The Thirty-Fifth Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-23)

Collocated with AAAI-23 | February 7-14, 2023, Washington, DC, USA

Important Dates

• August 12, 2022: Electronic papers due (All Times Anywhere on Earth AoE)
• September 12–16, 2022: Author feedback window
• October 7, 2022: Notification of acceptance or rejection
• November 18, 2022: Camera-ready copy due (11:59 PM AoE)

The Thirty-Fifth Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-23) is a venue for papers describing highly innovative realizations of AI technology. The objective of the conference is to showcase successful applications and novel uses of AI. The conference will use technical papers, best practice papers, invited talks, and panel discussions to explore issues, methods, and lessons learned in the development and deployment of AI applications; and to promote an interchange of ideas between basic and applied AI and the discourse on the actual deployment of AI in practice. The general goal of the conference is to teach people the challenges and solutions to accomplishing something useful in the real world, as opposed to describing a new algorithm. Papers focusing on algorithmic descriptions, rather than applications, are more appropriate for AAAI-23. All submissions must be original.

IAAI-23 will consider: (1) papers that showcase novel, deployed applications of AI; (2) applications on a trajectory to deployment; (3) papers that present deployed tools for faster AI solutions development and deployment; (4) papers that showcase original ways of integrating methodologies from different areas of AI for practical realization and future deployment; and (5) best practice papers. Submissions should clearly identify which track they are intended for, as the tracks are judged on different criteria. All submissions must be original.

Tracks and Topics

1. Deployed Highly Innovative Applications of AI​

Papers submitted to this track must describe *deployed* applications with measurable benefits that include an innovative use of AI technology. Applications are defined as deployed once they are in production use by their final end-users and the in-use experience can be meaningfully collected and reported. The study may evaluate either a stand-alone application or a component of a complex system.

Papers will be judged by the quality of: the task or problem description; the application description; the innovative use of AI technology; the measurable application use and payoff; and the lessons learned during application development, deployment and maintenance. In-depth descriptions of the algorithm are generally more appropriate for AAAI than for IAAI. Each accepted deployed application paper will receive the IAAI ‘Innovative Application’ Award.

Papers in this track may have up to 8 pages in the prescribed AAAI style, plus at most one more page which may only contain references.

2. Emerging Applications of AI

Emerging applications papers ‘bridge the gap’ between basic AI research and case studies of deployed AI applications, by discussing efforts to apply AI tools, techniques, or methods to real-world problems in novel ways. Emerging applications focus on aspects of AI applications that are not yet sufficiently deployed to be submitted as case studies in the Deployed track.

This track is distinguished from reports of purely scientific AI research appropriate for AAAI in that the objective of the efforts reported at IAAI should be the potential application of AI technologies, including engineering considerations. A key requirement for papers is to discuss the path forward for achieving deployment of the technology.

Papers will be judged primarily by the following criteria: significance (of the problem, and the tool or methodology); relevance of AI technology to the problem; innovation; path to deployment; content; evaluation; technical quality; and clarity. Authors are advised to bear these questions in mind while writing their papers. Authors are also advised to consider the novelty of applying AI to the particular problem domain.

Papers in this track may have up to 6 pages in the prescribed AAAI style, plus at most one more page which may only contain references.

3. Deployed Innovative Tools for Enabling AI Applications

Within this track, we solicit papers describing *deployed* tools for improving applied AI innovation and deployment of AI systems. Areas of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Process organization: Tools that help manage and assure the development, evaluation or deployment of AI systems.
• Data cleaning: Tools to ease the pain point of processing raw data for its use in AI systems.
• Modelling: Tools that facilitate AI modelling, for example approaches to facilitate deriving models from examples or demonstrations.
• Meta-algorithmics: Tools to improve AI systems, algorithm configurators, algorithm portfolios, and hyper-parameter tuners.
• Platforms: Tools in the form of platforms designed for AI research, especially those with connections to real world systems and domains.
• Novel computational models: Tools to exploit new computational hardware, for example neuromorphic co-processors, quantum computers, and chips approximating quantum computation.
• Interaction: Tools that facilitate the interaction design of or user experience with AI systems or improve user evaluations.
• Trusted AI: Tools that generate explanations, justifications, and persuasions for data-driven models.

Papers will be judged primarily by the following criteria: the extent to which the tool presented yields solutions with demonstrated improved quality; lower development, deployment, and maintenance costs; better productivity; fewer errors; and higher ability to scale. Reviewers will pay attention to how well designed is the tool, how easy is it to use and how well is it documented, and how many users it has. Note the focus is on the tool, not on foundational research.

Papers in this track may have up to 6 pages in the prescribed AAAI style, plus at most one more page which may only contain references.

