For the second year in a row, Canada has refused visas to dozens of researchers – most of them from Africa – who were hoping to attend an artificial intelligence (AI) conference in Vancouver. The hassles have caused at least one other AI conference to choose a different country for their next event.

The Neural Information Processing Systems conference (NeurIPS), which brings together thousands of experts and researchers from all over the world, will be held in Vancouver next month. Last week, NeurIPS began hearing that several attendees had had their visas denied.

It was the second year in a row the conference has had visa troubles. In 2018, when the conference was held in Montreal, more than 100 attendees were denied visas.

The issue prompted Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to defend Canada’s immigration system during the G7. “I can assure you that Canada is world-class in the way that it approves visas and encourages people from around the world to come participate in important global conversations like these,” he told Wired Magazine at the G7 in 2018. “I’m sure that  there will be people looking into what you have described.”

This year, event organisers had been working with Immigration, Refugee and Citizenship Canada to try to make the visa process smoother, providing a list of names of people invited to attend the conference. But still problems persisted.(BBC)…[+]