A Summary of the Twenty-Ninth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence

FALL 2015 99 The Twenty-Ninth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-15), the inaugural winter version of the long-standing AAAI conference, was held in January 2015 in Austin, Texas (USA) during pleasant weather while snowstorms hit other parts of the United States. The conference program was cochaired by Sven Koenig and Blai Bonet. AAAI-15 received 1991 submissions — 40 percent more than AAAI-14, which held the previous record. The 974 program committee members and 89 senior program committee members selected 539 papers that were presented either as 15-minute talks or posters (in three large poster sessions) that included 2-minute advertisements in the talk sessions. AAAI15 needed to be extended by one day to accommodate this many presentations. The AAAI-15 organizing committee of about 60 researchers arranged many of the traditional AAAI events, including the Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI) Conference, tutorials, workshops, the video competition, senior member summary talks (on well-developed bodies of research or important new research areas), and What’s Hot talks (on research trends observed in other AI-related conferences and, for the first time, competitions). Innovations of AAAI-15 included software and hardware demonstration programs, a virtual agent exhibition, a computer-game showcase, a funding information session with program directors from different funding agencies, and Blue Sky Idea talks (on visions intended to stimulate new directions in AI research) with awards funded by the CRA Computing Community Consortium. Seven invited talks surveyed AI research in academia and industry and its impact on society. Attendees kept track of the program through a smartphone app as well as social media channels. The conference featured robotics as thematic focus, in part