AAAI-18

(My First Research Conference!)

How did I get involved?

Dr. Amit Sheth informed me about an opportunity to attend the inaugural Student Outreach Workshop (SOW) at AAAI (held in conjunction with EAAI). This workshop was chaired by Dr. Sheila Tejada (University of Southern California), Dr. David Touretzky (Carnegie Mellon University), and Ms. Andrea Edwards (Xavier University of Louisiana).

The workshop, running from on February 2 and through February 4, featured the Cozmo robot by Anki and the Calypso robot intelligence framework by Visionary Machines LLC. We learned how to program Cozmo robot and created an interactive demo to illustrate how AI enables autonomous robots. My group and I created a reproduction of Simon Says and shared our learnings with K-12 students at the Louisiana Children’s Museum. We also gave demonstrations during the conference to AAAI and EAAI attendees on Sunday evening (Feb. 4th). The goal of the workshop was to increase the cultural diversity and inclusiveness of the AI community!

SOW Pictures

Talks, Posters, & Demo's I Attended ...

A lot of the talks I attended were extremely technical and filled with lots of equations. Therefore, I quickly learned how to navigate the conference to attend talks, posters, and demos that were more comprehensive for me. The program guide provides details about the different talks, etc.

The theme of the conference was Human Involved Machine Learning.

Day 1 (Friday - Feb 2nd):

I attend part of the 2-Day Health Intelligence workshop with Dr. Sheth.

I was there for the Integrating Environmental Data, Citizen Science and Personalized Predictive Modeling to support Public Health in Cities: the PULSE WebGIS talk, which was about aggregating multiple different streams of data for health care utilization. The speaker mainly talked about the New York Air Quality data to study asthma. He said some nice visualizations.

I was also there for Dr. Sheth's keynote, titled: Augmented Personalized Health: using AI techniques on semantically integrated multimodal data for patient empowered health management strategies. He talked about the KHealth project, Bariatrics Project, and the upcoming Depression Chatbot project.

I wanted to attend Dr. Nitish Chawla's keynote on the next day (Feb. 3rd), but the SOW was in full swing.

The rest of the day, I was busy meeting my roommate for the SOW, attending orientation, and then with the Student Welcome Reception.

Day 2 (Saturday - Feb 3rd):

We had an early start on Saturday by heading to Xavier University of Louisiana at 7:30 am. Dr. Touretzky launched the workshop by introducing Cozmo and it's purpose. He went through a step by step tutorial on how to use the SDK mode to program Cozmo. Additionally, he also explained how to use some of the built-in AI features to program simple tasks and how to split your code among different pages to simplify complexity.

After the tutorials, we formed groups to start working on a demo for Sunday. I worked with Kathryn Sarullo (Stension University), Elora Strom (CMU), Helen Gezaghegn (University of Alberta), and Vivian Tsai (John Hopkins University). We created an interactive activity for K-12 students to show how them who they can become involved in robotics/AI. We built a Command Cozmo (a reproduction of Simon Says) game where the students could tell Cozmo to clean up a room, change facial expressions, and play songs! This game involved speech recognition, path planning, cognitive realization, and object recognition.

We also designed the posters (check the top of the page) for Sunday's presentation.

Saturday evening started with the Welcome Reception. There was a fantastic live jazz band that was performing. During the reception, Dr. Sheth introduced me to Dr. Ashok Goel (Georgia Institute of Technology), Dr. Pedro Szekely (USC, ISI), and few other notable professionals in the field. After the reception, all of the Kno.e.sis, members (current and alumni) went to dinner. On our walk over to the restaurant, we caught a bit of a Mardi Gras parade!

Day 3 (Sunday - Feb 4th):

Another busy day! We started the day off by heading the Louisiana Children's Museum to set up our demos. After setting up, we realized that our speech recognition capabilities didn't quite work because of high volume level nearby. We quickly had to re-program Cozmo to take input from the XBox controller. After the quick changes, we were ready to demo! The kids really enjoyed interacting with Cozmo and were even interested in the way the code worked. It was exciting to see their curiosity towards the robot and how it "knew what to do." After the demo at the museum, we headed back to the conference hotel to demo our project there. We had a small number of attendees at the demo session, but they were very amused by Cozmo's cognitive interactions.

Day 4 (Monday - Feb 5th):

How Machines Learn Best from Humans

This was a great talk given by Dr. Charles Isbell (Georgia Institute of Technology) and Dr. Michael Littman (Brown University) on Interactive Reinforcement Learning. He along with Dr. Littman talked about how human input can be useful for RL. This talk was extremely interesting and entertaining not only because of the content but rather because of the presentation style. Dr. Isbell asked for a "volunteer" to debate him on the idea of if humans should be involved in RL. Dr. Littman then joined the talk as a "volunteer" to "debate" the topic. They both used papers written by each other and in the ML community to debate one another. Pretty neat way to present your thoughts with support!

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