An upcoming Animal Crossing AI workshop and ICLR this week may reshape what research conferences look like, but social experiences are still a challenge.
This week, the world’s machine learning community got a good look at what digital research conferences will look like in a post-coronavirus future, as ICLR kicked off what’s believed to be the first major AI research conference held entirely online. The conference was initially scheduled to be held in person in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) conference is next month and will be partially or entirely digital, while ICML, one of the biggest annual AI research conferences in the world, will be held entirely online in July.
Also this week: An NLP researcher announced plans to host the first-ever AI workshop inside Nintendo’s Animal Crossing: New Horizons this July. Artie lead scientist Josh Eisenberg told VentureBeat that more than 200 people have already signed up to watch the day-long event. Animal Crossing: New Horizons launched March 20 and is now the best-selling game in the U. S. and third-best launch of any game in Nintendo history.
One major area of focus for each event is figuring out how to create social connections. That’s part of what motivated an Animal Crossing AI workshop.
“I was talking to my fiancée about social interactions and quarantine, and some of our deepest interactions with other people over the past couple of months have been via video games, specifically with our friends in Animal Crossing. So I wanted to apply that to work and research to see if we can combine an academic-style workshop with the social interactions of Animal Crossing,” Eisenberg said.
By contrast, the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) may be the largest AI conference to take place entirely online. Each of the 680 papers was presented by authors via a prerecorded 5- or 15-minute talk. Every video was accompanied by recommendations for similar papers, something one attendee suggested should become the standard for all machine learning research conferences. There was also a paper search bar and visualization showing how each paper relates to each other to group similar works and make it easier to spot major areas of interest.
Many people are pondering the best ways to host digital events. It’s something VentureBeat and other media brands are thinking about a lot internally as well. This week, VB ran its annual GamesBeat Summit event entirely online, and Transform, VB’s annual AI conference, will take place online in July.
Three members of the VentureBeat AI team “attended” ICLR to check out innovative research in GANs like U-GAT-IT, NLP like Reformer, and neurosymbolic AI Iike Clevrer, as well as workshops on topics like climate change, affordable health care, and machine translation for African languages.
The entire week’s worth of ICLR keynote addresses and workshops were pre-recorded and available on the first day of the conference, so attendees could binge watch them or peruse them throughout the week. The advantage of tuning in to a given talk or workshop at its appointed time on the schedule was to get access to live Q&A with speakers and participate in the live chats that accompanied each session.
