Brief report about the MIWAI 2019 conference

In this blog post, I will report about the MIWAI 2019 conference (13th Multi-disciplinary International conference on Artificial Intelligence), which was held from the 17th to 19th November 2019 at the EDC hotel in Kuala Lampur Malaysia.

About the MIWAI conference

This is the 13th edition of the MIWAI conference. The conference is called MIWAI since originally, it started as a workshop called Mahasarakham International Workshop on Artificial Intelligence in 2017. Initially, MIWAI was held every year in Thailand, and since 2011, it has been held outside Thailand as a conference:

• Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam (2012)
• Krabi, Thailand (2013)
• Bangalore, India (2014)
• Fuzhou, China (2015)
• Chiang Mai, Thailand (2016)
• Brunei Darussalam (2017)
• Hanoi, Vietnam (2018)
• Kuala Lampur, Malaysia (2019)

Registration and proceedings

On the first day, I first registered and received the conference bag and proceedings.

The proceedings of MIWAI 2019 are published by Springer in the Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence (LNAI) series, which ensures good visibility to the papers. This year, there was 53 submissions from 23 countries, and 25 papers where accepted, for an acceptance rate of 45%.

Day 1 – Opening ceremony, keynote talk and paper presentations

On the first day, there was the opening ceremony.

Then, there was a keynote talk by me (Prof. Philippe Fournier-Viger) entitled “Algorithms to Find Interesting and Interpretable High Utility Patterns in Symbolic Data” about techniques for discovering useful patterns in data. In particular, I talked about high utility itemset mining, which has become a popular area of research, and introduced some of my recent contributions.

Then, there was several paper presentations. In particular, I enjoyed the talk about associative classification by “Generation of Efficient Rules for Associative Classification” by Chartwut Thanajiranthorn and Panida Songram. They proposed a novel associative classifier method that achieved high accuracy compared to other classifiers of that type.

Another interesting paper that caught my attention, applied sequential pattern mining for building an academic chatbot. This paper is “Identification of Conversational Intent Pattern Using Pattern-Growth Technique for Academic Chatbot” by Suraya Alias, Mohd Shamrie Sainin, Tan Soo Fun and Norhayati Daut.

Day 1 – reception

In the evening, there was a nice reception dinner at the hotel with a traditional malaysian dance performance, and the best paper award was announced.

Day 2 – keynote talk and other presentations

On the second day, there was a keynote by Prof. László T. Kóczy from Hungary about a novel Discrete Bacterial Memetic Evolutionary algorithm (DBMEA) for solving hard problems such as the travelling saleslman problem with a time window.

Then, it was followed by more paper presentations.

MIWAI 2020

New year, the MIWAI 2020 conference will be held in Seoul, Korea. See the information below.

And I heard that MIWAI 2021 would be held in Japan.

Conclusion

I am happy to have attended the MIWAI 2019 conference. I met some researchers that I knew beforehand and met several interesting people that I did not know. The quality of the papers was good, and some papers were particularly interesting for my research interests. The conference was well-organized.

In the next blog post, I will talk to you about the ADMA 2019 conference, which I will attend later this week to present a paper about high utility episode mining.

—
Philippe Fournier-Viger is a full professor, working in China, and founder of the SPMF open-source data mining library.