Institute for Creative Technologies Reviews

Pros

You get to work from scratch. You will be having meetings with Army people and get to gather the requirements from them.

Cons

Requirement specification document should be prepared before starting the development.

Pros

very good work life balance

Cons

low pay and irrelevant tech

Pros

-access to state-of-the art toolkits and technologies -good work/life balance -some nice social events for employees

Cons

Highly dependent on who your manager is, little exposure beyond who you directly report to. Can be less collegial (most of funding comes from one pot and senior people more concerned with protecting their slice of the pie as opposed to collaborating).

Pros

They try to make it a nice place to work. The facility is nice with a small gym, game room , and library. There is also a private park across the street with basketball, and volleyball courts. They have monthly birthday/new hire celebrations, holiday party, Independence day bar-b-que (family included). Monthly trainer consultation (not my favorite)

Cons

If you can get hired without knowing someone you are part of the lucky few. Don't look to be promoted. This is a small office so there isn't much room for growth and I didn't see many promotions (I don't know of any). I didn't see anyone move up through the ranks. Diversity in management is non existent so if that matters to you keep searching.

Pros

Lots of new cool research benefits and state of the art AI

Cons

H1-b non commercial visa provision for academia and hence need to take that into consideration

Pros

Excellent benefits, and if you're an academic, it's part of USC, so get that tenure! Free coffee, smart people, interesting work.

Cons

Lack of drive and initiative. Professional development is nonexistent for non-admin staff, so accountants get training, programmers have to beg for classes. Compensation isn't competitive. Management is aloof.

Pros

A caveat: I only worked here as a contractor. That said, there are two things that make this work environment incredible. 1. These people are working at the cutting edge, developing technologies for graphics, interactivity and entertainment that are changing industries. So you'll be surrounded by people that prioritize discovering new things. It's an academic environment, but one focused on solving real technical problems in creative industries. It's a super inspiring combination to participate in. 2. As a result of this, it is a bizarrely supportive workplace. These people understand trying 10 solutions that don't work and finding an answer on the 11th try, because that's how you develop new things. They get that so deeply. I've never worked at a place that was more tolerant of "learning curve", and as a result both my knowledge and my confidence in my abilities increased massively while I was there, even though I was there as a technical laborer and not an academic.

Cons

Sometimes deadlines can be pretty soft, because pretty much every project at ICT is an attempt to do something that hasn't been done before. It's very hard to project a timeline under those circumstances, and that took some getting used to.

Pros

Can learn more things about Natural Language Processing

Cons

nothing cons there. It's best place to work

Pros

I was a student worker, but still my teammates considered me part of their team. The project i was working on was more of a research project, so got to understand how a typical research project is handled. The people there are amazing, with lots of experience and I had a chance to learn a lot from them. The office is located in superb area of Playa Vista which was a plus for me.

Cons

This is not a major con, but coming from working in the industry, working on research projects sometime meant more of prototyping which meant a bit more slower but promising development of the projects.

Pros

Got to work on fascinating Virtual Reality research, friendly PhD students!

Cons

Internship was very unstructured, sometimes struggled to find things to do