EurAI Bullettin #1, 2016
A record number of submission to ECAI 2016
Frank van Harmelen (ECAI 2016 General Chair)
With 663 submissions (640 long papers and 23 short ones), ECAI 2016 has received the highest number of submissions ever. That’s almost 100 long papers more than 2014, which was itself a record year. This is a remarkable success in the first year where there is both an IJCAI conference, an AAAI conference and an ECAI conference. Program Chairs Maria Fox and Gal Kaminka will work hard with their 44 senior PC members and 398 regular PC members to provide all the papers with at least 3 reviews before May 24, when the author rebuttal period will start.
The main conference programme will take place 29 August – 2 September.
An important innovation this year was that we encouraged authors to resubmit rejected IJCAI papers together with the IJCAI reviews plus an explanation of how they improved the paper based on those reviews. We hope that this will lead to a culture in our field where papers are shepherded between conferences to improve over time, instead of receiving a new set of disconnected reviews at each new conference. We have received 79 of such papers, indicating that this model is well received by the community.
The theme of this year’s conference is “AI for human values” and it has resonated very well with the AI community. The special track on this theme has received 19 submissions, and there will be workshops on ethics in the design of multiYagents, on normative agents, on diversity aware AI and on integrating values in the design process. Furthermore, IEEE have chosen ECAI 2016 as the location for their “Values by Design” summit (invitation only), followed by a session on Monday open to all ECAI participants where IEEE will present its “Values by Design” declaration. Finally, on Thursday we will host a public event in the Peace Palace, the home of the International Court of Justice, where leading AI researchers, prominent opinion leaders and the general public will discuss the theme of AI for human values.
With Michael Bratman (University of Stanford), Jeff Rosenschein (Hebrew University of Jerusalem), MarieYChristine Rousset (Laboratoire d’Informatique de Grenoble), and Michael Zillich (Technical University of Vienna) ECAI 2016 has an excellent set of invited speakers, whose keynotes alone will be worth attending the conference for.
ECAI 2016 will be co-located with the tenth International Conference on Collective Intentionality, a major event for philosophers and AI researchers, and we have secured free access for ECAI delegates to all the sessions of the Collective Intentionality conference.
Local Chairs Virginia Dignum and Frank Dignum have worked tirelessly over the past year to organise an excellent conference venue. At the conference venue we can also offer additional meeting rooms for ad hoc get-togethers or preY planned-meetings. If you want to use ECAI as the location for a meeting of your EU consortium, or for an international working group, please get in touch with the local chairs. The Thursday night promises to become memorable for the beach party and barbecue that has been planned at the renowned Scheveningen beach resort. We look forward to welcoming all of you in the beautiful city of The Hague, which is within easy reach of Amsterdam Schiphol airport, and well connected to the European railway network.
See www.ecai2016.org for details about registration, the workshop and tutorial programme, the invited speakers and much more.
Call for bids to Host ECAI2020
The biennial European Conference on AI is organized every even-numbered year, by EurAI, jointly with one of the member associations of EurAI. The EurAI Board hereby invite bids to host the 2020 conference.
Previous ECAI conferences were held at Brighton (1974), Edinburgh (1976), Hamburg (1978), Amsterdam (1980), Orsay (1982), Pisa (1984), Brighton (1986), Munich (1988), Stockholm (1990), Vienna (1992), Amsterdam (1994), Budapest (1996), Brighton (1998), Berlin (2000), Lyon (2002), Valencia (2004), Riva del Garda (2006), Patras (2008), Lisbon (2010), Montpellier (2012), and Prague (2014), with ECAIY2016 due to be held in The Hague; ECAIY2018 will be a joint conference with IJCAI, and will be held in Stockholm.
Any member society of EurAI may submit a bid to EurAI for organizing ECAI-2020.
TIMETABLE
• 1 July 2016: deadline for submission of bids
• August 2016: presentation of bids & selection at ECCAI General Assembly
PROCESS
Guidelines for bids:
http://www.eccai.org/admin/ecaiproc.shtml
Submit your bid through the easychair system:
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=eccaibids2020
NB: please upload a single PDF file containing the bid, and for "title" use the city name and country of the bid.
It would be extremely helpful if you could informally indicate your intention to submit a bid by email to Mike Wooldridge <mjw@cs.ox.ac.uk> no later than 1 May 2016.
AI-related conferences
International Conference on Agents and Multi-Agent systems (AAMAS 2016)
May 9-13, 2016 Singapore
http://sis.smu.edu.sg/aamas2016
9th Hellenic Conference on Artificial Intelligence (SETN'16) May 18Y20, 2016, Thessaloniki, Greece
http://setn2016.csd.auth.gr/
Annual Meeting of the International Association for Computing and Philosophy (IACAP 2016)
June 14-17, Ferrara Italy
http://www.iacap.org/iacapY2016/.
11th International Conference on the Practice and Theory of Automated Timetabling
Udine, Italy, Tue 23 Aug 2016 - Fri 26 Aug 2016
http://www.patatconference.org/patat2016/
39th German Conference on Artificial Intelligence (KI 2016)
Klagenfurt, Austria, September 26Y30, 2016.
http://ki2016.org/
2nd Global Conference on Artificial Intelligence (GCAI 2016)
Berlin, Germany, September 29-October 2, 2016.
http://easychair.org/smartYprogram/GCAI2016/
8th International Joint Conference on Computational Intelligence (IJCCI 2016)
Porto, Portugal, November 9Y11, 2016
http://www.ijcci.org/
8th International Joint Conference on Knowledge discovery, Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management (IC3K 2016)
Porto, Portugal, November 9-11, 2016
http://www.ic3k.org/
15th International Conference of the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence (AI*IA 2016)
Genova, November 28 - December 1, 2016
http://www.aixia2016.unige.it/
6th International Conference on Pattern Recognition Application and Methods
Porto, Portugal, February 24-26, 2017
http://www.icpram.org/Home.aspx?y=2017
9th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence
Porto, Portugal, February 24-26, 2017
http://www.icaart.org/Home.aspx?y=2017
Magazines
AI Magazine Vol 36 n. 2
http://www.aimagazineY digital.org/aimagazine/spring_2016?sub_id=Hg8bpmXCKuej&pg=1#pg1
AI Communications Volume preprint available
http://content.iospress.com/journals/ai communications/Preprint/Preprint
Contact Information
This bullettin is edited by Michela Milano, DISI Università di Bologna mailto:michela.milano@unibo.it.
For advertising AI-related conferences, schools and journal issues, please contact the editor.