Our annual series of conferences has reached its 44th year and was held once again at its regular venue at Peterhouse, Cambridge in December. I acted as conference chair 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 half-day workshops on 'AI in Education: towards developing international standards' and 'Human-AI collaboration: advancing human, animal, and environmental health' and a full-day workshop on 'Computer Vision Applications of AI'.
The final programme included refereed papers by authors from 15 countries throughout Western and Eastern Europe plus Africa and Asia. 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 presented 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 XLI, marking the 41st 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 'Is Large AI good or bad for society?'. 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 sixteenth year. This is a free event for PhD and MRes/MPhil research students in the AI field, running on the day before the AI-2024 conference in the same venue, 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 SGAI virtual seminar series of free evening events delivered via Zoom continued in 2024, with talks on AI for healthcare in February, large language models in May and AI in education in June. The ultimate aim is to establish this series as a regular event.
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.
For the second year a face-to-face symposium on AI for healthcare was organised by Mercedes Arguello Casteleiro at the BCS London Office in November. This was on the topic of 'AI for One Health and Planetary Health: Where Are We?'. This was another very successful event, bringing together participants from several areas of the healthcare community.
For the second time SGAI collaborated with the BCS Consultancy Group, with a joint panel discussion on 'AI in Consultancy: Exploring the latest advancements and opportunities'. This was a free 'hybrid' event available both face-to-face in the BCS London Office and remotely by videoconference.
The terms of office of five of the committee members, Juan Carlos Augusto, Max Bramer, Rosemary Gilligan, Adrian Hopgood and Stelios Kapetanakis, came to an end at the conclusion of the 2023 AGM. There was also one committee vacancy, so there were six posts to fill by election. By the closing date, nominations had been received for the five people listed previously plus Mercedes Arguello Casteleiro. As there were the same number of candidates nominated as there were vacancies, no election was necessary and the Chair declared that the six people named above were elected for three years beginning at the close of the 2023 AGM. The co-option of Dr Giovanna Martinez (University of Nottingham) was extended for a further year. During the year Dr. Haiming Liu (University of Southampton) also joined the committee as a co-opted member for an initial one-year term.
The Group has ceased to use the X (formerly Twitter) social media platform and has joined Bluesky with account name @BCS-SGAI. 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 1,723 on November 16th 2024.
Max Bramer
Chair, SGAI
http://www.bcs-sgai.org
Bluesky: @BCS-SGAI
Facebook: SGAIatBCS