Next week is the next event in the summer of CompSust conferences. The Twenty-Sixth Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-12) is being held next week (July 22-26) in Toronto, Canada. So here’s a little preview of what to expect and how to get the most out of it.
The schedule for the entire conference can be found here. To get a taste of the kind of topics being covered you can take a look at this excellent review of the papers from last year (complete with an handy chart) by Douglas Fisher from Vanderbilt University. Note that one of the two best papers from the entire conference was from the CompSust Track (“Computational Sustainability and Artificial Intelligence Track: Dynamic Resource Allocation in Conservation Planning” by Daniel Golovin, Andreas Krause, Beth Gardner, Sarah J. Converse, Steve Morey).
There isn’t a handy chart for this year’s conference yet but a quick look at the topics shows that many of the same topics will be covered as well as some new additions. A brief look at the sustainability topics includes: modelling climate change, ocean eddy monitoring, air pollution, forest management, wildlife conservation design, invasive species and infectious disease control, power grid management and battery output prediction and control. Just from the titles the range of computational methods used includes at least : linear programming, Q-learning, Lagrangian relaxation, Inverse RL and Bayesian ensemble prediction.
Of course the point of having this track at the AAAI conference is to help broaden the field of AI research and showcase a large cluster of multi-disciplinary collaboration that is already going on. I can tell you that from last year’s conference, the CompSust sessions have a different feel than the other parallel tracks since there are a variety of computational methods being discussed within the same session whether it be on energy management or ecological planning. So if you want a change of pace from the method focussed tracks consider stopping by a CompSust session.
This conference will also be the launch of the official Twitter account for the Computational Sustainability field, @compsust. So follow us at @compsust for the latest updates on the conference or search for the #compsust or #aaai12 tags for posts about what interesting research people are talking about and share your own thoughts.
Google+
For discussion that needs more than 140 characters you could also sign up for the Google+ event for the whole AAAI conference where you can discuss anything going on and meet up with people.
Mailing List
If you aren’t already on the yahoo groups mailing list for computational sustainability make sure you subscribe. There are announcements about conferences, journal deadlines and relevant science news for the community.
That’s all for now. See you next week!