The 2018 International Joint Conference On Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) opened today in Stockholm, Sweden, with a record-setting 2,500 attendees gathering at the Stockholm International Fairs convention centre. In the opening keynote, the IJCAI organizing committee announced its Distinguished Papers, Marvin Minsky Medal, and other awards.
One of the most prestigious and highly-discerning conferences in the field of AI, IJCAI this year received 3470 paper submissions, 46 percent from Chinese researchers. IJCAI selected 710 main conference papers.
This year IJCAI changed the name of its top honour from “Best Papers” to “Distinguished Papers,” and named seven awardees:
- SentiGAN: Generating Sentimental Texts via Mixture Adversarial Networks from Peking University
- Reasoning about Consensus when Opinions Diffuse through Majority Dynamics from University of Salerno & University of Calabria
- R-SVM+: Robust Learning with Privileged Information from Wuhan University & University of Sydney
- From Conjunctive Queries to Instance Queries in Ontology-Mediated Querying from University of Bremen & University of Liverpool
- What Game are We Playing? End-to-end Learning in Normal and Extensive Form Games from Carnegie Mellon University
- Commonsense Knowledge Aware Conversation Generation with Graph Attention from Tsinghua University & Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology & Beijing Institute of Technology
- A Degeneracy Framework for Graph Similarity from Paris Polytechnic, Athens University of Economics and Business
IJCAI also announced the team behind DeepMind’s ultimate Go master program AlphaGo as recipients of the inaugural Marvin Minsky Medal for outstanding achievements in AI. The award is named for Marvin Minsky, an American computer scientist and pioneer in the field of AI.
Other awards announced today:
- The 2018 IJCAI-JAIR, an award for an outstanding paper published in the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR) over the preceding five calendar years, goes to Framing Image Description as a Ranking Task: Data, Models and Evaluation Metrics
- The winner of the 2018 Award for Research Excellence, a biannual award recognizing career excellence in an AI researcher, is Jitrenda Malik from University of California at Berkeley
- The winner of the 2018 Computers and Thought Award, a biannual award to recognize outstanding young AI scientists, is Stefano Ermon, assistant professor at Stanford University
- The winner of the 2018 John McCarthy Award, an annual award to recognize established mid-career researchers, is Milind Tambe, professor at University of Southern California
- The 2018 AIJ Classic Paper Award, which recognizes a paper published at least 15 years ago that has shown to be exceptional in its significance and impact, goes to On the Acceptability of Arguments and its Fundamental Role in Nonmonotonic Reasoning, Logic Programming and N-person Games, first published in 1995.
IJCAI 2018 runs to July 19, and Synced will be reporting from the conference throughout the week.
Journalist: Tony Peng | Editor: Micheal Sarazen