Who will train the next generation of data scientists?

While artificial intelligence is a hot topic these days, the industry is facing a key problem: Not enough scholars are staying in academia to teach the massive influx of students. It's a problem that Jennifer Chayes, a managing director and distinguished scientist at Microsoft Research, has seen firsthand while recruiting top researchers away from universities and into her organization. In her view, professors, like one who she hired away from a post at Stanford University last year, aren't leaving entirely for the money, since they could work at startups or do consulting on the side while keeping their academic posts. Large companies like Microsoft offer increased pay, but also access to massive amounts of data that gets updated frequently. It's an issue because the top-notch academic researchers who might have been training the next generation of data scientists are leaving.