The AAAI 35th conference on artificial intelligence started on 2 February. So far, we’ve been treated to some excellent invited talks, tutorial sessions, and diversity and inclusion events. The poster sessions are also now in full swing. Here is our round-up of the first few days of the conference as seen by the Twitter-sphere.

The AAAI 2021 best paper awards were announced during the opening ceremony

Excited to share the best paper awards for #AAAI2021. The best papers include (1) Informer (about transformers in NLP) by Haoyi Zhou: https://t.co/v5PLbUOyrK, (2) Exploration-exploitation in multi-agent learning by Stefanos Leonardos: https://t.co/1gqkagU7Pr <1 of 3>.

— Mausam (@mishumausam) February 4, 2021

Congrats to my PhD student @lilyxu0 lead author for paper "Dual-mandate patrols: Multi-armed bandits for green security" chosen as best paper runner up at #AAAI2021 !! Congrats co-authors @BondiElizabeth @fangf07 @PerraultAndrew @kaiwang_gua.
Tomorrow: Room BC-D2-R1, poster 4906 https://t.co/UNZD2ln5GP

— Milind Tambe (@MilindTambe_AI) February 4, 2021

Invited talks

The invited talk by @BarzilayRegina in @RealAAAI is beyond good. Models give confidence to the predictions, but shared stories give strength to people.

— Yiyuan Li still 💻 videoes@COLING🐱NeurIPS🐱AACL (@YiyuanLi1) February 5, 2021

@LukeZettlemoyer gave an invited talk about the massive advances in pre-trained language models in NLP. #AAAI2021. @UW @facebookai. Nice curve showing huge recent models pic.twitter.com/kgMQDErWjC

— Mausam (@mishumausam) February 5, 2021

From Tuomas Sandholm's #AAAI2021 Engelmore Award talk: why is game-theoretic AI better than ML for games? https://t.co/1XLi2xG9kR pic.twitter.com/VNbWvzfu4r

— Kevin Leyton-Brown (@k_leyton_brown) February 4, 2021

Some statistics about the reviewing process and submission levels

#AAAI2021 review lengths across topic areas (..and a comparison to the same stats from #IJCAI2016..).

Somethings don't change.

While other communities save their time for writing more papers, Planning folk use it for writing longer reviews 😋

(c.f. https://t.co/fdDQ1dhIYy) pic.twitter.com/pHsyezQ2qR

— Subbarao Kambhampati 🚀 #AAAI2021 (@rao2z) February 4, 2021

AAAI Historical Submissions & Acceptance Numbers #AAAI @RealAAAI #AAAI2021 pic.twitter.com/8DbSjn7n24

— Oktie Hassanzadeh (@oktie) February 4, 2021

Diversity and inclusion events

Do you want to learn more about the experiences from established Latinx researchers in AI? Would you like to spark connections with future potential collaborators? Join us!https://t.co/FYgqbmh1Vv pic.twitter.com/7PYSAslqE9

— Luz Angélica Caudillo Mata, Ph.D. (@laCaudilloMata) January 28, 2021

UPCOMING EVENT! We will be launching our 2021 Try AI Speaker Series at #AAAI2021 with three fantastic discussions. Open to 10th – 12th graders and 1st & 2nd year undergraduates. Learn more at https://t.co/O1UZz1I5BU pic.twitter.com/dUPEwC6F3C

— Try AI (@TryAIOrg) January 21, 2021

Hello to everyone attending @RealAAAI's #AAAI2021! Our https://t.co/dnxklnmV1i workshop is on Tue 09 Feb 2021. Greetings again to our co-chairs from #IndigenousInAI @AiDisability @QueerinAI @_LXAI @black_in_ai @WiMLworkshop and to our @wimlds and @NewInML affiliates! #DiverseInAI pic.twitter.com/zNw3QlHqcD

— Diversity in Artificial Intelligence @ AAAI 2021 (@DiverseInAI) February 4, 2021

Tutorials

Giving my tutorial "Designing Agents' Preferences, Beliefs, and Identities" at #AAAI2021 tomorrow! Slides at: https://t.co/7Bj1vbJoaW

— Vincent Conitzer (@conitzer) February 2, 2021

Today, @iddo and me are presenting a tutorial on meta-learning at #AAAI2021. For those who can't make it, we made all materials (slides and videos) publicly available here: https://t.co/CeiT4exuyV Happy to (try to) answer any questions you may have :). #AI #MachineLearning pic.twitter.com/RL68AVYKZX

— Joaquin Vanschoren (@joavanschoren) February 3, 2021

In this year's AAAI, we (w/ @feiwang03 @FeixiongCheng ) are going to give a tutorial on #Artificial_Intelligence_for_Drug_Discovery. The time is at 8:30am, 3rd Feb. EST.

