Talent

New Acting Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Michael Kratsios spoke with CSET Founding Director Jason Matheny and delivered formal remarks in his first public appearance in the role. The pre-recorded discussion and remarks addressed the challenges and opportunities inherent in defense innovation.

New ICE restrictions on foreign students speed up a trend that make it slower and costlier for immigrants to come to the United States, write Zachary Arnold and Tina Huang. America’s historic near-monopoly on the global market for foreign talent is fading.

China’s strategy to grow its science and technology talent includes: 1) improving domestic education; 2) attracting overseas Chinese talent; and 3) attracting foreign talent. While China’s commitment to domestic education reform has achieved remarkable results, significant challenges remain.

Talent is core to U.S. competitiveness in artificial intelligence, and international graduate students are a large source of AI talent for the United States. Graduate student retention has been a historical U.S. strength, but that strength is endangered by recent trends, finds a new CSET report.

Immigration and the Future of U.S. AI

Morning Consult
| November 26, 2019

The Forbes AI 50 list “shows that foreign talent is critical to AI innovation—and that for now, the United States can still attract talent from around the world,” write CSET’s Remco Zwetsloot, Tina Huang and Zachary Arnold.

Green card limits haven’t budged in decades, while new policies make it harder, costlier, and more uncertain for the world’s talent to come to the United States.

See our translation of a Ministry of Education plan issued in April 2018. The plan lays out objectives designed to significantly enhance China’s cadre of AI talent and its university AI curricula by 2030.

AI is getting caught up in politics

Axios
| November 2, 2019

Tarun Chhabra, Senior Fellow at CSET, spoke with Axios regarding the motivation behind China's technological drive. "[T]he Chinese Communist Party's whole technology worldview is driven...by the imperative on consolidation social control...," said Chhabra.

AI Talent Policy with Remco Zwetsloot

ChinAI
| September 24, 2019

CSET Nonresident Research Fellow Jeff Ding launched his new podcast, ChinaAI Pod, with an inaugural episode featuring CSET Research Fellow Remco Zwetsloot. “The key thing that draws talent to and keeps talent in the U.S.,” said Zwetsloot, “is the robustness of its AI ecosystem.”

As the artificial intelligence field becomes more developed globally, restrictive immigration policies threaten America’s ability to recruit and retain foreign AI talent, according to a new CSET report.