Building Community Relations: The LG Electronics and CDS Academic Research Services Initiative

Innovation is ubiquitous — whether you’re in academia or industry, someone is always doing something new and unique. However, the information exchange between academia and industry tends to be scarce. To build a stronger collaboration between the two, LG Electronics participated in the CDS Academic Research Services Initiative which was launched to provide industry professionals mentors in academia. We reached out to CDS faculty, Kyunghyun Cho and Michael Picheny, to learn more about the program.

Can you talk a bit about what CDS Academic Research Services is and the impetus for starting this initiative?

The impetus is to form tighter relationships between our laboratories and industry. Current relationships, while productive and rewarding, do not always involve a lot of cross-site interactions. Either students from our lab are sent for internships, we receive gifts and/or grant money, or faculty work part time at the external labs. While this is all good, it does not really foster close working relationships that allow for free flow of information between industry and academia.

What are you most excited about in relation to the collaboration with LGE?

We had the pleasure of interacting with very talented and skilled industrial people who are dealing with real-world problems.

What are some key takeaways from the initial collaboration with LGE?

One key takeaway is that many industrial problems in the AI area are very difficult and often border on the edge of state of the art research. As a result, this requires close cooperation between academic experts and the industry members who see and understand the nature of the field. Another takeaway is that close collaborations are definitely possible, but one should not underestimate the amount of time it takes to start such a collaboration from scratch.

How do you hope CDS Academic Research Services will evolve over time?

We are hoping to broaden the program, and also, once the pandemic lessens, to allow for on-site residencies by visiting members of industry.

To learn more about how to get involved in the initiative, please reach out to cdsindustry@nyu.edu.