AIhub monthly digest: July 2022 – conferences galore, Lanfrica talks, and song contest winner announced

by Lucy Smith

29 July 2022

RoboCup

Back as an in-person event for the first time since 2019, Bangkok played host to RoboCup2022, where around 1500 participants, from 39 different countries took part in competitions and a symposium. You can see the programme of events here, and there are links to the recordings of the competitions for some of the leagues here. If you are interested in reading our interviews from last year with members of the different leagues, these can be found here.

ICML

The 39th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2022) took place from 17-23 July in Baltimore. During the conference, the ICML Test of Time award, and the 2022 ICML outstanding paper awards were announced. The Test of Time award went to Battista Biggio, Blaine Nelson and Pavel Laskov, for their 2012 paper Poisoning Attacks against Support Vector Machines. You can find out more about that work here. You can read the 10 winning outstanding papers here.

IJCAI-ECAI 2022

The 31st International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence and the 25th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-ECAI 2022) draws to a close today. You can check out some of the events that took place here. We were lucky enough to be able to travel to the in-person event, in Vienna. On the Monday, we gave a tutorial on science communication for AI researchers. Thanks to everyone who attended! We learnt a lot from the talks, posters and panels, and it was great to be able to meet people face-to-face. During the conference, the following prizes were announced:
IJCAI distinguished papers
ACM SIGAI Industry Award
2021 EurAI Dissertation Award

AIhub coffee corner – hints and tips on attending an in-person conference

With so many in-person conferences taking place this month, it was a good job that some of our trustees were on hand to provide some useful hints and tips on attending an event for the first time. To find out how you can network, use conferences to inspire future work, and get the most out of an in-person event, check out the latest AIhub coffee corner discussion.

New voices in AI

This month, host Joe Daly chatted to Chris Emezue about his research and on founding Lanfrica, an online hub that catalogues, archives and links African language resources. If you are interested in finding out more about the Lanfrica project, we interviewed Chris, and fellow founders earlier this year.

Lanfrica talks

Speaking of Lanfrica, the team have just launched a new series of talks. Coverage of natural language processing (NLP) tends to be dominated by very large language models and datasets. As a consequence, smaller, yet impactful, efforts do not get much attention. The idea of this series is to provide a platform for anyone to share their efforts in natural language processing, with a particular focus on low-resource languages. The first talk in the series was given by Subhadra Vadlamannati, and you can watch the recording here.

Optimal planning – an interview with Álvaro Torralba

Daniel Fišer, Álvaro Torralba and Joerg Hoffmann won an outstanding paper runners-up award at AAAI 2022 for their paper Operator-potential heuristics for symbolic search. In this interview, Álvaro tells us more about the field of optical planning, their methodology, and how potential heuristics can be used in symbolic search with very positive results.

The GRACE podcast – catch the first episode

GRACE: Global Review of AI Community Ethics is a new student-run, peer-reviewed, open-access, international journal. To accompany the journal, there is a podcast hosted by Dr Harriett Jernigan. In the first episode, Harriett interviews Dr Brandeis Marshall about her research, ranking algorithms, misinformation, combining the analytical and the creative, the lack of Black women in leadership roles in the data industry, the disproportional effect of data on Black women, tech solutionism, her forthcoming book, and more.

World Economic Forum report on equitable and inclusive AI

Recently, the World Economic Forum released a blueprint for equity and inclusion in artificial intelligence. Partnership on AI shared their views on the report here.

Yaboi Hanoi wins the 2022 AI Song Contest

On 6 July, the organisers of the AI Song Contest revealed the winner of this year’s competition. Lamtharn “Hanoi” Hantrakul (team Yaboi Hanoi) came out on top with an interesting composition based on Thai tuning. You can listen to the song, and find out more about the creative process, here.

Our resources page
Forthcoming and past seminars 2022
Articles in our UN SDGs focus series
New voices in AI series