A Report on the IJCAI-07 Program

Manuela M. VelosoProgram Chair, IJCAI’07

Computer Science DepartmentCarnegie Mellon University

Abstract

We report on the main features of the IJCAI’07 program, including its theme, and its schedule andorganization. In particular, we discuss an effective and novel presentation format at IJCAI in which oraland poster papers were presented in the same sessions categorized by topic area.

1 Introduction

The Twenthieth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-07) was held in Hyderabad,India, January 6-12, 2007.

The theme of the conference was “AI and its benefits to society” with the aim of highlighting and raisingour research interests for problems of direct relevance to society. It is our hope that the theme of theconference can also be discerned in the technical papers, and the work be used towards the realization ofthat goal.

The theme was particularly addressed by the invited talks: Keynote speaker, Raj Reddy, Carnegie MellonUniversity, USA, on “The AI Chalenges in Developing Economies,” Patrick Doherty, Linkoping University,Sweden, on “Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Research: Challenges and Prospects”, Carole Goble, University ofManchester, UK, on “The e-Scientist is the Semantic Web’s Friend (or a Friend Of A Friend),” HideyukiNakashima, Future University, Japan, on “ Cyber-Assisting Real World with Ambient Intelligence andSemantic Computing,” Martha Pollack, University of Michigan, USA, on “Intelligence Assistive Technology:The Present and the Future,” and Devika Subramanian, Rice University, USA, on “Events, Patterns andAnalysis: Forecasting International Conflict by Analyzing Wire News Stories.”

Interestingly, in direct response to the theme of the conference, a new centre was created at the IndianInstitute for Information Technology (IIIT), Hyderabad, on “AI Technology and its Benefits the Society,”with sponsorship from Byrraju Foundation and Satyam Foundation. The centre plans to have an interna-tional visiting scholars programme in addition to its permanent faculty, researchers, and students. Moredetails are available from http://www.iiit.ac.in.

The conference included 471 technical papers, 23 workshops chaired by Carles Sierra, and 19 tutorialschaired by Cynthia Braezeal. More than 200 students of an AI course taught by Rajeev Sangal at IIITattended the tutorials as part of their course work. The conference overall had over 1,200 participants.

We were pleased to receive an unprecedent number of 1,365 papers submitted with authors from 45different countries. We accepted 471 papers (34.4%), with 212 for oral presentation (15.5%) and 259 forposter presentation (18.4%). The proceedings of IJCAI’07 were distributed as CDs (see Figure 1), and, aswell as all the IJCAI previous proceedings, are available online, at www.ijcai.org. Hard copies can also beordered.

2 Reviewing

The reviewing process represented an enormous amount of work by many volunteers of the internationalAI research community, who carried their extensive reviewing work over the Summer period. The papers

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Figure 1: The Cover of the CD for the IJCAI’07 Proceedings. (Thanks to Mike Hamilton, AAAI, for thedesign of the cover and the IJCAI’7 LAC for the original art.)

were distributed among a senior program committee (SPC) of 23 members, a program committee (PC) of86 members, and a set of 997 reviewers.

By early July, each paper was assigned to one supervisor SPC member and one PC member. The blindreviewing algorithm generated more than 2,500 assignments that maximized the matched bids of the SPCand PC members and, the matched interest keywords. The algorithm recorded the justifications for eachassignment in terms of the specific bid and keyword match. The PC members then further assigned eachpaper to three reviewers chosen from a pool of reviewers recruited by the PC.

When completed, the reviews were made available to the authors who had a chance to rebutte them.The PC member held an anonymous discussion among the reviewers based on the authors’ rebuttals andfinally made a definite or undecided recommendation for each paper in agreement with the correspondentSPC member. We held an SPC meeting in September 16-17, 2006, where all the undecided papers werecarefully revisited. At the end of the meeting, all papers had a definite decision. The final notifications weresent out on September 18, Figure 2 shows the distribution of accepted papers among the ten top-level areas.

Figure 2: Distribution of Papers per Area.

