China Has Now Eclipsed The US in AI Research (washingtonpost.com)

Earlier this week, the Obama administration discussed a new strategic plan aimed at fostering the development of AI-centered technologies in the United States. What's striking about it is, the Washington Post notes, although the United States was an early leader in deep-learning research (a subset of the overall branch of AI known as machine learning), China has effectively eclipsed it in terms of the number of papers published annually on the subject (Editor's note: the link could be paywalled; alternate source). From the report: The rate of increase is remarkably steep, reflecting how quickly China's research priorities have shifted. The quality of China's research is also striking. The chart narrows the research to include only those papers that were cited at least once by other researchers, an indication that the papers were influential in the field.

Comments

Citation shenanigans?

[93 Escort Wagon]

I really hate to say this, but it's not inconceivable that the Chinese might be intentionally gaming the citation-based rankings by citing each other a lot (we have seen such things happen in the west, too, albeit on a smaller scale). I'd like to see how many citations these papers get from non-Chinese sources as well.