Annual General Meeting

December 13th 2018

Peterhouse College, Cambridge

Chair's Report to AGM

Our annual series of conferences has reached its 38th year and once again was held at Peterhouse College, Cambridge in December. I acted as conference chair, as well as Technical Stream Chair. Miltos Petridis acted as Application Stream Chair, with Jixin Ma as his deputy, and Adrian Hopgood acted as Workshop Organizer. The twenty-third UK Case-Based Reasoning Workshop, which ran during the first day of the conference, was organized by Miltos Petridis. Rosemary Gilligan acted as Treasurer and was also responsible for Local Arrangements. I organised a session of short presentations by authors of poster papers, summarising the topics of their posters. This year's panel session was on the topic of 'Can Artificial Intelligence Systems Be Trusted?'. It was organised by Andrew Lea who also organised the AI Open Microphone session. Frederic Stahl acted as publicity organiser. For the second consecutive year Nadia Abouayoub organised a walking tour of Cambridge, including a visit to Kings College, as an alternative to lunch on the second day of the conference. Our conference administrator was Mandy Bauer from our parent body the BCS, with paper administration by Bryony Bramer. I am most grateful to all the organisers for their efforts on our behalf.

The final programme included papers by authors from 16 countries spread across four continents. All papers submitted were reviewed by an international panel of expert referees. There were prizes awarded for the best papers in the technical and application streams, the best poster and the best paper in each stream of which the principal author was a student. As well as the twenty-third UK Case-Based Reasoning Workshop the conference included workshops on 'AI for Software Engineering', 'Semantic Deep Learning: enhanced word embedding with semantic knowledge' and an innovation session presenting Roborace and the use of AI for autonomous racing cars. Papers accepted for poster presentation were again published as short papers in the proceedings. The Group once again subsidized a reduced rate for non-presenting students. We again used the ConferenceExpert system for electronic submission and reviewing of papers.

The conference proceedings were once again published by Springer in its prestigious Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence series, a sub-series of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science series under the name Artificial Intelligence XXXV, the number marking the 35th in an annual series of publications going back to our fourth annual conference in 1984.

Our Research Student Forum, FAIRS, continued for a twelfth year. This is a free event for PhD and MRes/MPhil research students in the AI field, running on the day before the conference, which was organised by Giovanna Martinez (Nottingham University). The Forum offered students the opportunity to meet other research students and to discuss their work with senior researchers and practitioners, with sessions covering guidance on conducting research and writing a thesis, feedback on research and research plans, and advice on undergoing a viva.

The terms of office of seven committee members Max Bramer, Adrian Hopgood, Gilbert Owusu, Miltos Petridis, Rosemary Gilligan, Simone Teufel and Nirmalie Wiratunga were due to come to an end at the conclusion of the 2017 AGM. As there were fewer candidates nominated than there were vacancies no election was necessary and the Chair declared that the candidates elected for 3 years beginning at the close of the 2017 AGM were Max Bramer, Rosemary Gilligan, Adrian Hopgood, Stelios Kapetanakis, Gilbert Owusu and Miltos Petridis. One place on the Committee remained vacant.

The Group's social media presence has continued to develop. The Group's Twitter name is @bcs_sgai, with hashtags #sgaiconf, #ukkdd, #realai and #micomp. Our 'Twitter Master' is Nadia Abouayoub. There is a Twitter feed on the website home page. We now also have a Facebook presence with the name SGAIatBCS. In addition, our list server AI-SGES is open to all (whether or not they are members of the Group) and is free of charge. Full information is available on the Group's website.

The eleventh in our series of UK Symposia on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining was held as an evening event at the BCS office in London in May 2018, organised by Frederic Stahl, Max Bramer and Stelios Kapetanakis. This series continues to reflect practical progress in this increasingly important field.

The latest in our series of 'Real AI' events was held at the BCS London Office in October. It was organised once again by Gilbert Owusu and Sid Shakya from BT. This event is designed to showcase practical applications of artificial intelligence, of particular interest to business and industry, and as before proved very successful. For the third time we combined Real AI with the BCS prize competition for Progress Towards Machine Intelligence in a single event. The competition was organised principally by Nadia Abouayoub and attracted some strong entries. The Machine Intelligence prize was won by Wish Wang from the Taipei American School with his entry 'Rock, Paper and Scissors Using Machine Learning', an AI game simulator which plays games between the program and a human. As the games go on, the human's past plays are analysed and used to predict what his/her next one will be thus enabling the program steadliy to improve its performance.

The Group's membership stood at 1,479 on November 3rd 2018.

Max Bramer
Chair, SGAI
http://www.bcs-sgai.org
Twitter: @bcs_sgai
Facebook: SGAIatBCS