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Our World in Data: AI Conference Attendance
webCredibility Rating
4/5
High(4)High quality. Established institution or organization with editorial oversight and accountability.
Rating inherited from publication venue: Our World in Data
Useful as empirical background evidence for discussions about the pace of AI development and research community growth; often cited to illustrate the rapid scaling of AI research activity over the past decade.
Metadata
Importance: 38/100dataset
Summary
This Our World in Data visualization tracks attendance at 13 major AI conferences from 2010 to 2024, documenting the dramatic growth of the AI research community and its shift toward virtual and hybrid event formats. It provides a quantitative proxy for the expanding scale and interest in AI research over time.
Key Points
- •Tracks attendance data across 13 major AI conferences (e.g., NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR) over a 14-year period from 2010 to 2024.
- •Shows dramatic growth in AI research community size, with some conferences growing from hundreds to tens of thousands of attendees.
- •Documents the COVID-19-driven transition to virtual and hybrid conference formats beginning around 2020.
- •Serves as an indirect measure of AI capabilities research momentum and the growth of the broader AI field.
- •Data is publicly accessible and visualized interactively, useful for trend analysis and governance discussions.
Review
The dataset provides insights into the evolving landscape of artificial intelligence research conferences, documenting a dramatic transformation in how researchers gather and share knowledge. Over the past two decades, AI conferences have experienced substantial growth in scale, quantity, and academic prestige, with a particularly notable shift towards virtual and hybrid participation formats. The analysis by the AI Index Report demonstrates the dynamic nature of AI research dissemination, capturing nuanced trends such as increased global accessibility through virtual conferences and potential measurement challenges in tracking precise attendance. By including major conferences like NeurIPS, ICML, and AAAI, the dataset offers a comprehensive view of the field's collaborative ecosystem, highlighting the increasing interconnectedness and rapid knowledge exchange among AI researchers worldwide.
Resource ID:
a105f4af84e14509 | Stable ID: MmIyNzc4NT