The 24 foreign scholars recruited by Canadian universities. See bios here. Collage: Canada 150 Research Chairs.
Seoul-born Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, a professor at Brown University known for her work on fake news, is moving to Canada. So is Alan Aspuru-Guzik, a Harvard chemistry professor working on quantum computing and artificial intelligence.
What's going on: They are among 24 top academic minds around the world wooed to Canada by an aggressive recruitment effort offering ultra-attractive sinecures, seven-year funding arrangements — and, Chun and Aspuru-Guzik said in separate interviews with Axios, a different political environment from the U.S.
The background: The "Canada 150 Research Chairs Program" is spending $117 million on seven-year grants of either $350,000 a year or $1 million a year. It's part of a campaign by numerous countries to attract scholars unhappy with Brexit, the election of Donald Trump, and other political trends, sweetened with unusually generous research conditions.
Chun, who grew up in Canada and has lived in the U.S. since 1992, said she will launch a new "digital democracies group" at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, which will take on the problem of the online echo chamber.
She spoke of wanting to live in a country "with a strong commitment to public education, funding research and universal health care." "That makes a real difference to society," she said. She added, "Some of my friends work in climate research. Funding for that is disappearing and that’s disturbing."
Aspuru-Guzik tells a similar story. He will become a professor of computer science at the University of Toronto. He will have a concurrent position at the Vector Institute, an artificial intelligence research center where Geoffrey Hinton, the father of machine learning, is chief scientific adviser.
After 20 years in the U.S., Aspuru-Guzik worried watching the rise of the Christian Right and then the Tea Party. When Trump won election in 2016, that was the final straw.
Harvard came back with a "generous" counter-offer, it wasn't enough.
"They couldn't change the president. And they couldn't change the zeitgeist," Aspuru-Guzik said. "So I left."
The bottom line: "Canada is not perfect — “not a utopia,” Aspuru-Guzik said. “But I place my bets on Canada rather than the U.S. as a place for my kids to grow up.”
Editor's note: We corrected the spelling of Simon Fraser University.
In Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos' annual letter to shareholders, he shares seven "essentials of what we’ve learned (so far) about high standards inside an organization" in this age of "customer empowerment."
His first rule: Intrinsic or Teachable? ... People "are pretty good at learning high standards simply through exposure. High standards are contagious."
Universal or Domain Specific? ... You "have to learn high standards separately in every arena of interest. ... Understanding this point is important because it keeps you humble. You can consider yourself a person of high standards in general and still have debilitating blind spots."
Recognition and Scope: "First, you have to be able to recognize what good looks like ... Second, you must have realistic expectations for how hard it should be."
Perfect Handstands: "A close friend recently decided to learn to do a perfect free-standing handstand. ... In the very first lesson, the coach gave her some wonderful advice. ... 'The reality is that it takes about six months of daily practice. If you think you should be able to do it in two weeks, you’re just going to end up quitting.' Unrealistic beliefs ... kill high standards."
Six-Page Narratives: "We don’t do PowerPoint (or any other slide-oriented) presentations at Amazon. Instead, we write narratively structured six-page memos. We silently read one at the beginning of each meeting in a kind of 'study hall.' ... The great memos are written and re-written, shared with colleagues who are asked to improve the work, set aside for a couple of days, and then edited again with a fresh mind."
Skill: "The football coach doesn’t need to be able to throw, and a film director doesn’t need to be able to act. But they both do need to recognize high standards for those things ... (As a side note, by tradition at Amazon, authors’ names never appear on the memos — the memo is from the whole team.)"
Benefits of High Standards: A "culture of high standards is protective of all the 'invisible' but crucial work that goes on in every company. ... The work that gets done when no one is watching. In a high standards culture, doing that work well is its own reward ... [H]igh standards are fun!"
P.S. "13 years post-launch, we have exceeded 100 million paid Prime members globally. In 2017 Amazon shipped more than five billion items with Prime worldwide, and more new members joined Prime than in any previous year."
U.S. tech giants hiring more foreign workers on H-1B visas
Prominent U.S. tech companies obtained more H-1B visas in 2017 than in 2016, according to a new study by the National Foundation for American Policy using fresh data from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. At the same time, several of the largest India-based companies saw a decrease in approved petitions for the second year in a row.
The big picture: Total petitions for H-1B visas for the 2019 fiscal year fell by about 9,000, mostly due to a decreasing numbers of H-1B petitions from India-based firms. However, the study shows there is still a strong demand for H-1Bs in the U.S.
Behind the numbers:
Foreign students: International students account for 81% of the full-time graduate students at U.S. universities in electrical engineering and 79% in computer science, per the report. That could be a contributing factor to the high number of H-1Bs used by U.S. tech companies, hoping to retain high-skilled workers trained in the U.S.
The other side: Shivendra Singh, Vice President of NASSCOM, which represents India's IT industry, told Axios that India-based companies are using fewer H-1Bs due to changes in needed skills, more local hiring by U.S. companies, and the use of new technologies that require "more non-STEM, managerial-type talent that is more readily available in the U.S."
Yes, but: Dan Stein, president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which advocates for lower legal immigration levels, tells Axios that "these trends reflect an effort to eliminate large-scale abuses of the program... Not surprisingly, higher approval standards would produce an approval bias in favor of U.S.-based corporations."
What to watch: NFAP's study highlights that Tesla, Uber and General Motors were all approved more than 100 H-1B petitions last year. Visa demand by these companies is likely to increase with the rise of new autonomous vehicle technologies.
The top companies
Here are the number of initially approved visas:
Cognizant 3,194
Amazon 2,515
TCS 2,312
Tech Mahindra 2,233
Microsoft 1, 479
IBM 1,231
Intel 1,230
Infosys 1,218
Google 1,213
Wipro 1,210
Deloitte 961
Accenture 954
HCL America 866
Facebook 720
Apple 673
Get more stories like this by signing up for our weekly robotics, AI and labor newsletter, Future of Work.
