ACM SIGAI Activity Report

AI MATTERS, VOLUME 4, ISSUE 3 4(3) 2018

ACM SIGAI Activity Report Sven Koenig (elected; ACM SIGAI Chair) Sanmay Das (elected; ACM SIGAI Vice-Chair) Rosemary Paradis (elected; ACM SIGAI Secretary/Treasurer) John Dickerson (appointed; ACM SIGAI Labor Market Officer) Yolanda Gil (appointed; ACM SIGAI Past Chair) Katherine Guo (appointed; ACM SIGAI Membership and Outreach Officer) Benjamin Kuipers (appointed; ACM SIGAI Ethics Officer) Hang Ma (appointed; ACM SIGAI Information Officer) Nicholas Mattei (appointed; ACM SIGAI AI and Society Officer) Amy McGovern (appointed; ACM SIGAI Newsletter Editor-in-Chief) Larry Medsker (appointed; ACM SIGAI Public Policy Officer) Todd Neller (appointed; ACM SIGAI Education Activities Officer) Plamen Petrov (appointed; ACM SIGAI Industry Liaison Officer) Michael Rovatsos (appointed; ACM SIGAI Conference Coordination Officer) David G. Stork (appointed; ACM SIGAI Award Officer) DOI: 10.1145/3284751.3284754

Abstract for their valuable service and have now started to provide certificates of appreciation for out- We are happy to present the annual activity going officers. We appointed a new informa- report of ACM SIGAI, covering the period from tion officer and are currently looking for a new July 2017 to June 2018. newsletter co-editor in chief and additional column editors. We also created and filled two The scope of ACM SIGAI consists of the new officer positions to be able to serve our study of intelligence and its realization in members even better, namely an AI and soci- computer systems (see also our website at ety officer and a labor market officer. sigai.acm.org). This includes areas such as Conferences autonomous agents, cognitive modeling, computer vision, constraint programming, hu- We helped to found the AAAI/ACM AI, Ethics, man language technologies, intelligent user and Society (AIES) conference, a high-profile, interfaces, knowledge discovery, knowledge multi-disciplinary meeting that addresses the representation and reasoning, machine learn- impact of AI on society (including aspects ing, planning and search, problem solving, such as value alignment, data handling and and robotics. bias, regulations, and workforce impact) in a scientific context. We have a 50 percent fi- Our members come from academia, industry, nancial stake in AIES, which we expect to be- and government agencies worldwide. We are come the prime international conference in the thrilled to be able to report that our member- field. The inaugural AIES, held on February ship numbers increased by about 10 percent 13, 2018 in New Orleans directly before the over the past year! AAAI conference, was a great success, at- The terms of three of our officers (one of the tracting 162 submissions and selling out (see two education activities officers, one of the two a recent summary in our newsletter AI Mat- newsletter co-editors in chief, and the informa- ters). The AI and society officer organized tion officer) came to an end. We thank them the AIES doctoral consortium, which received over 60 submissions but could only accept 20 Copyright c 2018 by the author(s). students. AIES 2019 is now in the planning

