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‘Basically a Chinese racket’: how China streaked ahead at a global AI conference

Mainland China accounted for 44 per cent of the top 50 institutions contributing to the ICLR in Rio de Janeiro, according to analysis

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Mainland China’s Tsinghua University alone had 332 accepted papers, according to one analysis. Photo: European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems
Among the top 50 institutions contributing to the International Conference on Learning Representations, held in Rio de Janeiro last month, mainland China accounted for about 44 per cent of the total. Photo: Dmytro Lopushanskyy
Ling Xinin Ohio
Chinese universities have significantly overtaken their American rivals in research output at one of the world’s leading artificial intelligence (AI) conferences, according to an analysis of more than 5,000 accepted papers that went viral on social media.

Among the top 50 institutions contributing to the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), held in Rio de Janeiro last month, mainland China accounted for about 44 per cent of the total, with Tsinghua University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Zhejiang University and Peking University taking the top four spots globally.

Some social media users pointed out that if Hong Kong’s 7.7 per cent share was counted together with mainland China’s, the country’s contribution would exceed half of all papers presented at the conference.

“If you count mainland China, Hong Kong and Singapore as mostly Chinese, and add the many Chinese-American researchers [in the US], AI research is basically a Chinese racket,” one user identifying himself as a Silicon Valley hi-tech entrepreneur wrote, partly in jest.

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