Santa Fe made its way into a Brookings Institution report that pinpoints the geography of America's artificial intelligence industry and "early adopter" cities with relatively high levels of activity in the sector.
Financial services firm American Express and Descartes Labs, which offers geospatial analytics for addressing issues such as climate change and food security, were the top two employers in the sector in the City Different, the report says.
Additionally, Santa Fe stood out among other "early adopter" metros due to its smaller population. Other cities listed include Austin, Boston, San Diego and Lincoln, Nebraska, where American Express also employs a notable amount of AI professionals, according to the report.
The Brookings Institution report defined "early adopter" cities as showing "above-average involvement" in artificial intelligence activities. And along with two other "superstar" metro areas, Santa Fe and the dozen other early adopter cities are identified as being pillars for the country's nascent AI industry.
View the full report, which was released in September, at this link.
Early adopter cities were characterized in the report as having "strong research institutions and have been successful in developing and deploying commercial applications from research and translating them into high-value growth companies." In New Mexico, entrepreneurs in Santa Fe and elsewhere have opportunities to commercialize technologies developed at or in conjunction with Sandia National Laboratories and Los Alamos National Laboratory, providing a potential buoy for high-tech industries.
A total of 13 early adopter cities were listed in the report:
- 1) Austin, Texas
- 2) Boston
- 3) Los Angeles
- 4) New York City
- 5) Raleigh-Cary, North Carolina
- 6) San Diego
- 7) Seattle
- 8) Washington, D.C.
- 9) Boulder, Colorado
- 10) Lincoln, Nebraska
- 11) Santa Cruz-Watsonville, California
- 12) Santa Maria-Santa Barbara, California
- 13) Santa Fe, New Mexico
Additionally, the Brookings Institution report showed some of the largest regional AI employers existed outside the tech industry, such as finance — which is highlighted by American Express in Santa Fe.
Methodology
The Brookings Institution's report lists various data sources: the STAR METRICS federally-funded research system; a database made public by Stanford and put together by Bloomberg Government for federal contracts relating to AI with Federal Procurement Data System data on government spending; patents and patent descriptions from the United States Patent and Trademark Office; job posting and profile data from economic data and analytics company Emsi; Crunchbase, which also provides information about companies; and academic publications from a compiled list of authors and their affiliation from the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems and International Conference on Machine Learning.
The report used various keywords such as "deep learning," "neural networks," "object tracking," "computer vision" and many other terms to identify patents and research and development grants. The keywords came from a separate report titled "WIPO Technology Trends 2019—Artificial Intelligence," according to Brookings.
The public policy research nonprofit then performed a type of cluster analysis, which is a statistical method for grouping data based on similarities that differentiate them from other groups, the report says.
