Artificial intelligence experts from Africa and South America were denied Canadian visas to attend a major international artificial intelligence conference in Vancouver, pushing the organizers to consider a different country for the next event.
Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), the conference organizers, said at least 30 international researchers were initially denied visas to attend the conference scheduled to take place in Vancouver from Dec. 8-14.
This is the second year running that the Canadian government has refused to allow more than a dozen foreign researchers to attend a major AI conference, The Globe and Mail reported.
Many of the researchers who were denied visas said Canadian authorities told them they were worried they would not leave the country after the conference.
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Tejumade Afonja, a master’s student from Nigeria who is studying at Saarland University in Germany, posted her rejection letter to Twitter.
“It is very significant for the field of AI that all voices be heard,” Katherine Heller, a professor who serves as co-chair of diversity and inclusion at NeurIPS, told CNN.
The conference brings together thousands of researchers from top academic institutions and companies for hundreds of talks, workshops, and side meetings where new ideas and theories are hashed out.
