I'm not qualified to evaluate this particular course. But any time there is a corporate sponsor of a course, it provides strong incentives to the professor to not harm that sponsor at a minimum. If there's a methodology that the professor would like to teach, but that sidesteps, or calls into question, the sponsor's main offering, then that content is in jeopardy. The corruption will always take root given enough time, so that's why editorial and advertising, or academic content and corporate sponsors, etc. should always be at arm's length. Snowflake should give money to CMU to fund "database-related research and teaching" and the university should decide what to do with it. There's still a possibility of improper influence, but it's harder to achieve. This is particularly bad because it's CMU and not University of Phoenix... CMU is in the highest echelon of computer science universities, so it's sad to see it so debased.
What if Kodak sponsored an imaging class in 1990... what do you think they would have said about film vs. digital photography?
A lot of ML classes at CMU (and probably other prestigious campuses) are sponsored by AWS or GCP through cloud credit donation, including the popular Cloud Computing class. Is that any different ?
Not really. Cloud computing has a lot of benefits, but a lot of risks and drawbacks. Who is sponsoring a class to teach about those? About keeping users’ data private by building your own infrastructure? CMU is actively tilting their students, who are the top CS students in the world, towards cloud computing, based on the choices of these sponsors.
