By:
December 2, 2018
Introduction to the AI Index 2018 Annual Report
We are pleased to introduce the AI Index 2018 Annual Report. This year’s report accomplishes two objectives. First, it refreshes last year’s metrics. Second, it provides global context whenever possible. The former is critical to the Index’s mission — grounding the AI conversation means tracking volumetric and technical progress on an ongoing basis. But the latter is also essential. There is no AI story without global perspective. The 2017 report was heavily skewed towards North American activities. This reflected a limited number of global partnerships established by the project, not an intrinsic bias. This year, we begin to close the global gap. We recognize that there is a long journey ahead — one that involves further collaboration and outside participation — to make this report truly comprehensive.
Still, we can assert that AI is global. 83 percent of 2017 AI papers on Scopus originate outside the U.S. 28 percent of these papers originate in Europe — the largest percentage of any region. University course enrollment in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) is increasing all over the world, most notably at Tsinghua in China, whose combined AI + ML 2017 course enrollment was 16x larger than it was in 2010. And there is progress beyond just the United States, China, and Europe. South Korea and Japan were the 2nd and 3rd largest producers of AI patents in 2014, after the U.S. Additionally, South Africa hosted the second Deep Learning Indaba conference, one of the world’s largest ML teaching events, which drew over 500 participants from 20+ African countries.