Welcome everyone to attend! The slides are available at: https://t.co/7yvm8Qnhm4 pic.twitter.com/OiaKTMduxw

— Jian Tang (@tangjianpku) January 27, 2021

Workshops

Woop woop, #aaai2021 is about to start! Looking forward to hear about new exciting research, and hope to see everyone at our workshop on #commonsense #KnowledgeGraphs (Feb 8th) and tutorial on #commonsenseknowledge acquisition and representation (Feb 3rd) @RealAAAI pic.twitter.com/2UidScYnxC

— Filip Ilievski (@earthling91) February 1, 2021

#aaai2021 attendees, consider coming to our workshop on Content Authoring and Design (CAD 21). Highlights: fantastic invited speakers, @xeeliz, @gdm3000 and Aaron Hertzman, and super interesting presentations on work at the intersection of design and AI. https://t.co/tOpagRzANu

— thamar ~🎉🥂 (@thamar_solorio) January 29, 2021

Excited to share our findings from an expert panel session and prototype walkthrough with clinicians on the need for explainability in a clinical context in this paper, "Designing for AI Explainability in Clinical Context", accepted to #taih workshop at #AAAI2021 1/7

— Shruthi Chari (@shruthichari) February 4, 2021

Papers and posters

Neural-Encoding Human Domain Knowledge to Warm-start RL! @andrewsilva9 is helping to democratize RL and bring end-users into-the-loop. Check his #aaai2021 poster session from 1145-1330 tomorrow (Thursday) EST. Paper here: https://t.co/A2CxOmoI0I @gtcomputing @mlatgt pic.twitter.com/QWY39pQswI

— Matthew Gombolay (@MatthewGombolay) February 3, 2021

At #AAAI2021 this week, I will present our paper "The Importance of Modeling Data Missingness in Algorithmic Fairness: A Causal Perspective" (with @AlfonAmayuelas, Amit Deshpande, @amt_shrma )

Link to paper: https://t.co/SSu45p2ldI#aaai21 #ArtificialIntelligence #AIEthics

— Naman Goel @AAAI2021 (@ng_goel) February 2, 2021

We will present our latest work on learning with noisily labeled data at #AAAI2021😊 If you are interested in distant supervision and noisy labels, we invite you to visit our poster this weekend or take a look into the paper https://t.co/bOT1LHwj0n @cs_dawei pic.twitter.com/4juDrchmg8

— Michael A. Hedderich (@MicHedderich) February 2, 2021

Happy to announce our work "Learning from the Best: Rationalizing Prediction by Adversarial Information Calibration", accepted at #AAAI2021 https://t.co/zOQ7OXLFCR

Come talk to us about it at AAAI: 4-Feb 08:45-10:30AM PST & 5-Feb 12:45AM-02:30AM PST
@extendAlanShore pic.twitter.com/SJU6oeWxSO

— Oana-Maria Camburu (@oanacamb) February 3, 2021

If you’re “at” #AAAI2021, come drop by our poster sessions tomorrow (Feb 5) from 11:45-1:30pm and 7:45-9:30pm ET!

Room BC-D2-R1, poster ID 4906

with @BondiElizabeth @fangf07 @PerraultAndrew @kaiwang_gua @MilindTambe_AI https://t.co/j1D4J5bQ4q

— Lily Xu (@lilyxu0) February 4, 2021

Panel sessions

If you are attending #AAAI2021, come join us for the #AI in Practice panels!

Forecasting in Unprecedented Times (📆Feb 4)

Emerging Uses of AI in Real-Time Automation (📆Feb 5)

AI Applications in Finance (📆Feb 6)

⌚️ 10:30 AM PST / 1:30 PM EST

Link: https://t.co/7fiVGBfgox pic.twitter.com/pwr1YoDCZ1

— Thiago Serra (@thserra) February 3, 2021

Please join The ##Neurosymbolic AI Panel 👇at @RealAAAI #aaai2021: Sunday Feb 7, 7:30 AM PST. Amazing panelists:@guyvdb, Marta Kwiatkowska, Matthew Botvinick, Leslie P Kaelbling, and @luislamb ! Thanks for joining @GaryMarcus @Montreal_AI @ceobillionaire pic.twitter.com/1JpNEXFmBB

— Kristian Kersting (@kerstingAIML) February 4, 2021

The deep impact #AI is already having on our lives has provoked hopes and fears in equal measure among general public and experts.

It is my pleasure to reflect on this today at 4.30pm (GMT+1) in the #AAAI2021 panel with such distinguished guests! https://t.co/4kQG7EJHrP pic.twitter.com/9NAgQ7dU8x

— Gabriela Ilian Ramos (@gabramosp) February 5, 2021

Lucy Smith , Managing Editor for AIhub... read more