Major AI conference is moving to Africa in 2020 due to visa issues
venturebeat.com
venturebeat.com
I was denied visa, going to present my paper at NIPS 2010 in Vancouver, Canada. Czech citizen (EU), PhD student at the time, with obvious ties to CZ.
I fully respect each country's right to refuse anyone, including without providing a reason (as was the case with me). I see it as "their loss" :-) You pesky computer scientists, stay away!
http://www.owl232.net/papers/immigration.htm
I now find this to be a very interesting and subtle ethical question
3.6 Social Peace
When large swathes of the work force suffer falling income sure to competition from immigrants, anger will rise to dangerous levels.
3.7 Maintenance of Social Capacity for Self-Governance
Rule of law through government institutions, rather than by an elite of cronies through hired thugs, is possible only under certain conditions. Foremost of these being: 1) Engagement of citizens in government, going beyond the minimum of showing up at a polling booth every four years, and 2) Sufficient education to understand what's being voted upon.
Though both of these are questions of degree rather than Boolean propositions, both nevertheless remain requirements of existential gravity for any free society.
The election of 2016 shows just how imperiled 3.6 and 3.7 have become here in the United States.
The author, writing back in 2010, lacked the 2016 evidence.
SO i guess life balances out. Sort of.
But yes. Denied visa after getting accepted really sucks. Do u still get "published in NIPS" credit or is the paper withdrawn ?
"Homosexuality is a criminal offense in Ethiopia, there's no way I'm ever submitting an abstract to #ICLR next year... I can't risk my life.
I guess there will be more racial diversity, at the cost of no more #LGBT diversity."
It is kind of sad that we have this way of carving up the world into arbitrary pieces and calling us "us" and them "the enemy".
I'm glad it's like this for me, and I hope the world can keep moving forward in that direction (as an european I'm kind of used to no borders between countries, the same way US people move between states); but at the same time I'm not sure how healthy it is to have such privileges and not even recognize them as such anymore.
I guess this is what causes the people from "our" countries calling themselves expat rather than immigrants (we've had a case this week again, where an english immigrant in France complained on twitter about immigrants coming to France ...).
I believe remembering what is a privilege you are lucky have is important, maybe if we were better at that we would have less on the modern "social stupidity" issues (another matter entirely but if people knew how lucky they were of not having polio and/or knew someone related to them who got it, they would be much less likely to avoid vaccination ...).
It's not arbitrary, our ancestors in many cases fought and died to establish those lines so that they could live their lives how they wanted within those lines. They worked hard so that their children and grandchildren and fellow citizens could have better lives within those lines. To discount that as luck is demeaning to the sacrifices of the people who came before you
As an example, if you read about the motivations of specific actors in the American revolutionary war, many of the top dissenters were basically interested in not paying taxes and being the boss of their own piece of land (instead of having oversight from across the pond). Nobody is ethically pure, of course, but the main push for the revolutionary war was done out of massive self-interest from people in power.
"There was a time that we were noble" is something that rarely plays out in practice. Why should it? If anything humanity has gotten more, not less, ethical and noble over time.
There's an idea of fighting for justice and truth, and then there's trying to die to establish lines on a map. They're not the same thing, and I'd say that it's rarely coinciding in practice
They might just be "lines on a map" but they mean something to people, just 50 years ago those "lines" were the difference between living in a communist hellhole and freedom and prosperity. There's a lot of cubans and eastern europeans who risked their lives to get on the other side of some lines on a map and get a better life for themselves and their children.
If people hadn't been willing to fight and die to defend those lines and their ability to live how they want, we wouldn't be able to have this discussion right now
he might've been from europe though, and we really did have ... a lot of blood wasted to draw out these lines... we kept killing each other for them
bloodshed and misery of the commons is a very ... 'noble' thing. by which i mean that every noble in europes history enjoyed it.
i'd agree to the spirit of your message though, and the grandparent post probably as well. he probably didn't mean it like you interpreted it
Doesn't sound so noble then, eh?
Carthaginians, Celts, Bosnians, Tutsi, Rohingya ...
My family members fought in wars, paid taxes, and helped build up the country so their descendants could have a better life, calling that nothing but luck is disrespectful to the sacrifices they made.
Also, statistically, birthrates are higher in less developed countries with worse living conditions.
That's sort of the whole point; often improving the lives of "fellow citizens" came at the expense of everyone else
As a scientist, however, I abhor organizations such as BlacksInAI: in science there’s no place for identity politics.
