AI Magazine - Winter 2018

24 AI MAGAZINE
An integral part of the conference, the special
tracks provide researchers working in similar areas
the opportunity to meet and present work in those
areas. These focused sessions also offer forums for
interactions within a broader community of AI
researchers. The special tracks program included ses-
sions and papers on AI for big social data analysis; AI
for games, serious games, and multimedia; AI in
healthcare informatics; applied natural language pro-
cessing; autonomous agents and robots; intelligent
learning technologies; recommender systems; uncer-
tain reasoning; case-based reasoning; and semantics,
logics, information extraction, and AI.

The call for papers attracted 150 submissions ( 61 to the general conference and 89 to the special tracks) and 27 poster abstracts. The accepted submissions comprised 70 full papers (24 from the general conference and 46 from the special tracks), 34 short papers presented as posters, and 24 poster abstracts that appeared in the proceedings. The Best Paper award went to Felipe Soares da Costa and Peter Dolog for Hybrid Learning Model with Barzilai-Borwein Optimization for Context-Aware Recommendations. The Best Student Paper award went to Jônatas Wehrmann, Mauricio Lopes, and Rodrigo Barros for Self-Attention for Synopsis-Based Multi-Label Movie Genre Classification. The Best Poster award was presented to Himan Abdollahpouri, Robin Burke, and Bamshad Mobash-er for Value-Aware Recommendation with Multiple Stakeholders.

The conference featured a stimulating set of invit-
ed talks by three distinguished speakers. Rina
Dechter from the University of California at Irvine
gave a talk entitled “Probabilistic Reasoning Meets
Heuristic Search,” Raymond Mooney from the Uni-
versity of Texas at Austin gave a talk called “Robots
That Learn Grounded Language Through Interactive
Dialogue,” and Peter Wurman of Cogitai’s talk was
“How Kiva Robots Disrupted Warehousing.” In addi-
tion, the invited speakers to the special tracks were
Kallirroi Georgila from the University of Southern
California, Institute for Creative Technologies, who
talked about challenges in reinforcement learning of
negotiation dialogue policies; Lewis Frey from the
Hollings Cancer Center, who gave a presentation on
artificial intelligence and precision medicine; and
Santiago Ontañón, of Drexel University, speaking
about similarity assessment for structured represen-
tation.

The next FLAIRS conference (FLAIRS- 32) will be held May 19–22, 2019, in Sarasota, Florida. Information about FLAIRS- 32, including the call for papers, is available online at www.flairs-32.info.

Keith Brawner is a researcher and project manager at the US Army Research Laboratory. His research interests are in the areas of machine learning for educational applications, and cognitive architectures.

Vasile Rus is the William Duanavant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Memphis. His research areas are natural language processing, interactive systems, and data science.

Roman Barták is a full professor of computer science at Charles University. His research areas are intelligent autonomous agents, model-based approaches, automated planning and scheduling, and verifiable AI.

Zdravko Markov is a professor of computer science at Central Connecticut State University. His research areas are machine learning, data and web mining, and AI education.