI professors. They¡¯re all in industry,¡± she said.

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Dr Wang, who heads Microsoft Research Outreach Academic Services, said that universities needed access to big datasets so that they could generate the industry¡¯s future workers. But privacy and copyright issues precluded companies from simply handing over data.

Microsoft, he said, had searched for years before settling on a data source that ¡°our lawyers think we can safely share¡± ¨C scholarly communication, a?phenomenon with ¡°the opposite of a privacy problem¡± because authors wanted as much exposure as possible.

Dr Wang said Microsoft had used machine reading to curate a dataset of more than 200?million academic publications extracted from the internet. The company is making it available as a teaching and research resource, he said.

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com