Sounds like a "theory vs practice thing". Do you believe that identity should not, and/or does not affect a person's ability to practice science to the best of their potential?
Of course I believe that in theory it should not but in practice it does. Organizations that try to correct, compensate, steer, etc. things towards where they should be, need to exist because things are not where they should be. There is nothing unscientific about it, but maybe you have data to prove otherwise. (I personally have no idea if BlacksInAI does this job well or not. The choice of Ethiopia in this case does not look great)
Citation needed.
>There is nothing unscientific about it, but maybe you have data to prove otherwise.
If you make a claim that something should be done, the burden on proof is on you to substantiate that claim.
Are you seriously trying to claim that science is a perfect meritocracy?
Seriously?
I'm not making any particular claim about science. I'm making a general claim about reason: someone making a moral argument must provide some reason or evidence to support that argument. In this particular case, it means that if someone wants to make a claim that there is something morally wrong with the distribution of scientists with respect to some particular characteristic, the onus is on them to support their claim (refute the null hypothesis).
So I put it to you again, do you agree with the statement or do you disagree?
If someone wants a source to my comments, I'll provide it as best I can.
1. I didn't make the original statement
2. The reason I became involved in this debate is because the original statement seemed very far from controversial to me and I was rather dumbfounded that anyone felt the need to ask for supporting evidence.
The original claim was "things are not where they should be" and the context was "a person's ability to practice science to the best of their potential" irrespective of their nationality, gender, ethnicity etc.
For this to be controversial someone would have to be making the rather extreme counter-claim that scientific achievement is based solely on ability.
Maybe, but the burden of proof lies with the person who made the argument. ("things are not where they should be")
I don't think the tangent this discussion has taken is any indication that the original claim was controversial - merely that it's very easy to get bogged down in meta-discussions that detract from the actual issue being discussed. I don't think anyone could reasonably dispute the original statement - unless their interpretation of it was wildly different to mine. If that's the case then it's not lack of supporting evidence that's the problem - it's clarity of communication.
The reason academic papers require rigour is because such rigour is necessary to make a convincing argument. Without rigour, people end up just talking past, misunderstanding or shouting at eachother; nobody's going to convince someone else to change their mind just by stating an opinion.
>So I put it to you again, do you agree with the statement or do you disagree?
Personally, I agree that science is not a perfect meritocracy, but I'm not convinced it's due to discrimination by scientists: I've never met a scientist I could imagine making a hiring decision based on race. If there is a problem I'd suspect it's due to other factors; if there are fewer people with a particular characteristic studying science in university or high school, then seems like the root cause of that would be the real problem. You can't expect scientists to hire a certain percentage of people with that characteristic if the percentage of science graduates with that characteristic is much lower.
And a brief look at your post history shows many examples of statements unaccompanied by supporting evidence.
As laudable as your sentiments are, they are rather unrealistic. We make unsupported claims all the time because normal human communication is not the same thing as rigorous chains of deductive statements.
Do you mean "race would never have any effect on their hiring decision" - even unconsciously? There's a fairly robust body of work on the topic of unconscious bias that would have to be almost entirely invalid for that statement to be true.
By "making a decison based on race" I mean making a conscious decision in which race is a significant factor. If you want me to be more specific, I'll restate that as: in my estimation, any racial bias that may exist among the scientists I've met is not significant enough to in aggregate result in a difference greater than 1% in the ratio of people of any particular ethnicity hired compared to people of other ethnicities. I'd suspect other biases have far greater effect, e.g. against people from no-name universities.
I might agree that conscious racial bias is rare but I would find it harder to accept that unconscious racial bias is as uncommon as you claim. Does that sound reasonable?
A moral statement doesn't prove itself. Someone has to prove it, either by providing an argument themselves, which the poster didn't do, or citing an external source of proof.
>ethnicity/gender/etc. should not affect one’s opportunities in science, and then claiming that there is still work to be done in achieving that goal.
That claim still requires a supporting argument: evidence to support that ethnicity/gender/etc. is affecting peoples' opportunities in science.
If you can solve any of the outstanding problems no one is going to care where you come from, gender, political views, socioeconomic status etc.
That seems quite meritocratic to me. Compare that to say a distinguished position such as a Supreme Court judge appointment.
That said, science is about equality of opportunities, not about equality of outcomes.
This means that we should of course strive for having easier access to universities for people of all backgrounds.
But after that Academia is PURE meritocracy.
Anyone who fights for more graduates with a certain identity, or more researchers with a certain identity, or more professors with a certain identity is SEVERELY misguided.
