This year's activities have once again been affected by the Covid-19 pandemic, with all our events being held online using the Zoom video-conferencing package. It was originally hoped that the annual conference AI-2021 could again be held at Peterhouse College, Cambridge, in December but eventually it was decided that in view of the continued uncertainties around the public health risks from the pandemic and the likelihood of travel and quarantine restrictions during the winter months the annual conference would again be run as a virtual event. Reluctantly we also decided to cancel the 2021 '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 fourteenth in our series of UK Symposia on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining was held as a virtual event in May, chaired by Frederic Stahl with two speakers: Marwan Hassani (Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands) and Giovanna Martinez-Arellano (University of Nottingham). 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 for the second time as a virtual Zoom event on October 1st, 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 always proved very successful.
Our annual series of conferences reached its 41st year and for the second (and I hope last) time was held virtually by video-conference. As with our face-to-face conferences in this series, the first day was devoted to workshops, followed by two days devoted to keynote lectures, refereed technical and application papers and other events. I acted as conference chair, as well as Technical Programme Chair, with Jixin Ma as Deputy Technical Programme Chair. Richard Ellis acted as Application Programme Chair. Adrian Hopgood acted as Workshop Organizer again. The conference included workshops on 'AI for Future Digital Health', 'AI for Software Engineering & Software Engineering for AI' and 'AI in Cybersecurity'.
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 'AI and Sustainability'. It was chaired 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 12 countries spread across three continents. All papers submitted were reviewed by an international panel of expert referees. We again used the ConferenceExpert system for electronic submission and reviewing of papers.
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 'poster' papers in the proceedings. As using physical poster boards was obviously not feasible, a dedicated 'virtual posters' area was provided 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. A separate breakout room was created for each short paper during three of the refreshment breaks, to enable direct discussion with interested delegates. Delegate voting for the best poster award was facilitated by a special online voting system using delegate booking reference numbers.
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 XXXVIII, the number marking the 38th in an annual series of publications going back to our fourth annual conference in 1984.
The terms of office of five of the committee members, Max Bramer, Rosemary Gilligan, Adrian Hopgood, Stelios Kapetanakis and Gilbert Owusu came to an end at the conclusion of the 2020 AGM. There were already two committee vacancies, so there were seven posts to fill by election. By the close of nominations, nominations had been received for the five people listed above plus Juan Carlos Augusto. As there were six candidates for seven vacancies no election was necessary and the Chair declared that Max Bramer, Rosemary Gilligan, Adrian Hopgood, Stelios Kapetanakis, Gilbert Owusu and Juan Carlos Augusto had been elected for 3 years beginning at the close of the 2020 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 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 1,400 on November 23rd 2021.
Max Bramer
Chair, SGAI
http://www.bcs-sgai.org
Twitter: @bcs_sgai
Facebook: SGAIatBCS