AAAI 2021 Announces Paper Totals – ‘Amazingly High Technical Level’

AAAI 2021 has officially announced its paper submission and selection numbers. Organized by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, AAAI is one of the world’s leading artificial intelligence conferences. The highly anticipated announcement came from Kevin Leyton-Brown, University of British Columbia Professor of Computer Science and AAAI 2021 program Co-Chair.

#AAAI2021 decisions are out! A record 9,034 submissions, of which over 7,911 were reviewed. We accepted ~1,692 papers, overall acceptance rate of 21%. Condolences to those who didn't make it in; many congrats to those who did. Amazingly high technical level overall.

— Kevin Leyton-Brown (@k_leyton_brown) December 2, 2020

Professor Brown says AAAI 2021 received a record-high 9034 submissions compared to last year’s 8800. Over 7911 papers went to review and a total of 1692 papers made it, for an acceptance rate of 21 percent, just 0.4 percent higher than last year’s 20.6.

During the review process, every main-track Phase II paper received at least three reviews and over 93 percent received four or more reviews. Each of the fast-track papers meanwhile received at least two new AAAI reviews and over 95 percent received three or more. Every paper also received a meta-review written by a Senior Program Committee member (SPC), the Area Chair (AC) or Program Chair.

It is worth noting that scores didn’t matter as much during this year’s decision process. Professor Brown says organizers did not decide acceptance or rejection using a numerical cutoff, and this is reflected in rejected Phase II papers’ having average scores between 2.0 to 7.0, while accepted papers’ average scores ranged from 4.5 to 9.3. He attributes the overlap to a number of factors: “Discussions often led reviewers to change their minds; in such cases they often but not always changed their scores. And in some cases papers were accepted or rejected based on a single expert opinion, even when it differed from the majority opinion.”

The 35th AAAI runs virtually February 2-9 and will will feature invited speakers, workshops, tutorials and student programs. The General Program Chair is Qiang Yang, Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer of WeBank and Chair Professor at Computer Science and Engineering Department at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. AAAI 2021 has made a commitment to encourage participation by groups that reflect the diversity in society, including “race, ethnicity, gender, age, religion, disability, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, and cultural background.”

The official list of AAAI 2021 accepted papers has not yet been released. Synced will update readers when this information becomes available.

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Analyst: Yuqing Li | Editor: Michael Sarazen; Fangyu Cai

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