Last week I was off to Macau, China for attending IJCAI 2019 one of the world top level conferences in Artificial Intelligence. In particular, I was invited to submit and attend the pre-conference workshop AI & Multimodal Analytics for Education (AIMA4EDU). I also attended another workshop on Human Activity Recognition, a Tutorial on TensorFlow2.0 and some the main conference presentations.

Although I have attended several conferences IJCAI was my first conference exclusively on Artificial Intelligence - definetly an interesting experience.

The conference had more than 3500 attendees and took place in Macao, an indipendent city-state in south of China, former Portugese colony. The conference was in the Venetian Hotel, the world biggest Casino. There were dozens of parallel sessions, paper and poster presentations, an expo area with stands from Chinese famous companies (Baidu, Alibaba, Huawei, Hitachi and so on) and non Chinese companies. There was a robot challenge, booths and demo exhibitions. IJCAI2019 was plenty of interesting activities revolving around the theme of Artificial Intelligence.

Lot of inputs, things to see in a enormous hotel venue, overcrowded with guests and conference participants. In few words IJCAI was challenging and intense experience.

In the gallery below you will get a glimpse of this unique experience.

Galaxy Hotel hall

Libratus, the poker bot which won against world best players

Dorabot multipurpose robotic arm

Sony beamer

Baidu and other Chinese companies using AI

University of Macau

The Venetian Hotel

Taipa island, the hotel-casino area

Inside the venetian, the shopping area

Tensorflow 2.0 tutorial by google

Workshop AIMA4EDU

Taipa island

The hotel conference lobby

Waking up with jetlag in beautiful city of Macau, a cultural mix wich tastes like Lisbon, Vegas and China 🇲🇴 pic.twitter.com/M00IJnJd1e

— Daniele Di Mitri (@dimstudi0) August 10, 2019

Workshop AIMA4EDU

The workshop AIMA4EDU was aimed to apply AI techniques and multimodal learning analytics for understanding human learning in real-world educational contexts. The conference was organised by a team of international researchers, primarily from Australia and China.

A number of presentations were presented using different types of multimodal data, including EEG data, EDA, self reports, mobile tracking.

The point of view of multimodality was primarily from an AI technical standpoint. Emphasis was given on various AI techniques used with multimodal data as compared to practical applications in the domain of Learning.

Similarly to the AIAED conference that took place in May in Beijing, this workshop was also in cooperation with Squirrel AI Learning the Chinese organisation which provides adaptive education in China. KP Thai from SquirrelAI presented a new multimodal dataset called SAIL releases publically.

The dasated as well as the list of papers presented in the workshop is avaialble on workshop's webiste aima4edu.com.

Best Paper Award

With great surprise the Demo paper I submitted on the Multimodal Pipeline got the Best Paper Award. I am very flattered that our work is receiving international recognition. I consider to be a reward for the effort me and the team have put in it. Special thank you, of course, goes to my advisors Jan, Hendrik and Marcus who made this work possible with their contributions.