From: Oded Maron
To: all-ai@ai.mit.edu
Subject: GSB - today at 5:30
Date: Fri, 20 Jun 1997 11:20:42 -0400 (EDT)

This week, BusinessWeek released its eagerly anticipated list of the top "Information Technology" research labs. One of the polls was the following:

If you were 35 and had just won the first Nobel Prize for Information Technology, triggering invitations to the lab of your choice, which one would you pick? Most researchers did not choose the lab where they work. Here are the results:

1. Stanford University
2. AT&T Labs
3. Bell Labs (Lucent)
Carnegie Mellon University
5. MIT Lab for Computer Science
Santa Fe Institute
7. Microsoft Research
8. University of California-Berkeley
9. MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab
MIT Media Lab

After the elated shouting of "We're number nine! We're number nine!" died down, many people realized that their CVs were out of date, and that they better touch them up if they want a chance at the Nobel Prize. Then things got a lot quieter for a while. Then it dawned on us: researchers would rather be at a frisbee school, or New Jersey, or Pittsburgh, or at a lower floor, or at a place where only granola and granola by-products are served in the cafeteria, or producing more fine Microsoft merchandise, or writing code to distinguish the powerful holistic crystals from the ordinary ones, or fighting Afghan rebels in hand to hand combat through the barren Afghanistan hills, or chasing down the Mexican reticulate gila monster (one of the only two venomous lizards in the world), pinning it down and collecting a throat sample while it tries to gnaw your nose off, or doing just about anything other than working here.

Think about how much higher we would be ranked if everybody knew and came to

  G   I   R   L      S    C   O   U   T      B   E   N   E   F   I   T

7th floor playroom June 20, 1997 5:30 pm