4. Innovative Inter-disciplinary AI Integration

This track is devoted to the integration of AI components with the focus on how the orchestration of methods from different AI silos requires the adaptation of existing technologies to allow them to work together well for application of AI in practice. Papers must pay attention to engineering considerations and, where relevant, to human–computer interaction.

Examples for such orchestrated new capabilities and applications include but are not limited to:

• Learning search algorithms: Implementations of systematic and heuristic search algorithms that are capable to improve their performance by learning from experience or during search.
• Decision support under uncertainty: Implementations that combine statistical and deterministic reasoning to provide scalable decision support under uncertainty for applications that are inherently stochastic.
• Knowledge representation: Representations that work effectively for downstream analytics, e.g., the innovative use of a knowledge graph for feature generation of a downstream machine learning model.
• Auto-configuration: The adaptation of search methods from combinatorial optimization to optimize knowledge bases or to design superior forecasting algorithms.
• Other research prototypes that integrate algorithms and methods from traditionally different AI sub-communities.

A clear, objectively the value of the innovation of the integration when compared to existing or ad-hoc approaches. Computational experiments on benchmarks (that either already are or will be made public) and in comparison, with existing state-of-the-art baseline methods are expected. At least a portion of the experiments is expected to consider real-world (not synthetic generated) benchmarks to demonstrate the practical importance of the problem studied.

Papers in this track may have up to 6 pages in the prescribed AAAI style, plus at most one more page which may only contain references.

5. AI Best Practices, Challenge Problems, Training AI Users

In this short paper track, we welcome papers that review best practices when deploying AI, that communicate novel challenge applications, and that review contributions that lower the barrier to applying AI by practitioners outside the AI community. These papers will be reviewed based on different criteria than the longer papers of the main IAAI tracks. Best practice papers must tie the recommendations to concrete learning from prior experience when deploying AI methods. Challenge problem papers *must* make non-generated, real-world data benchmarks publicly available (this is a hard requirement). AI training papers must focus on the particular challenges when bridging knowledge from application domain experts and AI expertise and how the domain experts can effectively and efficiently learn enough about the AI tools, they use to apply them successfully. For all topics in the scope of this track, papers that challenge the status quo are particularly welcome.

Papers in this track may be between four (4) pages and (6) pages long, including references, in the prescribed AAAI style.

Submission Instructions

Electronic submissions are required. Papers must be in trouble-free, high resolution PDF format and formatted for United States letter (8.5” x 11”) paper. Submissions need to be in AAAI two-column format (AAAI 2023 Author Kit). Deployed papers can be up to eight (8) pages plus one more page containing only references. Emerging, Tools and Integration papers can be up to six (6) pages plus one more page containing only references. Best practice, Challenge and Training papers may be between four (4) pages and (6) pages long, including references.

Submissions to IAAI-23 should contain identifying information of the authors and their affiliations: reviewing is single-blind.

Authors should register on the IAAI-23 EasyChair paper submission site. A login and password, as well as detailed instructions about how to submit an electronic paper, will be sent to the author in a subsequent email message. Authors must then submit a formatted electronic version of their paper through EasyChair no later than August 12, 2022. We cannot accept papers submitted by email or fax. Submissions received after the deadline, or that do not meet the length or formatting requirements detailed above, will not be accepted for review. Notification of receipt of the electronic paper will be mailed to the first author (or designated contact author) soon after receipt. By submitting a paper to IAAI, the authors agree that the Program Chairs have the final decision on the acceptance of publication at the conference. Papers will be reviewed by the Program Committee and notification of acceptance or rejection will be mailed to the contact author on October 7, 2022. PDFs of accepted papers will be due on November 18, 2022. Authors will be required to transfer copyright at that time.

All submissions must be original. IAAI-23 will not consider any paper that, at the time of submission, is under review for or has already been published or accepted for publication in a journal or another conference. Once submitted to IAAI-23, authors may not submit the paper elsewhere during IAAI’s review period. These restrictions apply only to refereed journals and conferences, not to preliminary versions that are posted as preprints to arXiv.org or other unrefereed forums, or to workshops with a limited audience and without archival proceedings. Authors must confirm that their submissions to IAAI conform to these requirements at the time of submission.

Organization

Correspondence may be sent to IAAI at iaai23@aaai.org.

IAAI-23 chairs:

• Karen Haigh (Consultant, USA)
• IAAI-23 co-chairs:
  • Alex Wong (University of Waterloo, Canada)
  • YuHao Chen (University of Waterloo, Canada)
• IAAI-23 Outreach Chairs:
  • Kai Qin (Swinburne University of Technology, Australia)
  • Jan R. Seyler (Festo,Germany)