The Effects of AI Conferences on Professor Assistant Professors' Tenure Decisions

We wanted to see like, okay, let's compare what's happening in AI with other non-AI conferences that would allow us to find some evidence that maybe something different is going on in AI or maybe not. So we used a statistical method known as a synthetic control method. What it does is it creates a counterfactual for your treated unit. In our case, it is AI with your non-treated units. The first two figures basically show the share of papers that have at least one co-author with the companies. And we find that only in AI conferences, we have a consistent trend, which is that large companies have actually increased their presence in these 10 computer science AI conferences