In this blog post, I will write briefly about the 18th Pacific Rim International Conf on Artificial Intelligence (PRICAI 2021) conference, which was held from November 8–12, 2021, in Hanoi, Vietnam, and online.
What is PRICAI ?
PRICAI is an artificial intelligence (AI) conference that is well-established and is always held in Asia since over 30 years. PRICAI was previously held in various locations such as:
Nagoya (1990), Seoul (1992), Beijing (1994), Cairns (1996), Singapore (1998), Melbourne (2000), Tokyo (2002), Auckland (2004), Guilin (2006), Hanoi (2008), Daegu (2010), Kuching (2012), Gold Coast (2014), Phuket (2016), Nanjing (2018), Fiji (2019), and Yokohama (2020, online).
The proceedings of the conference are published as three proceedings books in the Springer Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence (LNAI) series, which ensures good visibility.
This year, there was 382 submissions, from which 92 regular papers were accepted (24.8% acceptance rate), and 28 short papers. Thus the combined acceptance rate for all papers is 31.41%.
Keynote talk by Prof. Virginia Dignum about responsable AI
There was an interesting keynote talk by Prof. Virginia Dignum about responsible artificial intelligence, what is it, and how it is relevant for today’s society.
She first said that AI is still not intelligent as smart as we would like it to be, and that three important components of AI are : adaptability, autonomy and interactions.
She then said that responsible AI is about understanding that AI systems are not alone. There are users, institutions and other systems around these AI systems, and we need to consider them.
There are several dilemnas. For example, should we just focus on optimizing the accuracy of AI systems or should we consider other criterias such as biases and energy consumption. We can view this as different objectives and we cannot optimize all of them. Thus, what should be prioritized?
There are various issues about AI that should be considered such as transparency, accountability and responsability:
The speaker also talked about other things but I will not report everything. If you are interested by this topic, she has published some papers on that subject.
Paper presentation
There was numerous paper presentations on various artificial intelligence topics. In particular, I participated to a paper that was presented to the conference, about high utility itemset mining:
Song, W., Zheng, C., Fournier-Viger, P. (2021). Mining Skyline Frequent-Utility Itemsets with Utility Filtering. Proc. 18th Pacific Rim Intern. Conf on Artificial Intelligence (PRICAI-2021), Springer LNCS, to appear.
Best papers
The best paper awards went to these two papers:
- Best Paper: Ning Dong and Einoshin Suzuki, GIAD: Generative Inpainting-Based Anomaly Detection via Self-Supervised Learning for Human Monitoring
- Best Student Paper: Bojian Wei, Jian Li, Yong Liu, and Weiping WangFederated Learning for Non-IID Data: From Theory to Algorithm
Conclusion
This was just a brief report about the PRICAI conference. Since my schedule is quite busy this week, I did not attend all the talks. But on overall, it was an interesting conference. It is a medium size conference that had some good talks.
Philippe Fournier-Viger is a professor of Computer Science and also the founder of the open-source data mining software SPMF, offering more than 120 data mining algorithms.
