AI Research Atlas Maps Researchers, Topics, and the Doctoral Pipeline

Summary

AI Research Atlas is an interactive map of where AI researchers are located and what subjects they publish on. Its index is built from literature and researcher data drawn from arXiv, OpenAlex, ORCID, and DBLP, and each displayed figure counts the profiles represented in that index. Users can explore countries and subjects, while the site also shows people who began publishing in the last three years compared with the preceding three years, papers indexed by year, and doctorates in progress. The site treats recent subject growth as an indicator of where doctoral candidates may enter the market in roughly three to four years, rather than as a direct forecast. It is delivered as a single HTML file with JSON data embedded in the page, so it uses no API call, framework, chart library, or tracker for the displayed data. A scheduled process rebuilds the index from the public sources and regenerates the page and downloadable CSV and JSON aggregates, which are published under CC BY and also made available on Hugging Face. The atlas measures visible publication activity rather than everyone working in AI: non-publishing engineers and research in closed venues may be undercounted, affiliations can lag a move by months to a year, and OpenAlex subject categories are uneven and overlapping. Only aggregate counts appear on the page; individual records are excluded, while the underlying index and privacy practices are documented separately.