The INTEGRATE Colloquium will provide trainers and trainees the opportunity to engage other UW–Madison faculty working in relevant areas and invited external “keynote” speakers who are leaders in research at the intersection of robotics, work, and society. The wide range of topics are intentional to enrich trainee perspectives, backgrounds, and experiences. Participants will be encouraged to engage in follow-up discussion, networking, and socializing and thus serve as a catalyst for communication and community building.
If you would be interested in giving a talk, please contact Kristie Schultz.
Wednesday, December 3, 2025
The Race between Academia and Industry for AI Researchers
The advances of artificial intelligence (AI) are built on the substantial groundwork laid by researchers. In this paper, we study the labor market competition between academia and industry for AI researchers. Consistent with academia and industry increasingly rewarding the same talent, we find that over the past decade, publications in AI-related conferences are more predictive of employment in industry vis-à-vis academia. We also provide causal evidence via a (reweighted) difference-in-differences design, exploiting data from a leading AI conference that publicly releases submissions and referee reports. On average, a publication increases the chance of moving to a top firm by 2-6 percentage points in the next 1-3 years. Sorting to top firms is stronger for males in academia, whereas female students and postdocs are more likely to get tenure-track positions following a successful publication. Researchers who move to industry are subsequently less productive in publishing than academics, suggesting that an increasing concentration of talent in industry could compromise the efficiency of research production.
Alice WU
Alice Wu is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Economics of UW Madison. She works on topics in labor, personnel, and innovation. Her current research investigates information frictions in the labor market and their implications for the sorting of workers across firms, and the competition between academia and industry for talent. She received her PhD from Harvard in 2024, and her BA from UC Berkeley in 2017.
Upcoming Talks
Orchard View Room, Discovery Building – 9:30 a.m.
Wednesday, December 3, 2025 Alice Wu, Assistant Professor of Economics at UW-Madison
Wednesday, February 4, 2026 Mike Hagenow, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at UW-Madison
Wednesday, March 4, 2026 James Pikul, Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at UW-Madison
Archived Talks
November 7, 2025 – Robot Learning and Wearable Interfaces in Pursuit of Robotic Caregivers Zackory Erickson, Assistant Professor, Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University
March 5, 2025 – Robots and Inequality: Between and Within Occupations Rodimiro Rodrigo, Assistant Professor of International Business and Economics at the George Washington University School of Business (GWSB).
February 26, 2025 – Rethinking Design for Human-Robot Collaboration. EunJeong Cheon, Assistant Professor in the School of Information Studies and Senior Research Associate at the Autonomous Systems Policy Institute (ASPI) at Syracuse University. Zoom recording available, integrate-nrt@wisc.edu.
November 6, 2024 – Automation and Labor: The Role of Robots Hee Rin Lee, Assistant Professor in the Department of Media and Information at Michigan State University.
October 2, 2024 – Mapping the Mind: Neuroergonomics Insights into Human-Machine Interaction. Ranjana Mehta, Grainger Institute of Engineering Professor in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University of Wisconsin Madison.
April 17, 2024 – Economics of Automation, Robots, Competition, and Jobs. Victor Bennett, Professor of Entrepreneurship and Strategy at the University of Utah‘s Eccles School of Business.
February 28, 2024 – Blending Reality: The Real-World Impact of XR Technologies Kevin Ponto, Associate Professor at WID and in the Design Studies Department in the School of Human Ecology at UW-Madison.
November 8, 2023 – The Second Robot Problem: Obstacles to Manufacturing Automation at Scale. Ben Armstrong, Executive Director, MIT Industrial Performance Center.
September 27, 2023 – Copyright’s Latent Space: From Fair Use to Generative Art BJ Ard, Law School, University of Wisconsin-Madison.
April 28, 2023 – First Wisconsin Robotics Symposium A collaboration between UW-Madison robotics faculty, grad students and industry.
April 19, 2023 – Enhancing Safety and Efficiency in Human-Robot Collaboration for Future Manufacturing Workspaces Dr. Marvin Cheng, Assistant Coordinator, Center for Occupational Robotics Research (CORR), NIOSH
March 22, 2023 – Exoskeleton-Enabled Future of Work in Construction Zhenhua Zhu, Ph.D., P.Eng., Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Wisconsin – Madison.