Supported by the Luxembourg National Research Fund (FNR, RESCOM/18/12426287), the Luxembourg Logic for Artificial Intelligence Summit (LuxLogAI) attracted 223 registered participants to the Belval Campus from the 17th to the 26th of September 2018.
A dozen of professors and researchers specialized in Artificial Intelligence (AI), all from the different constituent events organised in tracks (Interdisciplinary Lab of Intelligent and Adaptive Systems), set up a program that was rich and varied. The Summit, initiated originally by ILIAS, Christoph Benzmüller and Xavier Parent, brought together Leon van der Torre: two well-established international conferences, five workshops, two round tables and interactive sessions, a tutorial and a summer school – all focussing on and discussing AI from different angles. Among the 223 participants, 8% were coming from Luxembourg, 80% from a European country other than Luxembourg, and 10% from North America, mostly the US.
The Summit featured a stellar line-up of eleven internationally recognized invited speakers, complemented by regular presentations of research papers. All in all, the Summit showed that AI (machine learning, big data, knowledge representation and reasoning) gave a new impetus to a wide spectrum of scientific disciplines, ranging from computer science (e.g., legal informatics and robotics) to education and art. It also showed how businesses are using AI to leap ahead on innovation. Local organizer and general chair of the RuleML+RR conference, Xavier Parent emphasizes: “We had the ambition to go beyond the usual academic AI conferences. The Summit therefore also had a dedicated industry track, where industrial applications of AI were discussed. It also included a public round table AI: Truth or Dare organized by Sviatlana Höhn, focusing on the impact of AI on society and the European future. This was complemented by a round table discussion on art markets, an AI and art exhibition, and a diversity event. A special highlight for me was DecisionCAMP. It showed how academia and industry can benefit one from the other.”
With its special focus theme on “methods and tools for responsible AI”, a core objective of the Summit was to present the latest developments and progress made on the crucial question of how to make AI more transparent, responsible and accountable. Leon van der Torre, general chair of the conference, explains. “European AI has moved from animal AI to human AI, and therefore LuxLogAI focused on ethical, legal and social aspects of AI. The key challenge for human AI is the explanation of AI decisions and behavior. We are now complementing machine learning algorithms with knowledge representation and reasoning techniques, such as rule-based systems.” New techniques for explainable AI were discussed at the RuleML+RR conference, the DecisionCAMP conference and the Deduktionstreffen workshop.
Co-organizer Alexander Steen adds: “Sustainable research in responsible AI requires computer science students to be educated not only in machine learning, big data and robotics, but also in logic and reasoning. I was therefore delighted that the Reasoning Web summer school, organized by Martin Theobald, attracted over 50 registered participants. In addition, Emil Weydert presented an expert tutorial on default reasoning and belief revision. A special highlight for me was Jean Botev’s workshop on self-organizing systems, showing how education, industry and society can work together and learn from each other.”
Here are at a glance all the respective events, which took place on behalf of LuxLogAI 2018:
The 4th Global Conference on Artificial Intelligence (GCAI 2018)
This event covered all topics in the field of artificial intelligence including robotics, machine learning, big data, knowledge representation and reasoning, cognitive modelling, education, creativity, etc. The GCAI proceedings are published by EasyChair Publications, in the EPiC Series in Computing. The volume will be open access and the authors will retain copyright. More info
The 2nd International Joint Conference on Rules and Reasoning (RuleML+RR 2018)
RuleML+RR 2018 brought together rigorous researchers and inventive practitioners, interested in the foundations and applications of rules and reasoning in academia, industry, engineering, business, finance, healthcare and other application areas. This leading event in rule-based reasoning, called for high-quality papers covering theoretical advances, novel technologies, and innovative applications of knowledge representation and reasoning with rules. More info
MIREL 2018
The aim of MIREL-2018 workshop was to bridge the gap between the community working on legal ontologies and NLP parsers and the community working on reasoning methods and formal logic, in line with the objectives of the MIREL (MIning and REasoning with Legal texts) H2020 project coordinated by the University of Luxembourg. The participants of the workshop presented various new techniques combining language technologies applied to the legal domain and those based on legal reasoning. More info
DecisionCAMP 2018
