The Thirty-Second AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, The Thirtieth Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence Conference, The Eighth Symposium on Educational Advances in Artificial Intelligence

The Thirty-Second AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence was held in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA in February, 2018. The surge in public interest in AI technologies, that we’ve seen over the past few years, continued in 2017-2018 with stories of AI R&D initiatives filling the newswires, and with the societal and economic impact of AI a point of public and government discussion worldwide. AAAI-18 saw a similar surge in interest, with submissions and attendance numbers breaking the records set in 2017. AAAI-18 continued its tradition of attracting top-quality papers from the breadth of AI. In 2018, we were excited to see increases in submissions across all areas and especially in computer vision and natural language processing, mirroring the worldwide increase in R&D activities related to machine learning and deep learning.

The AAAI-18 program consisted of a core technical program of original research presentations. The program chairs were Sheila McIlraith (University of Toronto, Canada) and Kilian Weinberger (Cornell University, USA). This year AAAI-18 featured the first Oxford-style debate, addressing the controversial statement “Advances in Machine Learning have displaced the need for logic in AI.” This somewhat lively debate featured Thomas Dietterich and Bart Selman arguing in favor, and Gary Marcus and Francesca Rossi arguing in opposition. Kevin Leyton-Brown served as moderator with wit and good humor. AAAI-18 also highlighted the emerging topic of human-AI collaboration with a dedicated sequence of technical sessions bookended by 30 minute invited talks. This initiative was cochaired by Ece Kamar and Julie Shah.

The AAAI-18 proceedings includes 938 original research publications, selected by rigorous double-blind review from a pool of 3,800 well-formed original submissions — an all-time record for AAAI. The final program reflected an overall acceptance rate of 24.7 percent.

The conference additionally featured a broad range of tutorials, workshops, invited talks and panels, student abstracts, What’s Hot talks from specialized AI conferences, a debate, and presentations by senior members. The program was rounded out by technical demonstrations, exhibits, the AI job fair, the student outreach program, and a game night. and the EAAI symposium.

AAAI-18 continued its tradition of colocating with the long-running Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence Conference (IAAI), which emphasizes the relevance of AI in our everyday lives. The IAAI-18 chair was G. Michael Youngblood (PARC, a Xerox Company, USA). The conference was cochaired by Karen Myers (SRI International, USA).

Again included in this proceedings are the papers of the eighth Symposium on Educational Advances in Artificial Intelligence. EAAI-18 seeks to advance the AAAI goal of improving the teaching and training of AI practitioners. This year, the symposium was cochaired by Eric Eaton (University of Pennsylvania, USA) and Michael Wollowski (Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, USA).

The conferences are sponsored by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.