The career path of Indian AI talent in charts

Who are the people driving the cutting edge of artificial intelligence, or AI as it is known? Where do the best of the best AI researchers come from and work?

Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), considered the top AI conference, offers some answers. Its December 2019 meeting saw a record 15,920 researchers submit 6,614 papers, with a paper acceptance rate of 21.6 percent, making it one of the largest, most popular, and most selective AI conferences on record.

Two things stand out from the reading of data collated from accepted papers. First, among the top-flight (0.5 percent) of AI researchers, 12 percent have undergraduate degrees from India, the second-biggest group from a country after the US' 35 percent.

Second, half of the world's top AI talents are immigrants, working away from their home countries.

Here is are some of the key takeaways:

Among the top 0.5 percent AI researchers,  12 percent got their undergraduate degree from India, the United States contributed the highest 35 percent. China comes a close third with 10 percent.

Where do top-tier AI researchers come from?
Globally, China, the US, Europe and India contribute 75 percent to top-tier AI researchers. Among these, China is the largest source with 29 percent and India contributes 8 percent to all AI researcher talent pool.

Where do top-tier AI researchers work today?
The United States is leagues ahead of other countries, with nearly 60 percent of top-tier researchers working for American universities or companies. As many as 11 percents of Indian AI researchers work in the United States. Immigrants are fuelling the AI boom. More than half (53 percent) of all the top-tier researchers are immigrants or foreign nationals working in a different country from where they received their undergraduate degrees.

What path did Indian AI researchers take to get to the US?
As many as 70.37 percent of researchers, who got their undergraduate degrees from India, went to the US for graduate school. The US lead is built on attracting international talent. More than two-thirds of the top AI researchers working in the US received undergraduate degrees in other countries. As many as 50 percent of Indian undergrads went to the US for grad school and work.