If you want to understand the state of AI research, just pull out the origins of the papers from top conferences, that is it. Or for conference like ICLR, there

If you want to understand the state of AI research, just pull out the origins of the papers from top conferences, that is it. Or for conference like ICLR, there is a rating attached for each paper, even easier for sorting top out influential ones. Anecdotally, US/UK/China are countries frequently popped into my mind, Iran is nowhere to be found. Research doesn't work by aggregate, in fact most of the papers are useless. The top 1% influential ones are the ones that really matters.