Should AI Researchers Get Special Access to Visas?

Last year the annual artificial intelligence conference NeurIPS invited 230 researchers from Africa to attend a "Black in AI" workshop in Montreal. It was a great opportunity to bring some diversity to the field of AI. Sadly, however, the Canadian government denied visas for about a third of the Africans invited to the workshop. Many others were unable to attend because the Canadian government took too long to process their visas. The Partnership on AI--a group founded by Amazon, Facebook, Google's DeepMind subsidiary, Microsoft, and IBM--contends that these sorts of visa issues are a threat to the development of AI.