Comment by nopinsight | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nopinsight | Hacker News Reader

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I added up the number of university researchers who publish in top AI conferences (according to csrankings.org) from Jan 2017 to late May 2018.

http://csrankings.org/#/fromyear/2017/toyear/2018/index?ai&v...

Here are approximate numbers (with 2 significant digits) of faculty members/university researchers who published as above in each country/continent:

US 770

Canada 92

Asia (including China) 340

China 240

Europe 280

Australia + New Zealand 86

South America 12

The world excluding the US 810

So the US is still far ahead of other nations/regions, but it now has a bit below 50% of the world's university researchers who recently published in top AI conferences. China as a country is close to Europe as a continent and its number of published university researchers has increased rapidly in recent years.

The number of researchers is not weighted by the number of papers published but this number is useful since it counts how many people are capable of advising graduate students to produce world-class research. Using the number of papers is complicated by how likely highly capable international graduate students would choose to study in each program (in addition to the researcher's capability), i.e. university's reputation would have an additional impact beyond its research capability.

Are counting the country by the physical location of the university or the actual nationality of the authors? Many of the papers I've read in my program come from the US, but nearly everything I read cutting edge on computer vision had a number of Chinese authors if the entire team wasn't Chinese.

The current administration is trying their hardest to prevent immigrants from studying here, are openly hostile to the ones here, and a lot of the students doing research in my program are returning back to China because it's not worth the effort to work here for many of them.

It's by the physical location of the university/campus. (If the offshoot campus is in another continent, it is counted there, but there are few published AI researchers in offshoot campuses so far that I've seen.)

I certainly agree that the US strength in cutting edge research in many fields significantly derives from its recent immigrants. If the US becomes hostile to high-potential immigrants, its strength will decline.

Surprised at how high Canada is when you factor in its population is only 4x NYC.

When you say it that way, it sounds impressive, but the population is ~11% of the US (36/320), so it seems reasonable they have ~11% the output of the US (90/770).

Yeah you're right.

Hey this is ian hogarth. I first presented a version of this essay at an event at a place called Ditchley which had brought together various ML researchers and politicians from North America and Europe to discuss this topic. One of the things that really struck me was the similarity between the U.K. and Canada in terms of their depth of academic talent around ML but the paucity of independent “domestic champions”.

If you haven't, you should rewrite this essay from the perspective of Crypto nationalism and how that turned out.

I really enjoyed reading this essay-thank you for writing it.

I am curious how many of them are first generation emmigrants.

When it's really cold outside, staying inside and hacking on stuff is probably preferable to working outside.

Somebody told me that's why there's so many Russian hackers even though Russian compsci education is basically third world.

Are there a lot of hackers in regions where it's too hot and sunny to be working outside?

Humans adapt to living in and working in eg tropical, very hot zones dramatically easier than the coldest regions.

That's why there's a vast population in the hot tropical areas, whereas there's nobody in Canada's frozen north, or vast stretches of frozen Russia. Even in the more temperate parts of cold Canada & Russia, the population density is extraordinarily low. Compare that to numerous high population density hot tropical regions.

Mexico for example is one of the hottest countries on earth, it has 127 million people with a population density seven times that of Russia. Its population will soon surpass Russia.

India is even hotter than Mexico.

Iran and Iraq are even hotter than India (120 million people in those two countries, they'll combined surpass Russia in population very soon).

I suspect it also has something to do with information markets being global and internet tech being a way to get western levels of income while living with Eastern European costs.

I think you counted China twice.

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