Assuming this is talking about deep learning, I wish this myth would die, but it's repeated again and again, by people like Ted Cruz and media outlets with little knowledge.
Deep learning was pioneered in Canada, not the US....
Even now, I would say U of Toronto and U of Montreal are still the best universities for DL across the North America.
A big part of the rest of machine learning & AI research has been pioneered in the US. However, there have been some huge contributions by UK and Canada throughout the growth of AI.
Prior to Deep Learning, Machine Learning community don't really associated themselves with Artificial Intelligence very often. The AI at the time, if I recall correctly, related more to 70s symbolism and heuristic search approach.
Now DL have became the dominant focus, people start to put AI/DL in every places possible, to ride the along the hype. For me it is deep learning that really leads the AI buzzword trend at this point.
Of course non-generalist conferences such as ICML, UAI, AAMAS, etc. focus on more specific topics, and those are considered of the same level (A+) than IJCAI/AAAI. Their existence does not mean that anyone in those fields doesn't think they are not doing AI.
In fact, pretty much everyone agrees they are doing AI. If anyone does not agree on that, it is (part of) the pro-"symbolic reasoning" crowd, which sometimes claim only their "strong AI" approach is actual AI and everything else is just little more than mathematical tricks.
[1] https://aaai.org/Library/conferences-library.php [2] https://www.ijcai.org/past_proceedings
It's more complicated than that.
First, the AI community had periodic tendencies that oscillated between philosophies and approaches. Every once in a while, someone would make a big contribution, that approach would bloom, then progress would slow for a number of years. There were previous periods where ANNs and other statistical methods were in vogue.
Second, it depends on what you define as the AI community and the ML community. For example, speech recognition people have been using Hidden Markov Models for years, which is a statistical/learning method. Is that AI? Is that ML?
Again, I was assuming this is talking about deep learning. I understand that hating on deep learning is popular, but the current AI boom, including AlphaGo (which triggered the Chinese interest in AI according to this article) is driven by deep learning.
Although Barto is retired now, Barto's lab at UMass Amherst is still alive and kicking (led by another of his pHD and incoming UMass asst. professor in Phil Thomas).
https://www.recode.net/2015/7/15/11614684/ai-conspiracy-the-...
I would say that grenerally it doesn't matter much where ideas come from but since that's the point of the article they ought to be more precise.