7 AI MATTERS, VOLUME 4, ISSUE 3 4(3) 2018 phase. • International Conference on the Founda- tions of Digital Games (FDG 2018), Malm, We sponsored the following conferences in Sweden, August 7-10, 2018 addition to AIES 2018: • The 10th International Joint Conference on • The IEEE/WIC/ACM International Confer- Computational Intelligence, Seville, Spain, ence on Web Intelligence (WI 2017), September 18-20, 2018 Leipzig, Germany, August 23-26, 2017 • The 15th International Conference on Infor- • The 32nd International Conference on Au- matics in Control, Automation, and Robotics tomated Software Engineering, Urbana- (ICINCO 2018), Porto, Portugal, July 29-31, Champaign, USA, October 30-November 3, 2018 2017 • The First IEEE International Conference • The 9th International Conference on Knowl- on Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Reality edge Capture (K-CAP 2017), Austin, TX, (IEEE-AIVR 2018), Taichung, Taiwan, De- USA, December 4-6, 2017 cember 10-12, 2018 • The CRA Summit on Technology and Jobs, ACM SIGAI membership benefits include re- Washington D.C., USA, December 12, 2017 duced registration fees for many of the in- • The 23rd International Conference on In- cooperation and sponsored conferences and telligent User Interfaces (IUI 2018), Tokyo, access to many proceedings in the ACM Digi- Japan, March 7-11, 2018 tal Library. • The 13th Annual ACM/IEEE International We also have an agreement with the Asso- Conference on Human Robot Interaction ciation for the Advancement of AI (AAAI) to (HRI 2018), Chicago, USA, March 5-8, 2018 jointly organize the annual joint job fair at the AAAI conference, where attendees can We approved the following in-cooperation and find out about job and internship opportuni- sponsorship requests from events covering a ties from representatives from industry, univer- wide thematic and geographical range across sities, and other organizations. The job fair the international AI community: in 2018 was run by two of our officers and attracted over 30 organizations offering jobs • The 20th International Conference on En- and hundreds of job seekers (see the recent terprise Information Systems (ICEIS 2018), summary in AI Matters). Similarly, we have Funchal, Portugal, March 21-24, 2018 an agreement with AAAI to jointly sponsor the annual joint doctoral consortium at the AAAI • The 17th International Conference on Au- conference, which provides an opportunity for tonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems Ph.D. students to discuss their research in- (AAMAS 2018), Stockholm, Sweden, July terests and career objectives with the other 10-15, 2018 participants and a group of established AI re- • The 33rd IEEE/ACM International Confer- searchers that act as their mentors. ence on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2018), Montpellier, France, Septem- ber 3-7, 2018 Awards • The 18th International Conference on Intel- We started a new award, the ACM SIGAI In- ligent Virtual Agents (IVA 2018), Sydney, dustry Award for Excellence in AI, which will November 5-8, 2018 be given annually to an individual or team in industry who created a fielded AI application • The 2nd ACM Computer Science in Cars in recent years that demonstrates the power of Symposium (CSCS 2018), Munich, Ger- AI techniques via a combination of the follow- many, September 13-14, 2018 ing features: novelty of application area, nov- • The 10th International Joint Conference elty, and technical excellence of the approach, on Knowledge Discovery, Knowledge Engi- importance of AI techniques for the approach, neering and Knowledge Management (IC3K and actual and predicted societal impact of the 2018), Seville, Spain, September 18-20, application. The award will be accompanied 2018 by a prize of US$5,000 and be presented at

8 AI MATTERS, VOLUME 4, ISSUE 3 4(3) 2018 the International Joint Conference on AI (IJ- Member Communication CAI), starting in 2019 - thanks to a collaboration with the IJCAI Board of Trustees. We communicate with our members via email announcements, the SIGAI newsletter AI Mat- The ACM SIGAI Autonomous Agents Re- ters, the AI Matters blog, and webinars. search Award was presented at the Interna- tional Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS) 2018 - thanks AI Matters to a collaboration with the International Foun- We continued to expand the scope of our dation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent newsletter AI Matters this year, introduced Systems (IFAAMAS) - to Craig Boutilier, Prin- the EasyChair system for the submission cipal Research Scientist at Google, for his of manuscripts and added additional column seminal contributions to research on decision- editors to the editorial team. We publish making under uncertainty, game theory, and four issues of AI Matters per year that are computational social choice. openly available on the ACM SIGAI website at sigai.acm.org/aimatters/ and feature articles of general interest to our members. Member Support Recurring columns have included:

We support our members in different ways. • AI Interviews (with interesting people from For example, we nominate them for awards or academia, industry, and government), support their nominations. We also nominate • AI Amusements (including AI humor, puzzles, publications of recent, significant, and excit- and games), ing AI research results that are of general in- • AI Education (led by the education activities offi- terest to the computer science research com- cer), munity to the Research Highlights track of the Communications of the ACM (CACM) to make • AI Policy Issues (led by the public policy officer), important AI research results visible to many • AI Buzzwords (which explains new AI concepts computer scientists. We concentrate our fi- or terms), nancial support on our student members and • AI Events (which includes conference an- provided funding to conferences so that they nouncements and reports, led by the conference can award scholarships to their student atten- coordination officer), dees. We also supported the review process • AI Dissertation Abstracts and for the applications of students to attend the • News from AI Groups and Organizations. Heidelberg laureate forum to meet the recipi- ents of the most prestigious awards in math- The Symposium on Educational Advances in ematics and computer science, including the AI (EAAI) will feature an undergraduate re- ACM A.M. Turing Award and the ACM Prize in search track for the Birds of a Feather faculty- Computing. mentored undergraduate research challenge To understand the interests of our members based on one of the AI Education columns. AI better, we conducted a membership survey Matters also published the 8 winning entries and learned, among other things, that the ma- from the ACM SIGAI Student Essay Contest jority of our members have been SIGAI mem- on the Responsible Use of AI Technologies. bers for two or more years. They are inter- One of these essays had more than 2,000 ac- ested in AI resources (such as digital con- cesses (including accesses to the pdf file of tent access and webinars) as well as network- the complete issue that contained the article). ing, and consider it important that we cover (among other things) hot AI topics, AI ethics, AI Matters Blog and AI applications with an industry focus. We also reached out to other groups to learn The AI Matters Blog is openly avail- about their outreach activities, including to re- able on the ACM SIGAI website at gional groups (such as the Northeast Ohio sigai.acm.org/aimatters/blog/ and ACM chapter) and larger ACM Special Inter- serves as a forum for important announce- est Groups (such as SIGCHI). ments and news. For example, we post new

