ACM SIGAI Activity Report

AI MATTERS, VOLUME 5, ISSUE 3 SEPTEMBER 2019

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 (elected; 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) Iolanda Leite (appointed; ACM SIGAI Newsletter Editor-in-Chief) 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) Marion Neumann (appointed; ACM SIGAI Diversity Officer) Plamen Petrov (appointed; ACM SIGAI Industry Liaison Officer) Michael Rovatsos (appointed; ACM SIGAI Conference Coordination Officer) David Stork (appointed; ACM SIGAI Award Officer) DOI: 10.1145/3362077.3362079

Abstract ACM SIGAI also added two new officers this year to be able to serve its membership better, We are happy to present the annual activity namely Iolanda Leite from the Royal Institute report of the ACM Special Interest Group on of Technology (Sweden) as second newslet- AI (ACM SIGAI), covering the period from July ter editor-in-chief and Marion Neumann from 2018 to June 2019. Washington University in St. Louis (USA) as diversity officer, thus increasing diversity in The scope of ACM SIGAI consists of the the ACM SIGAI leadership committee by in- study of intelligence and its realization in creasing both the number of international of- computer systems (see also its web-site at ficers and the number of female officers and sigai.acm.org). This includes areas such also furthering the internationalization of the as ACM SIGAI newsletter. Marion will be covering diversity also as part of the ACM SIGAI autonomous agents, cognitive modeling, newsletter. ACM SIGAI started officers meet- computer vision, constraint programming, hu- ings at major AI conferences already in 2018 man language technologies, intelligent user and continued the new practice in 2019 (so interfaces, knowledge discovery, knowledge representation and reasoning, machine learn- far at the AAAI Conference), in addition to all- ing, planning and search, problem solving and officers teleconferences and a monthly ACM robotics. SIGAI leadership teleconference.

Members come from academia, industry and government agencies worldwide. ACM SIGAI Meetings recently added two new ACM SIGAI chap- ACM SIGAI decided to participate on a trial ters, namely one professional chapter in La- basis in ACM’s voluntary carbon-offset pro- guna Nigel (USA) and one student chapter at gram for conferences. Introduction of this the SRM Institute of Science & Technology in scheme will give conference participants the Chennai. option of making voluntary contributions to off- Copyright c 2019 by the author(s). set the carbon footprint of their trips to confer-

6 AI MATTERS, VOLUME 5, ISSUE 3 SEPTEMBER 2019 ences when they register online. ACM SIGAI • iWOAR 2018 plans to test this scheme at upcoming edi- • ICPRAM 2018 tions of the AAAI/ACM AI, Ethics and Soci- • IEA/AIE 2019 ety (AIES) and ACM Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI) conferences in cooperation with AAAI • FW 2018 and SIGCHI, respectively, and hopes that it • BIOSTEC 2019 will enable the ACM SIGAI and wider ACM • RecSys 2019 membership to contribute to the environmen- • FW 2019 tal sustainability of our communities. • ICAART 2019 ACM SIGAI continues to support AIES, which • AAMAS 2019 it co-founded in 2017 to fill a scientific void. As • iWOAR 2019 AI is becoming more pervasive in our lives, its impact on society is more significant, raising • KMIKS 2019 ethical concerns and challenges regarding is- • ICPRAM 2019 sues such as value alignment, safety and se- • FDG 2019 curity, data handling and bias, regulations, ac- • ICAIL 2019 countability, transparency, privacy and work- • IC3K 2019 force displacement. Only a multi-disciplinary and multi-stakeholder effort can find the best • IJCCI 2019 ways to address these concerns, by includ- • IEA/AIE ’20 ing experts from various disciplines, such as • AAMAS 2020 ethics, philosophy, economics, sociology, psy- chology, law, history and politics. AIES was ACM SIGAI also organizes – jointly with the co-located with AAAI 2019 in Honolulu and will Association for the Advancement of AI (AAAI) again be co-located with AAAI 2020 in New – the annual joint job fair at the AAAI con- York City. ference, where attendees can find out about job and internship opportunities from repre- ACM SIGAI sponsored the following confer- sentatives from industry, universities and other ences in addition to AIES 2019: organizations. The AAAI/ACM SIGAI job fair was held at AAAI 2019 in Honolulu, co- • WI 2018 organized by the ACM SIGAI labor market of- • ASE 2018 ficer. Twenty-six employers formally attended, • IVA 2018 while a handful of exhibitors who did not for- • HRI 2019 mally sign up also took part. Hundreds of CVs and resumes were collected before, dur- • IUI 2019 ing and after the job fair from students, post- doctoral researchers and other job seekers and it will sponsor the following conferences via the job fair web-site; these were shared coming up in 2019 and 2020: with interested employers. This year, the or- • IVA 2019 ganizers also purchased a dedicated domain (aaaijobfair.com) to allow present and fu- • K-CAP 2019 ture firms and participants to view previous it- • ASE 2019 erations of the job fair. The ACM SIGAI la- • WI 2019 bor market officer believes that we can use in- sights from AI to create an even better func- • ASE 2020 tioning job market and works actively toward • HRI 2020 designing the job market of the future. Toward • IUI 2020 that end, he has begun to gather requirements with a large number of chairs of top computer ACM SIGAI approved the following in- science departments in the USA as well as in cooperation and sponsorship requests from Israel and Europe and is working to formulate events covering a wide thematic and geo- a model that will be translated into a larger job graphical range across the international AI fair (in terms of participating employers as well community: as applicants) in the near future.

