IJCAI post-conference report

This year, thanks to the support from IJCAI conference, I can travel to Pasadena to attend the IJCAI conference. This is the first time I attended IJCAI (I attended AAAI in 2005). AI motivated me to pursue my Ph.D study in the first place. I was quite excited to attend this top conference on AI.

Overall, I like the invited talks and demos most. AI is now so separated into different subfields and each field currently (e.g., machine learning and data mining) rarely talks much about intelligence. So these high-quality invited talks in IJCAI really gave me a fresh view of AI from different perspectives. However, the papers in the conference, I have to say, are not quite interesting. What is even worse, it is difficult to grasp any idea if you are not working directly in the field the paper is talking about. While it seems IJCAI motivates to encourage collaboration and cross-discipline talks between AI researchers, the barrier is heavier than ever before. This makes me worry about the quality of the IJCAI conference. How to attract high-quality work to publish in IJCAI and break the boundary between different areas require a lot of efforts, or even a revolutionary reform. Maybe, it is more reasonable to host IJCAI as a symposium consists of high-quality talks and pioneer work, rather than yet-another conference to publish delta papers.

This conference provides two tours for APL and USC. I think these tours were great and such kind of activities should be kept in the following conferences as they provide a great opportunity to explore classical AI projects. It was a little sad that some attendants reserved the seats but did not show up. On the contrary, some other people who wish to join the tour could not go because they had no ticket. I hope the ticket-exchange at the registration desk would be allowed to accommodate more people in the next IJCAI.

Another is concerning the organization of IJCAI. The sessions were well organized. But the catering was really poor. I attended the student reception. The food there was not attractive at all. Some other attendants were also complaining about the food. Maybe, the conference organizer spent most of the fundings to provide travel scholarship for students. Then, I'll take my words back given such a bad economic situation.

I would like to thank IJCAI to provide me this great opportunity to make friends with other AI researchers, to meet those AI “stars”, and to re-cherish those AI dreams I used to have. Hope this conference would become better and inspire more AI communications and explorations.