mdrutenberg (03/25/83)
Alan, I found your "Canadians in US AI" message in can.ai very interesting to read and reflect on. I can see some really serious problems in attracting people back to Canada which I thought I'd comment on. First some context... I am currently a first year (non CS) undergraduate at Waterloo. I'm quite interested in most areas of computer science research (including AI) and so I've tried to get interesting summer jobs in the field. Last summer I worked at Parc with the Software Concepts Group (the Smalltalk group) and since then, I've spent some of my free time here doing CS research work (with a professor) as well as just watching the Waterloo CS department function. As may be apparent, I am not currently too close to facing a decision about where to work, but I have spent some time this year thinking about the problem. I see several things which might discourage people from returning to Canada. While they currently do not directly affect me (other than that I have generally gone to the US for my summer jobs), I would expect that they will be quite important when I have to choose where to work after I get my PhD (in CS). The first problem, as you mentioned in an earlier message, is that there are no private Canadian AI research labs similar to Parc or SRI. If people do not want to teach or work in an academic environment, this gives them nowhere to go in Canada. The second problem is that it appears that governments (both federal and provincial) have little idea of what is going on in computer science and they provide funding accordingly. To move from the informed, (somewhat) assured funding of Arpa, NSF or the large corporation of your choice to an almost hostile funding environment is *not* very attractive. The final, and I think most serious, problem is that Canadian CS schools don't seem to provide the type of working environment that, for example, the world class institutions mentioned on your list provide. I'm thinking not just of equipment (e.g. high performance personal computers) but more importantly of the general atmosphere and the support, both from colleagues and administrators, which seems missing. I don't see this as a problem only in Canada, but if we want to keep top people here, we will have to provide an environment which is competitive with the top institutions they are leaving for. An example... I was talking with the head of our CS department about the difficulty the department is having getting new faculty members. He mentioned that he sometimes has graduate students visit as potential assistant professors and he was amazed that many expected to have a terminal in their office(!). Such an attitude towards environment and support would be hard to find in the places which are "stealing"(?) Canadians. Mike Rutenberg