Are you claiming it is a pure meritocracy or that it aspires to being such? If the former then I think that's remarkably optimistic to the point of naivety so I'll presume you mean the latter.
This is pure naivety.
There's no such thing as an absence of identity politics. Only the politics of the status quo, which as we know has not been fantastic for PoC, women, LGBT+, ...
Sure there is! Its name is meritocracy.
That’s meritocracy. And there’s no place for this “historical biases” in the decision making process in the academia. At least not in science.
I can accept that maybe there are still some barriers in some situations I am not aware of, but then the message should not be “more blacks in science” or “more women in science”.
That’s countereffective and humiliating for minority people: the focus should be on the barriers, if any, not on the headcount. We are not pandas in need of protection.
The Indian govt will throw money at you if you do something like this here.
here's the govt budget for AI - https://inc42.com/buzz/budget-2018-ai-ml/
NITI specifically recommends collaborative programs for funding (as well as ethics organizations) - http://niti.gov.in/writereaddata/files/document_publication/...
there's a crap ton of govt funding for initiatives like this. I interact with the NITI Aayog personally on this.
People from certain effectively balck-listed Chinese regions are much harder to get it done.
I know here in China people would exploit every loophole and weak point they can find to get a visa to the US etc, either to study, born babies, or apply asylum. They would exchange latest info about where and which VO is easier to pass, how to best frame your story, like white middle-aged woman is more likely to pass etc, these behaviors in turn are pushing the bars higher and higher every year.
It's like that border wall, there are realistic problems on field that need to be solved.
Americans genarally don't realize how much their passport worth in other parts of the world.
The key is entering America, any other thing doesn't matter, if you want to smuggle you way in through Russai-Cuba-Mexico etc, you need to pay around 70-100K or something and it's not guaranteed.
So how to legally enter America? Either through universities, medical reasons, or tourism. Like applying any for-profit American language school to "learn English", PHD and extend it endlessly.
Once you entered, you can do what you wanted, to study then go back home, or to earn money, illegal overstaying waiting for citizenship amnesty, or applying for asylum. Chinese make up the majority of asylum seekers there.
The recent hot topic of birth tourism, there are two ways, do it on a tourist visa and be possibly black-listed and visa revoked afterwards; or state your intention to the VO, you need to frame a perfect story here to convince the person that it's a medical cause, agencies will teach you to say American hospitals are better, pain-free whatever, just don't say you want that passport, but in reality all these people are there for the American passport. It's best to delete any related things on your phone such as Wechat opon entering in case evidence of visa fraud were found.
There's also a service that agencies would help you to apply for EB1-A (Alien of Extraordinary Ability), publish paid papers, acquire paid awards etc. It's said (by his former friend) this guy paid audiences to fill an entire American theater for his show to help him apply it. https://www.scmp.com/news/world/united-states-canada/article...
You guys remember couple months ago, America said they no longer accept domestic abuse as the reason for asylum? I can't say it's definitely related, but it's a known easy way to get quick green card, you pay for a short term sham marriage, then call the police for domestic abuse, go to court, then you can divorce, not having to wait out 2 years' marriage.
I have a small suspicion that those who decided for that never set foot in the countries considered for this (though I might be wrong).
Though it is undeniable that there is talent there and we should try to make things easier to them, there is a limit and a compromise in making things not harder for other people as well.
As someone familiar with 3rd world country business, a lot of things people take for granted is not trivial
The opaqueness of the US system is pretty high.
I do agree that other places have bigger problems. There won’t be too many conferences in Saudi Arabia I bet.
Typically when I file for visas I have to give detailed statements of all my bank accounts, all my investments, my income tax statements for the last 3 years, a list of all the places I’ve travelled, medical insurance, a letter from my employer guaranteeing that I’ll be back and god knows what else. This was for an Australian visa btw, that allows visa free travel if you’re American, Canadian or European.
That’s not even the half of it. A friend of mine applied for a Schenghen visa for a 6 day trip and got a 5 day visa. The border agent then harassed him on his way out for “overstaying” his visa.
Heaven forbid that people with privilege are subjected to the horrors of filling forms.
Keep in mind that official enforcement isn't the only concern. Illegality can make people feel justified in taking matters into their own hands, and there have been anti-homosexual mobs and attacks in countries that recently criminalized homosexuality.
This conference is not going elsewhere to "help poor people", but because it is too difficult for international researchers to go to the U.S.A., and many do not bother at all, resulting in a worse conference. I for one would not even consider going to the states for a conference, but often go to other countries.