Investigating Co‐Authorship Networks of Academic and Industry Researchers in Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Research teams from the industry, especially big technology companies, have been pushing impactful research work in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), changing the prospects of the field and the careers of many researchers. Research teams from big technology companies usually possess more data, bigger computing infrastructure, and research talent, granting them the advantages in advancing AI research. While most previous work focuses on investigating the advantages the industry has in the field of AI, and how their research publication is different from those published by academic teams, few research has been done to investigate whether working as an industry researcher is beneficial at the individual level. In this work, by analyzing co‐authorship networks of researchers published in AI conferences, we investigate whether working in the industry gives researchers advantages in “intangible” forms, such as social capital, represented by the collaborative relationships they gained or maintained. Our result shows that the many advantages industry researchers possess correlate with the social capital they have, measured by degree centrality, eigenvector centrality, betweenness centrality, and effective size.