The reviewers and program committee members were asked to recommend papers for distinction. Wewere pleased to see several papers that were identified, out of which a subcommittee of the senior programcommitteea selected three as the IJCAI’07 distinguished papers. They are ”Building Structure into LocalSearch for SAT” by Duc Nghia Pham, John Thornton, and Abdul Sattar; ”Automated Heart Wall Mo-tion Abnormality Detection From Ultrasound Images using Bayesian Networks” by Maleeha Qazi, GlennFung, Sriram Krishnan, Romer Rosales, Harald Steck, R. Bharat Rao, Dr. Don Poldermans, and Dhanalak-

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shmi Chandrasekaran; and ”Performance Analysis of Online Anticipatory Algorithms for Large MultistageStochastic Integer Programs” by Luc Mercier and Pascal Van Hentenryck.

3 Program Schedule and Organization

IJCAI’07 introduced a new presentation format of oral/poster technical sessions with oral and poster presen-tations in the same session. Oral and poster were divided by topic and presented in the same sessions. Thisnew format was very well received, and it enabled extensive discussion of both the oral and poster papers.Figure 3 shows a few snapshots of the ambient at the technical sessions.

Figure 3: posters

Furthermore the IJCAI’07 schedule for the overall technical program was designed with several principlesin mind, including:

• No invited talks are presented in parallel with technical paper sessions;

• Each technical session has a duration of 90 minutes followed by a 30 minute break to allow for ample andfocused discussion and interaction among the oral and poster presenters and the conference participants;

Figure 4 shows a sketch of the schedule with the keynote and invited talks, the Computer and ThoughtAward talk by Peter Stone, the Research Excellence Award talk by Alan Bundy, and the multiple parallelpaper presentation sessions. Ron Brachman was presented the Distinguished Service Award at the openingceremony.

We chose to have a maximum of six parallel sessions. On Wednesday, the sixth parallel session was takenby a special symposium organized by the Local Arrangements Committee on “AI and Industry.” On thelast day, we also had five paralledl sessions. The distribution of the actual number of oral and poster papers

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Time Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, FridayJanuary 9 January 10 January 11 January 12

9:15 - 10:30 Keynote Talk: Patrick Doherty, Hideyuki Narashima Carole GobleRaj Reddy Devika Subramanian Martha Pollack –

10:30 - 11:00 Coffee Break Coffee Break Coffee Break Coffee Break11:00 - 12:30 6 sessions 5 sessions 6 sessions 5 sessions12:30 - 14:00 Lunch Lunch Lunch Lunch14:00 - 15:30 6 sessions 5 sessions 6 sessions 5 sessions15:30 - 16:00 Coffee Break Coffee Break Coffee Break Coffee Break16:00 - 17:30 6 sessions 5 sessions 6 sessions 5 sessions18:00 - 19:30 C&T Talk: Res.Exc.Talk

Peter Stone Alan Bundy

Figure 4: IJCAI’07 Program at a Glance

(constrained by their topics) by a specific number of parallel technical sessions was nontrivial. Given 212oral and 259 poster papers, and a total of 66 sessions (see Figure 4), we created 52 novel oral/poster sessions,51 of which had 3 oral and 5 poster presentations, and one had 3 oral and 4 posters. The 52 oral/postersessions then accomodated a total of 156 oral and the total 259 posters. The remaining 56 oral papers weredivided by 14 oral-only sessions with four oral presentations each. When possible, these oral-only sessionswere also strategically scheduled when the motivation for poster discussion would have been problematic,namely before lunch time, at the end of the days when there were no following invited talks, and in the lastfive sessions of the conference.

Two major factors contributed to the innovation of the oral/poster format. First, with the growth of thefield, IJCAI receives a very large number of submissions, inevitaby also accepting a large number of papers.Second, a large number of parallel sessions and non-structured large poster sessions may not effectivelyexpose the selected papers for presentation. The oral/poster sessions at IJCAI’07 provided some empiricalevidence for its success.

4 Conclusion

There were many people responsible for making IJCAI’07 successful and their names are exhaustive listedin the conference proceedings. My special thanks go to Ramon Lopez de Mantaras, the conference chair forIJCAI’07, and the local arrangements committee, who provided a fantastic conference setup for the IJCAI’07technical program where the hospitality and the wonders of India were a real treat. As an example, Figure 5shows the Chowmahalla Palace, one of the palaces of the Nizam of Hyderabad, where the more than 1,000person sit-down banquet was held.

Through the IJCAI’07 program chairing, I got to know and to truly enjoy the rich research communityand wide variety of excellent work in a very special and priveleged manner. Finally, the conference websitewww.ijcai-07.org has kept all the detailed information about the conference, including the videos of theinvited talks.

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Figure 5: Sit-Down Banquet at the Chowmahalla Palace

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