Our annual series of conferences has reached its 43rd year and has returned to its regular venue at Peterhouse, Cambridge in December. I acted as conference chair for AI-2023 as well as Technical Stream Chair. 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. Papers accepted for poster presentation were again published as short papers in the proceedings. Juan Augusto organised the poster sessions, including chairing a session of short presentations by authors of poster papers, summarising the topics of their posters. 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 first day of the conference comprised workshops on 'Computational Scientific Discovery in Social Sciences', 'AI for Manufacturing and Supply Chains', 'AI Challenges in Healthcare' and 'Testing AI'.
The final programme included refereed papers by authors from 13 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 paper in each stream of which the principal author was a student and the best poster. 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 XL, the number marking the 40th 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 'How is AI going to change society in the coming decade? How do we ensure that change is for the good?'. It was chaired by Andrew Lea.
Our conference administrators were Mandy Bauer and Kerry Wear 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.
Our Research Student Forum, FAIRS, continued for a fifteenth year. This is a free event for PhD and MRes/MPhil research students in the AI field, running on the day before the AI-2023 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.
An innovation this year was the introduction of the 'SGAI virtual seminar series' of free evening events delivered via Zoom. This has proved very successful and it is hoped that it will continue in 2024. The first in the series was a seminar on 'Large Language Models, including ChatGPT and BERT' organised by Mercedes Arguello Casteleiro in May 2023. The second in the series was also the sixteenth in our series of UK Symposia on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, held as a virtual evening event in June on the subject of 'Knowledge Graphs'. Following a summer break the series resumed with a seminar on 'Ethics in AI: Bias, Privacy & Policies' organised by Giovanna Martinez in October.
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 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.
In October SGAI collaborated with the BCS Consultancy Group on a panel discussion on 'How consultants can leverage the AI transformation in the industry'. This was a free 'hybrid' event available both face-to-face in the BCS London Office and remotely by videoconference.
A second face-to-face symposium was organised by Mercedes Arguello Casteleiro at the BCS London Office in November. This was on the topic of 'The Rise of AI in the Healthcare Ecosystem' and was another successful event, bringing together participants from several areas of the healthcare community.
The term of office of three of the committee members, Nadia Abouayoub, Andrew Lea and Frederic Stahl, came to an end at the conclusion of the 2022 AGM, which was held during AI-2022. There were also two vacant posts. By the closing date, nominations had been received for the three people listed previously plus Mathias Kern and Eric Jukes. As there were the same number of candidates nominated as there were vacancies, no election was necessary and the Chair declared that the five people nominated were elected for three years beginning at the close of the 2022 AGM. During the year Dr Giovanna Martinez (University of Nottingham) and Dr. Mercedes Arguello Casteleiro (University of Southampton) also joined the committee as co-opted members for initial one-year terms.
The Group's social media presence has continued. The Group's X (formerly Twitter) name is @bcs_sgai, with hashtags #AI2023, #sgaiconf, #ukkdd, #realai and #micomp. 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 1,549 on November 21st 2023.
Max Bramer
Chair, SGAI
http://www.bcs-sgai.org
X (Twitter): @bcs_sgai
Facebook: SGAIatBCS