  International collaboration has become imperative in the field of AI.
However, few studies exist concerning how distance factors have affected the
international collaboration in AI research. In this study, we investigate this
problem by using 1,294,644 AI related collaborative papers harvested from the
Microsoft Academic Graph (MAG) dataset. A framework including 13 indicators to
quantify the distance factors between countries from 5 perspectives (i.e.,
geographic distance, economic distance, cultural distance, academic distance,
and industrial distance) is proposed. The relationships were conducted by the
methods of descriptive analysis and regression analysis. The results show that
international collaboration in the field of AI today is not prevalent (only
15.7%). All the separations in international collaborations have increased over
years, except for the cultural distance in masculinity/felinity dimension and
the industrial distance. The geographic distance, economic distance and
academic distances have shown significantly negative relationships with the
degree of international collaborations in the field of AI. The industrial
distance has a significant positive relationship with the degree of
international collaboration in the field of AI. Also, the results demonstrate
that the participation of the United States and China have promoted the
international collaboration in the field of AI. This study provides a
comprehensive understanding of internationalizing AI research in geographic,
economic, cultural, academic, and industrial aspects.
