This has been a year unlike any other that anyone now alive can remember. Worldwide disruption to conferences, professional activities and professional bodies such as SGAI and our parent body the BCS are just a tiny, insignificant part of the worldwide disaster caused by a dangerous virus named COVID-19 that has already taken over a million lives with many more sure to come.
In April, the Group's committee members were devastated to learn of the death of our colleague and friend Professor Miltos Petridis from the COVID virus. Miltos was a prominent member of our Group for many years. He acted as application program chair for the annual conferences and co-editor of the proceedings book for many years as well as being the lead organiser of the annual UK Case-Based Reasoning workshops. More importantly, Miltos was a great person to work with, full of ideas and positive energy and deservedly very popular. He will be greatly missed. In recognition of Miltos's strong involvement in AI education, we will be acquiring a new permanent trophy - the Miltos Petridis Memorial Trophy - and will inscribe the names of the best student paper award winners there as a permanent record of their achievements, from this year onwards.
The Covid lockdown that started in March led initially to the cancellation of our annual UK KDD (Knowledge Discovery in Data) evening lectures, followed by a decision to relaunch UK KDD as a virtual event using Zoom in July. The success of that event led to a decision to make our annual Real AI event and our annual conference AI-2020 virtual too. Reluctantly we also decided to cancel the 2020 'Progress Towards Machine Intelligence' competition and the FAIRS training event for AI research students. We will restart both of them as face-to-face events as soon as it is safe to do so.
The thirteenth in our series of UK Symposia on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining was rearranged as a virtual event in July 2020, with two speakers: Frederic Stahl, who is now based in Germany, and Stelios Kapetanakis who connected in from Greece. This series continues to reflect practical progress in this increasingly important area of AI.
The latest in our series of 'Real AI' events was held as our second virtual Zoom event on the evening of October 1st and the following day, with six speakers. It was organised once again by Gilbert Owusu 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.
Our annual series of conferences reached its 40th year and for the first time was held virtually by video-conference over five days, the first two devoted to workshops, followed by three days the following week devoted to the keynote lectures, refereed technical and application papers and other events. I acted as conference chair, as well as Technical Stream Chair, with Jixin Ma as Deputy Stream Chair. I am very grateful to Richard Ellis for agreeing to act as Application Stream Chair, as replacement for Miltos Petridis. Adrian Hopgood acted as Workshop Organizer again, with the workshops run over two separate days this year. The twenty-fifth UK Case-Based Reasoning Workshop, which ran during the first day of the conference, was organized by Stelios Kapetanakis, Frederic Stahl and Nadia Abouayoub. The conference also included workshops on 'AI for Future Digital Health', 'AI and Operational Research' and 'Recent Advances in AI - Theory and Applications'.
Rosemary Gilligan acted as the Group's Treasurer. Richard Ellis 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 can we avoid the risks of unreliable, manipulated, or unconstrained AI or pseudo-AI and ensure the world gets the benefits AI can deliver?'. It was organised by Andrew Lea. Nadia Abouayoub chaired the AI Open Microphone session. Frederic Stahl acted as publicity organiser. 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 conference programme included refereed papers by authors from 14 countries spread across five continents. All papers submitted were reviewed by an international panel of expert referees. There were awards 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.
Papers accepted for poster presentation were again published as short papers in the proceedings. An innovation this year, as using physical poster boards was obviously not feasible, was a dedicated 'virtual posters' area on the website, which enabled delegates to view an expandable image file for each paper (replacing the traditional poster), to access the full text of the paper online and to interact with the authors at any time during the conference via a dedicated blog. The author of each short paper was also invited to take part in a one-hour videoconference dedicated to that paper, to enable direct face-to-face discussion with interested delegates. Delegate voting for the best poster award was facilitated by a special online voting system using delegate booking reference numbers. 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 XXXVII, the number marking the 37th in an annual series of publications going back to our fourth annual conference in 1984.
The terms of office of four of the committee members, Nadia Abouayoub, Andrew Lea, Sid Shakya and Frederic Stahl came to an end at the conclusion of the 2019 AGM. By the close of nominations on Wednesday December 11th, nominations had been received for Nadia Abouayoub, Andrew Lea and Frederic Stahl. As there were three candidates for four vacancies no election was necessary and the Chair declared that Nadia Abouayoub, Andrew Lea and Frederic Stahl had been elected for 3 years beginning at the close of the 2019 AGM. That left one vacancy which would be filled at the next AGM.
The Group's social media presence is continuing 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 Group's membership stood at 1,768 on November 23rd 2020.
Max Bramer
Chair, SGAI
http://www.bcs-sgai.org
Twitter: @bcs_sgai
Facebook: SGAIatBCS