Staying up to date with current research

Based on Howard’s comment on my last blog post, I will today give an overview of how I try to stay up to date with current research in the AI and Conceptual Spaces area. What are conferences, workshops, mailing lists, etc. that I think are relevant?

Let’s first start with relevant conferences:

• IJCAI: The “International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence” is probably the largest AI conference in the world.
• ECAI: The “European Conference on Artificial Intelligence” is Europe’s smaller version of IJCAI.
• AAAI: The AI conference by the “Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence” is also one of the most prestigious AI conferences in the world.
• SGAI: This is the annual AI conference by the “Specialist Group on Artificial Intelligence” in the British Computer Science Society.
• KI: As I’m from Germany, I also feel obliged to mention the German AI conference “Künstliche Intelligenz” 🙂
• ICLR: The “International Conference on Learning Representation” is concerned with deep representation learning and thus quite relevant to my plans for learning conceptual spaces from data.
• KR: The “International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning” focuses on knowledge representation from an AI perspective
• ICDL-EPIROB: The “IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning and on Epigenetic Robotics” is concerned with developmental robotics – quite relevant to the language games I plan to use in my research.
• AGI: The “Conference on Artificial General Intelligence” is about generally intelligent systems, i.e., AI systems that can perform a wide variety of tasks.

While most of the conferences listed above cover a relatively wide variety of topics, the workshops listed below tend to be more specific:

• NeSy: The “Workshop on Neural-Symbolic Learning and Reasoning” explores approaches combining neural and symbolic aspects – quite a good fit for conceptual spaces.
• AIC: The “International Workshop on Artificial Intelligence and Cognition” focuses on the interaction of cognitive science and artificial intelligence – and possible symbioses arising from such interactions.
• Conceptual Spaces@work: A biannual workshop on conceptual spaces – if my research belongs anywhere, then there!
• Commonsense: The “International Symposium on Commonsense Reasoning” deals with reasoning strategies based on common sense rather than on strict logical deduction. Also here, Conceptual Spaces can fit in nicely.
• C3GI: The title of the “International Workshop on Computational Creativity, Concept Invention, and General Intelligence” already says it all.
• Cognitum: The “Workshop on Cognitive Knowledge Acquisition and Applications” is concerned with the question about how artificial agents can acquire knowledge – which is basically what I’m trying to do in my PhD project.

Now how do you learn about these and other conferences? Well, either you already know about them, someone else tells you about them (like I’m doing right now) – or you subscribe to some mailing lists where call for papers are posted on a daily basis. Here are some of them:

• Connectionists: Cognitive (Neuro-)Science, but also AI-related.
• Logics: Logics, deduction, knowledge representation.
• PlanetKR: Knowledge representation.
• XAI: Explainable AI, i.e., AI systems whose decisions can be understood and explained.
• NeSy: Neural-Symbolic integration.
• IAOA-General: Semantic web and ontologies.
• CS360: Conceptual spaces.

Of course, also a classic literature review can help to get you an idea where relevant papers are published and which researchers are relevant for your own work. What I’m typically doing is to search for these researchers on ResearchGate and Twitter and to follow them there. This way, you have a good chance of being notified when they published a new paper. Of course, I’m also present on both platforms (see the links in the sidebar), so you can use this strategy to also follow me and my research progress 😉

With respect to conceptual spaces, I can also recommend taking a look at the table on the following website: CS360 It lists several researchers that are currently working on conceptual spaces – this might be a good starting point if you want to educate yourself about conceptual spaces and their applications.

If you think I forgot something in my (definitely incomplete) overview, please feel free to share in the comments!