Last week I attended the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) in Vienna. Being `co-hosted’ with the European Conference on AI, the official name of this years’ edition was IJCAI-ECAI 2022. It was a great week with too many impressions and learnings to list. Here are some personal highlights:
- presented our paper on Option Machines as a long talk in the `Deep Reinforcement Learning’ session
- presented our paper on Safe & Efficient RL with Planning for Potential at the Safe RL workshop
- met many great people with great humor, ideas and experience
- attended keynotes by two Giants in AI: Stuart Russel and Judea Pearl
- had a nice visit of the Vienna. Managed to see some of the sights and experience the city. Went to see the 1922 movie Nosferatu with live piano music in a 1870s theatre-turned-movie hall.
- AI computer chess championship being held during the conference
- traveled there by a sleeper coach on the Night Jet, which was a great experience as well
The conference had a focus that seems pretty typical of AI research in Europe at the moment:
- hybrid knowledge v.s. data-driven approach. Tons of planning + learning combinations in various shapes. Temporal logic at the high-level and low-level control. Knowledge graphs for improved classification. Specific neural net architectures leveraging high-level planning results. Neuro-symbolic approaches. Distillation of neural net models into explainable models. Common-sense knowledge to defend against adversarial attacks. Reasoning about actions, then doing learning. Learning+causality. Learning (in) a relational domain. And many many more.
- Lots of RL (probably more telling of my selection than of the conference focus)
- Using AI to improve society: an AI for good track and a strong computational social choice presence.
- AI in context: robustness, safety, interpretability. Impact on users/people. Fairness, preferences and goals of agents. Societal impact of AI and ethics.
For proof of attendance and awkwardness, see the picture below ;)
Update 2022-09-23: the proceedings are available at IJCAI.