In this blog post, I will talk about the 15th International Conference on Multi-disciplinary Trends in Artificial Intelligence (MIWAI 2022), which was held as a virtual event on November 18th, 2022. I have attended this conference to present two papers related to pattern mining.
MIWAI is a conference that has been held every year in the pacific/Asia region, for 15 years. In the past, MIWAI has been held in countries such as Vietnam, India, Thailand, China, Malaysia and Brunei. I have also attended MIWAI in Malaysia in 2019 (see my blog post about MIWAI 2019 here).
Proceedings of MIWAI 2022
This year, the MIWAI conference received 42 papers from which 19 were accepted, which includes 14 full papers (acceptance rate of 33% for full papers) and 5 short papers (acceptance rate of 45% for full + short papers).
The proceedings of the conference are published by Springer in a book from the LNAI series. Hence, the papers are well-indexed in various publication databases such as DBLP, which is good.
Schedule of the conference
The conference was organized during a single day (November 18) and online using the Zoom platform. It started with an opening session, followed by a keynote talk by Prof. Rapeepan Pitakaso from Thailand about “Artificial Multiple Intelligence System (AMIS) and its Applications”. Then, there was paper presentations organized as parallel sessions during the rest of the day.
Opening
During the opening, the organizers talked about the program, the review process, the organization, etc. It was nice to see several people that I knew already from MIWAI 2019. The organizers are very friendly and professional.
It was announced that next year, MIWAI 2023 will be in Hyderabad, India. The submission deadline is planned for 10th January 2023.
Then, MIWAI 2024 will be in Chongqing, China.
Awards were also announced. I am please that the best paper award was given to “LCIM: Mining Low Cost High Utility Itemsets“, which is my paper. There was also another paper who received an award.
Keynote talk
There was a keynote talk “AMIS – Artificial Multiple Intelligence System: Theory and Application” by Prof. Rapeepan Pitakaso from Ubon Ratchathani Unviersity, Thailand. The talk was about a system called Artificial Multiple Intelligent System (AMIS), that aims to combine multiple types of intelligence, just like humans do (verbal, linguistic intelligences, etc.). The system is based on heuristic algorithms and also combines CNN (Convolutional Neural Networks) and other techniques. Here are some pictures and slides from this presentation.
Papers on pattern mining
As readers of this blog knows, I am interested in the field of pattern mining. At the conference, there was two papers about pattern mining (my papers):
| 5121 | Philippe Fournier-Viger, M. Saqib Nawaz, Yulin He, Youxi Wu, Farid Nouioua and Unil Yun | MaxFEM: Mining Maximal Frequent Episodes in Complex Event Sequences [paper] [source code] [ppt] |
| 6226 | M. Saqib Nawaz, Philippe Fournier-Viger, Naji Alhusaini, Yulin He, Youxi Wu and Debdatta Bhattacharya | LCIM: Mining Low Cost High Utility Itemsets [paper] [ppt]. [source code and data] |
These papers are about episode mining and high utility pattern mining.
Affordable registration fee
A good thing about this conference is that the registration fee is cheap. For one paper, it costs 250$ USD and for two papers, I spent only 350$ USD. This is much cheaper than many other conferences published by Springer and also IEEE. For example, an alternative that I considered would have been to publish in some European conferences published by Springer such as DAWAK or DEXA but registering two papers for those conferences would have cost me over 1240 euros instead of 350$ USD! This is a big difference. There are also many IEEE top conferences that are very expensive and have an increasing price in recent years. For example, this year, IEEE ICDM has a registration price of 1300 USD, while the price 10 years ago was about only 500$ USD. Thus, I appreciate that MIWAI offers registration at a very reasonable price. I think it can allow researchers from all around the world to more easily publish their papers, especially when research funding is limited.
Conclusion
MIWAI 2022 was a good conference. It is not a very large conference but there are some interesting papers of good quality, and the conference is well-organized. I will try to attend again for MIWAI 2023.
Later this month, I will talk to you about the MEDI 2022 and ICDM 2022 conference.
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Philippe Fournier-Viger is a distinguished professor of computer science
