Menlo Park, California — The Twenty-second AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-07), and the collocated Nineteenth Innovative Applications of AI Conference (IAAI-07) are being held July 22-26, 2007, at the Hyatt Regency in Vancouver, B.C. This will be the place to learn about the work of the top tiers and next generation of AI scientists and programmers. The conferences present the latest in cutting-edge AI research and applications in robotics, business, gaming, science, and government from around the world. The diversity and depth of the conference program illustrate the vitality and emerging trends in the influential field of Artificial Intelligence.
World Class Invited Speakers
World-class speakers on cutting-edge topics have been invited to address this year’s conference. The Keynote Presidential Address will be given by AAAI President Alan Mackworth (University of British Columbia, Professor of Computer Science and Canada Research Chair in Artificial Intelligence). His talk will focus on the issues of reliability, trust, and ethics that must be addressed as intelligent agents, including robots, migrate into the real world.
Speakers invited for the IAAI-07 conference include Oren Etzioni, Matt Brown, and Geoffrey Ling.
Oren Etzioni (University of Washington and Farecast) Etzioni is known for his technical work in intelligent agents, data mining, and Web search; and for founding three companies, including most recently, Farecast, a company that utilizes data mining to inform consumers about the right time to buy air tickets. Farecast has won numerous awards in 2006, including TIME’s “50 Coolest Web Sites” and PC World’s “20 Most Innovative Products.” Etzioni will give this year’s Robert S. Engelmore Memorial Award Lecture, entitled AI in a Moore’s Law World: The Stories of Farecast and KnowItAll.
Matt Brown (Maxis / Electronic Arts) Brown was the technical director and designer for Electronic Art’s FIFA franchise for many years and later for The Sims 2 at Maxis. He is now the creative/design director for future versions of The Sims and SimCity. He is obsessed with creating the illusion of life through simplification, scale, and sleight of hand, as well as the practical application of AI. In his talk, Big “A,” Small “I”: Smart Ends from Simple Means, he will cover various elements of the game design, behavioral AI, and structure behind The Sims 2 as well as future efforts in products such as The Sims and SimCity.
Geoffrey S. F. Ling (DARPA, Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Johns Hopkins Hospital) Ling is responsible for a portfolio of DARPA programs that include Revolutionizing Prosthesis, Human Assisted Neural Devices, Preventing Violent Explosive Neuro Trauma, Predicting Health and Disease and Long-Term Blood Storage. He is also developing new programs with the intent of protecting and restoring injured warfighters. He will speak on Revolutionizing Prostheses: A Program of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) about research targeted at treating extremity/traumatic brain injuries using assistive devices that leverage off of biological capabilities.
For the technical AAAI-07 conference, speakers include:
- Alan Schultz (Naval Research Laboratory, Navy Center for Applied Research in Artificial Intelligence) — Schultz will speak on Moving toward Peer-to-Peer Human-Robot Interaction, describing recent multidisciplinary approaches in the emerging field of human-robot interaction.
- Toby Walsh (NICTA and University of New South Wales), distinguished for his work in automated reasoning, will speak on Representing and Reasoning about Preferences.
- Michael Wooldridge (University of Liverpool, UK), respected for his work in intelligent agents, will speak on Logic for Automated Mechanism Design — A Progress Report.
- Lise Getoor (University of Maryland, College Park) — This prominent young researcher working in the exciting new area of statistical relational learning, will speak on Graph Identification.
Global Reach for Innovative Applications (IAAI-07) conference
Continuing IAAI’s tradition of demonstrating the profound impact AI is having throughout modern science and industry, this year’s 22 papers accepted for the Nineteenth Innovative Applications of AI conference include a record nine non-US papers, with the U.S. having 13. This is one of many indications of the growing global nature of AAAI.
Of far greater significance is the global reach of many of this year’s applications. One winner, for example, from Changing Worlds Ltd., Ireland, enabling intelligent content discovery on the mobile Internet, has been deployed to 40 mobile operators and millions of subscribers around the world.
Broad, Diverse Technical Tracks
This year’s bumper crop of papers continues to meet AAAI’s high standards. “We have had an outstanding number of excellent papers submitted,” notes AAAI President Alan Mackworth. “In particular, we have had a very high level of international participation, reflecting the increasingly global nature of AI research. The quality of the accepted papers and invited speakers is very high.”
A record 923 papers were submitted to the technical program this year, coming from a record 45 countries, with 560 papers (61%) from outside the United States. A total of 251 (27%) were accepted, covering a wide range of current AI research topics such as agents, evolutionary computation, interactive entertainment, machine learning, data mining, natural language processing, and many more.
The ever-popular Mobile Robot Competition and Exhibition returns for its sixteenth year. A growing number of competitions at the conference include the General Game Playing Competition with a $10,000 purse; the Computer Poker Competition; the Human vs. Machine Poker Challenge with a world-class poker player; the Trading Agents Competition; and the new AI Video Competition. The goal of this competition is to communicate AI research and applications in a fun, creative, and exciting medium.
Four Special Tracks are also offered. AI and the Web will focus on AI concepts, systems, and techniques for the world wide web. The Integrated Intelligence special track evaluates various approaches and techniques that synergistically combine abilities from distinct areas of AI to achieve intelligent behavior. The Senior Member Presentation track provides an opportunity for established researchers to give a broad talk on a well-developed body of research, an important new research area, or a thoughtful critique of trends in the field. The Nectar track makes the most significant AI results presented at related conferences in the last two years available to a broad AI audience.
Sixteen tutorials will cover a wide range of topics. Fifteen workshops are open to attendees, with a separate fee. An Intelligent Systems Demonstrations will showcase research systems. There will also be a select Vendor Exhibition.
For additional information, please see the AAAI-07 and IAAI-07 conference websites.
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