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ACM SIGAI also co-sponsors – jointly with candidates in AI. This new annual award will AAAI – the annual joint doctoral consortium at be presented at the AAAI Conference on AI the AAAI conference, which provides an op- in the form of a certiﬁcate and is accompa- portunity for Ph.D. students to discuss their nied by the option to present the dissertation research interests and career objectives with at the AAAI conference as well as to submit a the other participants and a group of estab- six-page summary to both the AAAI proceed- lished AI researchers who act as their men- ings and the ACM SIGAI newsletter. The nom- tors. The AAAI/ACM SIGAI doctoral consor- ination deadline for the inaugural AAAI/ACM tium was held at AAAI 2019 in Honolulu. SIGAI Doctoral Dissertation Award will be an- nounced later this year and is expected to be in late Fall 2019. Awards

ACM SIGAI sponsors the ACM SIGAI Au- Public Policy Activities tonomous Agents Research Award, an annual award for excellence in research in the area of ACM SIGAI promotes the discussion of poli- autonomous agents. The recipient is invited to cies related to AI through posts in the AI Mat- give a talk at the International Conference on ters blog, helps to identify external groups Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems with common interests in AI public policy, (AAMAS). The 2019 ACM SIGAI Autonomous encourages ACM SIGAI members to part- Agents Research Award was presented at AA- ner in policy initiatives with these organiza- MAS 2019 in Montreal to Carles Sierra, the tions, disseminates public policy ideas to the vice-director of the AI Research Institute of the ACM SIGAI membership through articles in Spanish National Research Council, for sem- the ACM SIGAI newsletter and ensures that inal contributions to research on negotiation every technologist is educated, trained and and argumentation, computational trust and empowered to prioritize ethical considerations reputation and artificial social systems. in the design and development of autonomous and intelligent systems. ACM SIGAI partici- ACM SIGAI also sponsors the ACM SIGAI pates in the ACM US Technology Policy Com- Industry Award for Excellence in AI, a new mittee (ACM USTPC), formerly USACM, via annual award which is given annually to an the ACM SIGAI public policy officer and in a individual or team in industry who created variety of other policy efforts, including those a fielded AI application in recent years that of other societies (such as the IEEE Global Ini- demonstrates the power of AI techniques via tiative on Ethics of Autonomous and Intelligent a combination of the following features: nov- Systems). ACM USTPC addresses US public elty of application area, novelty and techni- policy issues related to computing and infor- cal excellence of the approach, importance mation technology and regularly educates and of AI techniques for the approach and ac- informs US Congress, the US Administration tual and predicted societal impact of the ap- and the US courts about significant develop- plication. The inaugural ACM SIGAI Industry ments in the computing field and how those Award for Excellence in AI will be presented at developments affect public policy. For exam- the International Joint Conference on AI (IJ- ple, the ACM SIGAI public policy officer joined CAI) 2019 in Macau to the Real World Rein- the comments of ACM USTPC on the draft forcement Learning Team from Microsoft for of the “20-Year Roadmap for AI Research in the identification and development of cutting- the US” of the Computing Community Con- edge research on contextual-bandit learning, sortium. He also studies how organizations the manifest cooperation between research collect and analyze data and whether these and development efforts, the applicability of practices are consistent with recommenda- the decision support throughout the broad tions by the USTPC working group on algo- range of Microsoft products and the quality of rithmic accountability, transparency and bias. the final systems. He represented ACM SIGAI via his talks “Fu- ACM SIGAI also recently created – jointly with ture of Work, AI Education, and Public Policy” AAAI – the joint AAAI/ACM SIGAI Doctoral at EAAI 2019 and “Transparency, Accessibil- Dissertation Award to recognize and encour- ity, and Ethics in AI” at Dalhousie University age superior research and writing by doctoral in 2019. He was also the moderator of the