Decision Management is rapidly becoming the critical methodological and technological framework to support decision-making approaches across a wide range of industries. DecisionCAMP is the latest incarnation of the series of popular events for Business Rules and Decision Management practitioners. The event included presentations from industrials, mostly from the US, exploring the current state in Decision Management with respect to the main theme of the Summit, and investigating how so-called decision modelling can be used to both improve the transparency of an analytic model and explain outcomes. More info
Artificial Intelligence: Truth or Dare
Hosted by KPMG Luxembourg, this public round table discussion focused on Responsible AI and the European future, and included nine experts of AI in politics, industry and academia, such as Viviane Reding (European Parliament), Toby Walsh (TU Berlin, UNSW Sydney), Mario Grotz (Ministry of Economy), and Philipp Slusallek (Saarland University, DFKI). It was observed that Luxembourg with its expertise in High Performance Computing and central location would be a natural hub for European AI (CLAIRE). The discussion identified key directions in the development of Artificial Intelligence to gain competitive advantage for Europe and Luxembourg in particular, and to figure out the critical transformations in our society as a consequence of the technological progress. The event had repercussion in the media, see https://today.rtl.lu/media/vox-pops/1243397.html More info
AI and Art
Several activities were combined in the AI and art symposium. Roman Kräussl of the Luxembourg School of Finance went into debate with artists Alexander Gurita and Sergio Albiac on the future of the art market. Curator Yolanda Spinola-Elias opened an AI and art exhibition with several artists. Featured artists are Sergio Albiac, José Manuel Berenguer, Roc Parés, a selection of video artworks from Loop Festival of Video art. some of them related to AI/New Technologies and society impact vision. The exhibition included an AI+A timeline art installation. Yolanda Spinola-Elias also gave the keynote lecture during the Summit’s dinner on a boat on the Moesel. She explaine that Artificial Intelligence and Art confluences and conjunctions may not rely only on a serendipity process, but on a deeply intentional Art, Science, Technology and Society creative research system. Meta, multi and/or interdisciplinary creative processes were some of the issues that “AI and Art” covered during LuxLogAI 2018 in order to provide a wide perspective of AI impact in Art and vice versa. More info
Diversity@LuxLogAI
The main theme of Diversity@LuxLogAI was to promote gender equality and sensitivity in Artificial Intelligence. The event gathered researchers, practitioners and policy makers to provide their views of the current state of diversity in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and contribute in discussions at multiple tables lead by hosts addressing different topics. The table topics were: Explicit and Implicit Discrimination hosted by MEP Mady Delvaux-Stehres (European Parliament), Stereotypes and Bias hosted by Prof. Dr. Tonie VAN DAM (The University of Luxembourg), Work Environment/Culture hosted by Dr. Aida Nazarikhorram (LuxAI), Current state of diversity in AI hosted by Dr. Valeria de Paiva (Nuance Communications), Possible Improvements & Solutions hosted by Dr. Cynthia Kop (Radboud University Nijmegen). The objective is to empower women in AI and ICT. More info
Self-Organising Systems in Art, Business and Science (SOS/ABS)
Self-Organising Systems have been a subject of fascination in many disciplines, ranging from Biology over Cybernetics to Sociology. However, and despite their obvious commonalities, many of the insights, methods and their applications remain disparate or incompatible. The SOS/ABS workshop brought together different perspectives on self-organising systems in order to gain an emerging higher-order understanding of self-organisation for application, study and creativity. More info
Deduktionstreffen 2018
The annual meeting Deduktionstreffen is the prime activity of the Interest Group for Deduction Systems (FGDedSys) of the German Informatics Society. This year, it was again a meeting with a familiar, friendly atmosphere, where everyone interested in deduction could report on their work in an informal setting. More info
The 14th Reasoning Web Summer School (RW 2018)
The research areas of Semantic Web, Linked Data and Knowledge Graphs have received a lot of attention in academia and industry recently. The Reasoning Web series of annual Summer Schools gave insight into the Semantic Web, Linked Data, Knowledge Graph, Ontologies, Rules and Logic. A special emphasis was put on the use of machine learning techniques for the Semantic Web. More info
SST ABCDE 2018
The ABCDE summer tutorial 2018 gave a survey of exciting recent developments in default reasoning as well as belief change and offered a look at some interesting but hardly known facts from these areas. More info
The second edition of the Logic for AI Summit will take place in Bolzano in Italy in September 2019.
You can find more information about LuxLogAI 2018 on the website: https://luxlogai.uni.lu/