Sponsored by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
The Ninth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-91) was held July 14-19, 1991, at the Anaheim Convention Center, Anaheim, California.
With the advent of the Ninth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, it is exciting to review the evolution that the conference has gone through over the past several years. As the primary national conference on artificial intelligence, scientific research remains the primary focus of the conference. However, as the field of artificial intelligence matures, so should the conference. We are experimenting both with the form and the content to meet the changing needs.
We attempt to serve the scientific community by presenting a program that is both technical and practical in nature. AI-On-Line was introduced in 1990 to explore the current practice and the intellectual issues it raises. It will continue in 1991.
We also announced the collocation of the Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications in Anaheim. Holding these two prestigious events in the same location afforded attendees the opportunity of visiting both. Scientific participants saw how theory is employed within the real world, and practitioners viewed current successes and innovations in AI science.
Artificial Intelligence continues to be both a fascinating and evolving field, and AAAI-91 reflected the energy and accomplishments during the past year.
Daniel G. Bobrow, President, AAAI
The themes of this year’s conference were interaction and growth. Through a new conference format, we sought to encourage greater interaction among individual researchers and facilitate communication between diverse groups of researchers. The new format was designed to provide a more intimate atmosphere for researchers with similar interests.
Through a modified review process, we tried to identify and foster promising new research in its early stages. The result of the new reviewing procedures can be seen in a technical program that highlights new approaches and innovative techniques.
This year the conference was organized around several specialized forums, each emphasizing a different set of coordinated topics. Each of these specialized forums featured a schedule of presentations and meet-the-author sessions united by a set of related research issues.
Scheduling was arranged to encourage staying in one place for extended periods, and seating was designed to facilitate note-taking and audience participation. Time was set aside to interact more closely with the authors in a poster session following each set of presentations. Conference participants freely moved between forums and were encouraged to participate in as many different forums as they had the time and inclination. The forum presentations were synchronized to simplify moving about.
The program committee was encouraged to seek out and nurture groundbreaking research that is perhaps still in its early stages. We want to change the view that the purpose of the national conference on artificial intelligence proceedings is archival and that the program committee only accepts papers describing results in well-established research programs. We also sought to identify papers with a more balanced blend of theory and practice.
The program committee was selected with both of these thoughts in mind. The conference format is designed to facilitate the exploration of new research directions and allow for interaction between the theoretically and the empirically oriented.
Thomas Dean and Kathy McKeown