TY - GEN
T1 - Skilled and Mobile
T2 - 4th AAAI/ACM Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Ethics, and Society, AIES 2021
AU - Zwetsloot, Remco
AU - Zhang, Baobao
AU - Dreksler, Noemi
AU - Kahn, Lauren
AU - Anderljung, Markus
AU - Dafoe, Allan
AU - Horowitz, Michael C.
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 ACM.
PY - 2021/7/21
Y1 - 2021/7/21
N2 - Countries, companies, and universities are increasingly competing over top-tier artificial intelligence (AI) researchers. Where are these researchers likely to immigrate and what affects their immigration decisions? We conducted a survey (n = 524) of the immigration preferences and motivations of researchers that had papers accepted at one of two prestigious AI conferences: the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) and the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML). We find that the U.S. is the most popular destination for AI researchers, followed by the U.K., Canada, Switzerland, and France. A country's professional opportunities stood out as the most common factor that influences immigration decisions of AI researchers, followed by lifestyle and culture, the political climate, and personal relations. The destination country's immigration policies were important to just under half of the researchers surveyed, while around a quarter noted current immigration difficulties to be a deciding factor. Visa and immigration difficulties were perceived to be a particular impediment to conducting AI research in the U.S., the U.K., and Canada. Implications of the findings for the future of AI talent policies and governance are discussed.
AB - Countries, companies, and universities are increasingly competing over top-tier artificial intelligence (AI) researchers. Where are these researchers likely to immigrate and what affects their immigration decisions? We conducted a survey (n = 524) of the immigration preferences and motivations of researchers that had papers accepted at one of two prestigious AI conferences: the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) and the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML). We find that the U.S. is the most popular destination for AI researchers, followed by the U.K., Canada, Switzerland, and France. A country's professional opportunities stood out as the most common factor that influences immigration decisions of AI researchers, followed by lifestyle and culture, the political climate, and personal relations. The destination country's immigration policies were important to just under half of the researchers surveyed, while around a quarter noted current immigration difficulties to be a deciding factor. Visa and immigration difficulties were perceived to be a particular impediment to conducting AI research in the U.S., the U.K., and Canada. Implications of the findings for the future of AI talent policies and governance are discussed.
KW - ai researchers
KW - immigration policy
KW - survey research
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85112442543&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85112442543&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/3461702.3462617
DO - 10.1145/3461702.3462617
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85112442543
T3 - AIES 2021 - Proceedings of the 2021 AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society
SP - 1050
EP - 1059
BT - AIES 2021 - Proceedings of the 2021 AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society
PB - Association for Computing Machinery, Inc
Y2 - 19 May 2021 through 21 May 2021
ER -