9 AI MATTERS, VOLUME 4, ISSUE 3 4(3) 2018 information every two weeks in the blog to SUNY Albany survey and report on current AI policy issues Topic: “Advances in Socio-Behavioral Com- and raise awareness about the activities of puting” other organizations that share interests with • May 7, 2018 ACM SIGAI. We are also open to posts by re- Jussi Karlgren gional groups and have invited the Northeast KTH Royal Institute of Technology and Ohio ACM chapter to contribute. Helsinki University and founding partner of Gavagi, a text analysis company Webinars Topic: “Explicitly Encoded High- Dimensional Semantic Spaces” We extended our webinars on AI topics as • part of our commitment to lifelong learning. In June 4, 2018 ´ particular, we offered monthly webinars from Maja Mataric November 2017 to June 2018 that focused Professor and Chan Soon-Shiong Chair in on the application of AI technology to real- the Computer Science Department, Neuro- world problems and were presented by speak- science Program, and the Department of ers typically involved with both academic re- Pediatrics at the University of Southern Cal- search and industrial implementations: ifornia Topic: “Socially Assistive Robotics” • November 10, 2017 Dan Moldovan The webinars were streamed live but Founder of Lymba Corporation, Professor can still be watched on demand at learning.acm.org/webinar/ in the Computer Science Department at . They the University of Texas at Dallas and Co- turned out to be very popular, typically Director of its Human Language Technology reaching a thousand or more viewers. Research Institute Topic: “On the Evolution of NLP, QA, and Public Policy and AI Ethics IE, and Current Research and Commercial Trends” Within ACM, we work with the ACM US Public Policy Council (USACM) through the member- • December 15, 2017 ship of our public policy officer in USACM and Peter Elkin the participation of our members in US pub- Professor and Chair of the University at Buf- lic policy issues related to computing and in- falo Department of Biomedical Informatics formation technology. For example, our pub- Topic: “HTP-NLP: A New NLP System for lic policy officer works with the USACM lead- High Throughput Phenotyping” ership and the Electronic Privacy Information • January 12, 2018 Center to petition the Office of Science and Lionel Jouffe Technology Policy of the White House to con- Co-founder and CEO of France-based struct and publicize a formal process by which Bayesia S.A.S. the public might have input into the work of Topic: “Data Mining, Knowledge Modeling, the recently-named Select Committee on Arti- and Causal Analysis with Bayesian Net- ficial Intelligence. He also studies how organi- works” zations collect and analyze data and whether • February 23, 2018 these practices are consistent with recom- Kristian Hammond mendations by the USACM working groups on Professor of Computer Science at North- algorithmic accountability, transparency, and western University and co-founder of Narra- bias. Finally, he works on recommendations tive Science for possible changes to the ACM policy re- Topic: “Communicating with the New Ma- garding data privacy of ACM SIGAI and ACM chine: Human Insight at Machine Scale” members who use EasyChair to submit articles for publication, including to AI Matters. • March 15, 2018 Tomek Strzalkowski Outside of ACM, we helped to found the Director of the Institute for Informatics, Log- AAAI/ACM AI, Ethics, and Society (AIES) con- ics, and Security Studies and Professor at ference (as detailed above). We also partici-

10 AI MATTERS, VOLUME 4, ISSUE 3 4(3) 2018 pate in the executive committee of the IEEE Global Initiative on Ethics of Autonomous and Intelligent Systems to ensure that every tech- nologist is educated, trained, and empowered to prioritize ethical considerations in the de- sign and development of autonomous and intelligent systems.

Planning for the Future In our last progress report, we promised to in- crease our understanding of our current membership. To further this objective, we per- formed a membership survey this year. We promised to intensify our activities to reach industry professionals. To further this objective, we substantially extended our webinars that focus on the application of AI technology to real-world problems and started the ACM SIGAI Industry Award for Excellence in AI. We promised to reach out to more AI groups worldwide that could benefit from ACM support, such as providing financial support, making the proceedings widely accessible in the ACM Digital Library, and providing speakers via the ACM Distinguished Speakers program. To further this objective, our membership officer contacted a number of such groups. We promised to expand the number of co-sponsored and in-cooperation conferences and to continue our efforts to further the dis- cussion on the responsible use of AI technologies. To further these objectives, we helped to found the AAAI/ACM AI, Ethics, and Soci- ety conference. In the next year, we intend to continue the reorganization of AI Matters to be able to provide more content while spreading the production effort among more editors. We also intend to intensify our activities to support students and regional chapters and become even more international in our news coverage. Furthermore, the election of the next SIGAI leadership team is coming up and we are looking for strong candidates who are interested in shaping the future of ACM SIGAI!