8 AI MATTERS, VOLUME 5, ISSUE 3 SEPTEMBER 2019 panel “Are We Ready for AI” at the Annual • Matthew Sun and Marissa Gerchick – The Consumer Assembly of the Consumer Feder- Scales of (Algorithmic) Justice: Tradeoffs and ation of America in 2019. Remedies • Annie Zhou – The Intersection of Ethics and AI Educational Activities ACM SIGAI supported the “Birds of the ACM SIGAI held a second ACM SIGAI Stu- Feather” undergraduate research challenge dent Essay Contest focused on AI ethics (or- organized by the ACM SIGAI education officer ganized by the ACM SIGAI AI and society offi- at the Symposium on Educational Advances cer), after the success of the first such compe- in AI (EAAI) 2019. Six research and liberal tition in 2017. Students could win cash prizes arts institutions participated with seven papers of US$500 or Skype conversations with se- and one poster presentation that passed peer nior AI researchers from academia or industry review. ACM SIGAI contributed US$500 of (including the director of Microsoft Research award funding for the best papers. The ACM Labs and the director of research at Google) if SIGAI education officer intends to announce their essays provided good answers to one or a Gin Rummy undergraduate research chal- both of the following topic areas (or any other lenge at EAAI 2020. question in this space that they considered im- ACM SIGAI also started discussions with the portant): ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Sci- ence Education (ACM SIGCSE) on a collabo- • What requirements, if any, should be imposed ration for disseminating pointers to resources on AI systems and technology when interacting for AI educators and creating incentives for the with humans who may or may not know that they production and dissemination of assignments are interacting with a machine? For example, should they be required to disclose their identi- on AI ethics. ties? If so, how? • What requirements, if any, should be imposed Member Communication on AI systems and technology when making decisions that directly affect humans? For exam- ACM SIGAI communicates with its members ple, should they be required to make transparent via email announcements, the ACM SIGAI decisions? If so, how? newsletter “AI Matters,” the AI Matters blog and webinars: This year, ACM SIGAI received 18 submis- sions, of which eight were selected for publica- ACM SIGAI maintains a more than 4,000 tion and prizes. The winning essays are listed email address long mailing list for AI-related below in alphabetical order by author. ACM announcements to its members and friends. SIGAI intents to hold a third ACM SIGAI stu- ACM SIGAI publishes four issues of its dent Essay Contest later this year. newsletter AI Matters per year. The ACM SIGAI newsletter is distributed via the • Janelle Berscheid and Francois Roewer- ACM SIGAI mailing list but also openly Despres – Beyond Transparency: A Proposed available on the ACM SIGAI web-site (at Framework for Accountability in Decision- sigai.acm.org/aimatters/). AI Matters Making AI Systems features articles of general interest to the AI • Gage Garcia – AI Education: A Requirement for community and added not only an additional a Strong Democracy editor-in-chief but also additional column edi- • Alexander Hilton – AI: The Societal Responsibil- tors in the past year. Recent columns, led by ity to Inform, Educate, and Regulate these and other column editors, have included • Michelle Seng Ah Lee – Context-Conscious AI Interviews (organized by the ACM SIGAI Fairness in Using Machine Learning to Make diversity officer), AI Amusements, AI Educa- Decisions tion (written or organized by the ACM SIGAI • Yat Long Lo, Chung Yu Woo and Ka Lok Ng – education officer), AI Policy Issues (written The Necessary Roadblock to Artificial General by the ACM SIGAI public policy officer) and Intelligence: Corrigibility AI Events (written by the ACM SIGAI confer- • Grace McFassel – Embedding Ethics: Design of ence coordination officer). The editors-in-chief Fair AI Systems have recently added an AI crossword puzzle

