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Our World in Data: AI Conference Attendance
webCredibility Rating
4/5
High(4)High quality. Established institution or organization with editorial oversight and accountability.
Rating inherited from publication venue: Our World in Data
Useful as empirical background evidence for discussions about the pace of AI development and research community growth; often cited to illustrate the rapid scaling of AI research activity over the past decade.
Metadata
Importance: 38/100dataset
Summary
This Our World in Data visualization tracks attendance at 13 major AI conferences from 2010 to 2024, documenting the dramatic growth of the AI research community and its shift toward virtual and hybrid event formats. It provides a quantitative proxy for the expanding scale and interest in AI research over time.
Key Points
- •Tracks attendance data across 13 major AI conferences (e.g., NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR) over a 14-year period from 2010 to 2024.
- •Shows dramatic growth in AI research community size, with some conferences growing from hundreds to tens of thousands of attendees.
- •Documents the COVID-19-driven transition to virtual and hybrid conference formats beginning around 2020.
- •Serves as an indirect measure of AI capabilities research momentum and the growth of the broader AI field.
- •Data is publicly accessible and visualized interactively, useful for trend analysis and governance discussions.
Review
The dataset provides insights into the evolving landscape of artificial intelligence research conferences, documenting a dramatic transformation in how researchers gather and share knowledge. Over the past two decades, AI conferences have experienced substantial growth in scale, quantity, and academic prestige, with a particularly notable shift towards virtual and hybrid participation formats. The analysis by the AI Index Report demonstrates the dynamic nature of AI research dissemination, capturing nuanced trends such as increased global accessibility through virtual conferences and potential measurement challenges in tracking precise attendance. By including major conferences like NeurIPS, ICML, and AAAI, the dataset offers a comprehensive view of the field's collaborative ecosystem, highlighting the increasing interconnectedness and rapid knowledge exchange among AI researchers worldwide.
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Annual attendance at major artificial intelligence conferences - Our World in Data Data Annual attendance at major artificial intelligence conferences
See all data and research on: Artificial Intelligence What you should know about this indicator
AI conferences serve as essential platforms for researchers to present their findings and network with peers and collaborators.
Over the past two decades, these conferences have expanded in scale, quantity, and prestige.
Attendance data should be interpreted with caution, as many conferences in recent years have adopted virtual or hybrid formats.
Virtual conferences often attract larger and more global audiences, but exact attendance figures are harder to measure.
The AI Index reports total attendance, including virtual, hybrid, and in-person participation, across conferences such as AAAI, NeurIPS, ICML, CVPR, EMNLP, ICLR, and others.
The significant spike in ICML attendance in 2021 was likely due to the conference being held virtually that year.
Annual attendance at major artificial intelligence conferences Thirteen major conferences are included. Source AI Index Report (2025) – with minor processing by Our World in Data Last updated April 8, 2025 Next expected update May 2026 Date range 2010–2024 Unit attendees Related research and writing
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Sources and processing
This data is based on the following sources
AI Index Report
The AI Index Report tracks, collates, distills, and visualizes data related to artificial intelligence (AI). The mission is to provide unbiased, rigorously vetted, broadly sourced data to enable policymakers, researchers, executives, journalists, and the general public to develop a more thorough and nuanced understanding of the complex field of AI.
Retrieved on April 8, 2025 Retrieved from https://hai-production.s3.amazonaws.com/files/hai_ai_index_report_2025.pdf Citation This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below. Nestor Maslej, Loredana Fattorini, Raymond Perrault, Yolanda Gil, Vanessa Parli, Njenga Kariuki, Emily Capstick, Anka Reuel, Erik
Brynjolfsson, John Etchemendy, Katrina Ligett, Terah Lyons, James Manyika, Juan Carlos Niebles, Yoav Shoham, Russell Wald,
Tobi Walsh, Armin Hamrah, Lapo Santarlasci, Julia Betts Lotufo, Alexandra Rome, Andrew Shi, Sukrut Oak. “The AI Index 2025
Annual Report,” AI Index Steering Committee, Institute for Human-Centered AI, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, April 2025 The AI Index Report tracks, collates, distills, and visualizes data related to artificial intelligence (AI). The mission is to provide unbiased, rigorously v
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