Hi,
here are the notes from our meeting at SCAI. I would like to thank Anders and Helge for a great SCAI and I look forward to Aalborg 2013 :) The email address is scai@sais.se and if you want to add more people to the list let me know.
Best regards, Fredrik
Summary of meeting at SCAI with A Kofod Petersen, H Langseth, F Jensen, H Boström, A Holst, F Heintz and P Naula?
The two main issues discussed was who will organize the next SCAI and the form and content of SCAI.
Since Denmark is next in line Finn Jensen accepted the task of trying to organize SCAI in Aalborg or find someone else who is willing to organize the next conference in 2013.
We agreed that the purpose of SCAI is to be a meeting place for AI researchers and companies in Scandinavia. Since SCAI can not compete with IJCAI, AAAI or ECAI with respect to scientific quality we have to find another angle which is both relevant and can attract participants.
As many countries require that you have an accepted paper to go to a conference it is necessary to review and publish papers. One idea is to focus more on PhD students. Some questions are whether a special track is needed and how to organize the reviewing. This year we had full papers, short papers with extended abstracts and posters without anything in the proceedings.
An opportunity could be to get more interaction with industry. It is believed that many companies are solving problems our would need to solve problems where we have appropriate methods. The main question is how to get in contact with the right people at the companies and present an attractive proposal to them. An idea is to present success stories from industry. An issue could be the terminology, maybe the term AI needs to be replaced. Business intelligence, decision support, and complex problem solving are common terms used that have similar issues as general AI.
A third step is to get the Scandinavian AI societies to commit to having their yearly meetings at SCAI. If this is possible we should guarantee a reasonable number of participants.
Having tutorials could be one way to attract both industry and researchers. Tutorials could be given by different Scandinavian groups. An alternative is to have invited talks by research groups to give them an opportunity to give an overview of their work. This could be specially attractive for senior researchers.
We also discussed at what time to have the conference and also how long it should be. In order to allow papers that have been rejected from the main conferences to be submitted it might be a good idea to have the conference in the fall. This would also simplify for the Norwegian AI society, but require the Swedish AI society to change its procedures. Regarding the length we discussed 2 vs 3 days and lunch to lunch alternatives without reaching a consensus.