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(thanks to Adi Botea from IBM’s Ireland Re- The ACM SIGAI conference coordination of- search Laboratory) and are about to add a col- ficer recently started to test a new open stu- umn on current research trends in AI, written dent award travel scheme. Beyond provid- by recent grantees of research funds (such as ing a ringfenced allocation to specific confer- NSF CAREER or European Research Council ences, he created a process by which any awards). AI Matters has also started to pub- ACM SIGAI student member who intends to lish the winning student essays of the second attend an ACM (and, in exceptional cases, ACM SIGAI Student Essay Contest. even a non-ACM) event can apply for travel support through the ACM SIGAI web-site. In ACM SIGAI also maintains an AI Matters blog the first few months since the inception of the sigai.acm.org/aimatters/blog/ (at ) scheme, students have already been offered as a forum for important announcements and financial support of about US$8,000 in total. news. For example, the ACM SIGAI public policy officer posts new information every two ACM SIGAI also recently created the AI Activ- weeks in the blog to survey and report on ities Fund, a new initiative to empower ACM current AI policy issues and raise awareness SIGAI members and friends to organize ac- about the activities of other organizations that tivities with a strong outreach component to share interests with ACM SIGAI. either students, researchers or practitioners not working on AI technologies or to the pub- After a hiatus due to the illness of one lic in general. The purpose of the inaugural of the organizers, ACM SIGAI recently re- call for funding proposals was to help ACM started the ACM SIGAI webinars with a SIGAI members and friends to promote a bet- webinar on “Advances in Socio-Behavioral ter understanding of current AI technologies, Computing” and several more in prepara- including their strengths and limitations as well tion. The webinars are streamed live but the as their promise for the future. Examples of videos can still be watched on demand at fundable activities included (but were not lim- learning.acm.org/webinar/. ited to) AI technology exhibits or exhibitions, ACM SIGAI is also a founding member of AI holding meetings with panels on AI technology Hub (at aihub.org), a new non-profit sibling (including on AI ethics) with expert speakers, to Robohub (at robohub.org) dedicated to creating podcasts or short films on AI tech- connecting the AI communities of the world by nologies that are accessible to the public and bringing together experts in AI research, start- holding AI programming competitions. ACM ups, business and education from across the SIGAI was looking for evidence that the infor- globe. Content-area specialists will curate all mation presented by the activities would be of incoming AI news articles to make sure that high quality, accurate, unbiased (for example, reporting is truthful, fair and balanced, and not influenced by company interests) and at in-house editors will ensure that all content the right level for the intended audience. The meets the highest editorial standards for lan- inaugural call for proposals supported the fol- guage and clarity. AI Hub is expected to come lowing initiatives: a workshop on “AI for All us- online in Summer or Fall 2019. ACM SIGAI ing the R Programming Language” organized will provide content to AI Hub and, conversely, by the Indian Institute of Technology in Goa, AI Hub will provide AI news to the ACM SIGAI the “Bee Network of AI” organized by the Uni- members. versidad Mayor in Chile and “Co-Opting AI: Public Conversations about Design, Inequality and Technology” organized by New York Uni- Financial Member Support versity. ACM SIGAI so far had concentrated its financial support on travel scholarships to ACM Additional Member Services SIGAI student members to allow them to attend conferences if they are otherwise missing ACM SIGAI also supports its members in the financial resources to do so. The amounts additional ways. For example, it nominates of the scholarships vary but are generally in them for awards or supports their nominations. the range of US$1,000 to US$10,000 per con- ACM SIGAI is proud of the fact that many AI ference, depending on the conference size. researchers in the past year received ACM

10 AI MATTERS, VOLUME 5, ISSUE 3 SEPTEMBER 2019 honors, such as becoming ACM senior members, distinguished members and fellows as well as receiving other awards. Three AI researchers received the A.M. Turing Award in 2018. ACM SIGAI also actively supports the Re- search Highlight Track of the Communications of the ACM (CACM) by nominating publica- tions of recent, signiﬁcant and exciting AI research results that are of interest to the computer science research community in general to the Research Highlight Track. This way, ACM SIGAI helps to make important AI research results visible to many computer sci- entists. Additional ACM SIGAI membership beneﬁts include reduced registration fees at many of the co-sponsored and in-cooperation conferences and access to the proceedings of many of these conferences in the ACM Digital Li- brary.

Planning for the Future ACM SIGAI held elections for a new chair, vice chair and secretary/treasurer in Spring 2019. Sanmay Das (the current ACM SIGAI vice chair) was elected ACM SIGAI chair, Nicholas Mattei (the current ACM SIGAI AI and society officer) was elected ACM SIGAI vice-chair, and John Dickerson (the current ACM SIGAI labor market officer) was elected ACM SIGAI secretary/treasurer. Sven Koenig (the current ACM SIGAI chair) will transition to his new role as ACM SIGAI past chair. We are looking for- ward to the new leadership committee shap- ing the future of ACM SIGAI. In general, ACM SIGAI intends 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. ACM SIGAI also intends to reach out more to other disciplines that share an interest in AI, for example, in terms of research methodolo- gies or applications.