Our annual series of conferences has reached its 42nd year and has returned to its regular venue at Peterhouse College, Cambridge in December. After two years of virtual conferences forced on us by the Covid-19 pandemic, it is a great pleasure to be able to return to a face-to-face conference this time.
I acted as conference chair for AI-2022, as well as Technical Stream Chair. Jixin Ma was deputy chair of the technical stream. Frederic Stahl acted as Application Stream Chair and Adrian Hopgood acted as Workshop Organizer. Rosemary Gilligan acted as Treasurer and was also responsible for Local Arrangements. Juan Augusto and Richard Ellis were the poster organisers. Juan chaired a session of short presentations by authors of poster papers, summarising the topics of their posters. 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 final 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. There were prizes awarded for the best papers in the technical and application streams, the best paper in each stream of which the principal author was a student and the best poster. The first day of the conference comprised workshops on 'AI Trends in Healthcare', 'Sustainability & AI', 'Explainable AI' and for the less experienced 'Introduction to AI'.
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 XXXIX, the number marking the 39th in an annual series of publications going back to our fourth annual conference in 1984.
This year's panel session was on the topic of 'Explainable AI'. It was organised by Andrew Lea who also organised the AI Open Microphone session. As an innovation this year we had a visit from the Eva Photobooth Robot for two hours around the lunch break 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 the Group's behalf.
The Group has obtained a third permanent trophy, the Miltos Petridis Memorial Trophy, to commemorate our former colleague Professor Miltos Petridis who sadly died early in the Covid pandemic in 2020. The trophy will record the winner of the best student paper in each stream from 2020 onwards. Dr. Yvonne Fryer, Professor Petridis' widow, was invited to the conference dinner as Guest of Honour to present the awards to the 2022 winners.
Our Research Student Forum, FAIRS, continued for a fourteenth year. This is a free event for PhD and MRes/MPhil research students in the AI field, running on the day before the AI-2022 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 fifteenth in our series of UK Symposia on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining was held as a virtual evening event in June, organised by Frederic Stahl and Max Bramer. This series continues to reflect practical progress in this increasingly important field, with excellent presentations on 'Autonomous identification of submarine groundwater discharge from environmental in situ data' and 'Zooniverse - a tool for citizen science and more'.
The latest in our series of 'Real AI' events was held at the BCS London Office at the end of September, organised by Mathias Kern and 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.
The term of office of two of the committee members, Dr. Jixin Ma and Mr. Richard Ellis, came to an end at the conclusion of the 2021 AGM, which was held during AI-2021. 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 three years beginning at the close of the 2021 AGM were Jixin Ma and Richard Ellis. During the year Dr Mathias Kern (BT) also joined the committee as a co-opted member. Towards the end of the year Gilbert Owusu left the committee because of pressure of other commitments and Giovanna Martinez was co-opted for a year starting at the end of the 2022 Annual General Meeting.
The Group's social media presence has continued. 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 1,373 on November 5th 2022.
Max Bramer
Chair, SGAI
http://www.bcs-sgai.org
Twitter: @bcs_sgai
Facebook: SGAIatBCS