IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - December 2019 - 9

alumnus Selam Gano, who worked as
an undergraduate in the lab of robotics
faculty member Alberto Rodriguez and
subsequently took a position at the
company XYZ Robotics [15]. This condemnation led to the resignation of
Stallman from the Free Software Foundation's board of directors and from
CSAIL [16].
All of MIT's problems with the
Epstein case began, it seems, with public
concerns about the source of research
funding. To most of us, it will seem selfevident that taking money from a convicted sex offender who is subsequently
accused of large-scale sex trafficking is
not a good idea. However, it may be
harder for us to say exactly why we find
this idea so troubling and to convince
others. Indeed, according to the reports
cited, Director Ito was perfectly willing to
accept funds from Epstein and his foun-

dation-as was MIT itself, until the
source became public-and was not dissuaded by Zuckerman's private correspondence in 2013 that a relationship
with Epstein "could have negative consequences for the lab" [8]. Other members
of the MIT Media Lab seem to agree
with Ito. One student at the lab recently
echoed the common refrain, "as long as
we are doing well with this money, we
shouldn't care," and, of course, it is only
Zuckerman and Matias who have so far
resigned in protest [9]. Lawrence Lessig,
a professor at Harvard Law School, went
so far as to say that Ito and the MIT
Media Lab had an obligation to conceal
the acceptance of money from Epstein-
the sort of money "every institution"
[italics in original] necessarily takes,
according to Lessig-to avoid giving the
appearance of endorsing Epstein's views
or behavior [17].

At minimum, the Epstein story
should remind us that how we fund our
research matters in ways that go beyond
"using the money to do good work." How
extreme is this story, though? To what
extent does it relate to most of our own
activities? Is this story just an outlier, or is
it an example of more pervasive problems
with how our research is, or can be,
funded? To help answer these questions,
we will consider another example, from
industry rather than academia.
What About Taking Money From
Those Who Carry Out Targeted
Killing?
"Project Maven" was established by the
U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) in a
26 April 2017 memorandum from the
Deputy Secretary of Defense at the Pentagon [18]. Also known as the Algorithmic Warfare Cross-Functional Team, the

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IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - December 2019

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