Our annual series of conferences has reached its 39th 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-fourth 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. Richard Ellis was the poster organiser and chaired 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 'How should developments in AI be regulated over the next 25 years?'. It was organised by Andrew Lea who also organised the AI Open Microphone session. Frederic Stahl acted as publicity organiser. For the third 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 17 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-fourth UK Case-Based Reasoning Workshop the conference included workshops on 'AI for Future Digital Health', 'Explainable AI' and 'a Beginners' Guide to AI'.
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 XXXVI, the number marking the 36th in an annual series of publications going back to our fourth annual conference in 1984.
Our Research Student Forum, FAIRS, continued for a thirteenth 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 term of office of one of the committee members, Dr. Jixin Ma, came to an end at the conclusion of the 2018 AGM. There was also one vacancy to fill. By the closing date, nominations had been received for Dr. Jixin Ma and Mr. Richard Ellis. As there were the same number of candidates nominated as there were vacancies, no election was necessary and the Chair declared that the candidates elected for 2 years beginning at the close of the 2018 AGM were Jixin Ma and Richard Ellis.
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 twelfth 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 2019, 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 new 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 fourth 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 Juan Carlos Augusto and his team from Middlesex University with their entry 'Smart Environments Architecture (SEArch)'. This work is the result of the insights gained through several projects deploying sensing technology complementing more traditional computing systems to assist humans in practical situations. The emphasis of the presentation was on its use to train and run a Smart Home system which is part of one of the labs at the Hendon Campus of Middlesex University.
The Group's membership stood at 1,583 on November 22nd 2019.
Max Bramer
Chair, SGAI
http://www.bcs-sgai.org
Twitter: @bcs_sgai
Facebook: SGAIatBCS