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Proceedings of the Twenty-Sixth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI 2017,Melbourne, Australia, 19-25 August 2017
Recent highly visible and impactful applications of AI have resulted in tremendously increased public and commercial interest in AI. Tis interest is spurring large investments in the development of further applications of AI. Many of these applications, like autonomous cars and drones, personal assistants on mobile devices, and increased robotic automation of factories, have the potential to create major changes in society. As a result there has also been growing concern over the potential negative impacts of AI. Tese developments inspired the theme of IJCAI-2017: Autonomy and AI. Te aim of this year's theme is to further debate and analysis of the limits and safeguards that must be established in order to ensure that AI research is used in a manner that best contributes towards a more just and prosperous society. Tis year we received a record number of 2540 papers, accepting 660 (26%). All papers had an oral presentation and were also displayed as posters at the conference venue so as to facilitate better one-to-one interactions with the authors. Each paper received at least three reviews with most (80%) receiving four or more reviews. Every paper was monitored by one Senior Program Committee Member and one Area Chair. Te Program Committee consisted of 44 Area Chairs, 384 Senior Program Committee Members, 1123 Program Committee Members and 392 Review Assistants. Tat is, a total of 1945 researchers made careful and rigorous reviews, discussed the papers and came to a recommendation on acceptance. Authors had the opportunity to provide feedback to their reviews. Tis feedback was analysed by the reviewing team at discussion time. Senior Program Committee Members wrote a metareview for each paper and the program chair consulted with all the area chairs to reach fnal decisions. A number of new features in the review process were introduced. Reviewers were asked to upload their own papers into the Toronto Paper Matching System (TPMS, http://papermatching.cs.toronto.edu) and 80% of them did it. At submission deadline we computed the matching degrees between reviewers' papers and the submitted papers: 2.8M degrees. For those that uploaded their papers into TPMS the matching degrees were shown to help in the paper bidding process. Tis was considered useful or very useful by 71% of the reviewers. 74% of the reviewers were satisfed or very satisfed with the papers assigned to them. Diferently from previous editions, this Year, Senior Program Committee members reviewed papers. Tis was done with the purpose of making a better use of the expertise of the more experienced researchers and to have more informed discussions. Finally, reviewers performed a peer-assessment of the reviews that gave extra information to Area Chairs in order to make fnal recommendations. We received 58 papers for the Track on autonomy and AI and accepted 12 covering diferent philosophical, ethical, legal and technical aspects. Tese papers were presented in special sessions with an open debate at the end. We also include in these proceedings abridged versions of previously published papers in major AI Journals (JAIR and AIJ) that had never been exposed in a major conference, and of the best papers of many specialised conferences on AI. We had seven outstanding invited speakers, partly or totally touching upon Autonomy and the social benefts of AI: Georg Gottlob, Marti Hearst, Rong Jin, Ugo Pagallo, Joelle Pineau, Stuart Russell, and Tuomas Sandholm. Talks by the 2017 Computer and Toughts Award winner Devi Parikh, and the 2017 John McCarthy Award winner Dan Roth were also featured. A conference the size and scope of IJCAI-2017 requires tremendous efort from many people, to whom we are very thankful. First of all, the authors, who submitted the best of their work to this conference. IJCAI is such an outstanding conference thanks to the high respect that the whole community has on it. Second, the program committee members, that made an efort to cope with the deadlines, the heavy load of work, and the extra efort required by the several new features introduced this Year. Tird, all the people that helped in the diferent stages of the review process. Francisco Cruz (aka Tito) and Marc Pujol who led the production of a new paper submission system for the proceedings, performing paper formatting quality control and giving professional feedback to authors. Francisco Cruz, Marc Pujol and Xavier Ferrer led the programming of a new user-friendly sofware to build the scientifc program. Many others have helped in diferent phases of the process: Anna Enciso with multiple tedious clerical tasks; Tomas Preuss giving technical support on ConfMaster, sometimes at midnight and on weekends; Laurent Charlin making it easy to integrate TPMS in the process; Blai Bonet customising his sofware to allocate papers to reviewers, also over a weekend and under pressure; Jordi Levy and Mateu Villaret codifying the paper-to-session allocation as a SAT problem and solving it. In addition to those whose work made the content of the conference possible, many worked to make the operation of the conference possible. Te local arrangements committee (LAC) did a tremendous job for which we are very thankful. Te LAC was co-chaired by Chengqi Zhang, Toby Walsh and Andy Song who all worked tireless to make IJCAI-2017 happen. Other members of the LAC included Michael Georgef, Abdul Sattar Ling Chen, Yang Yu, Kai Qin, Truyen Tran, Tianqing Zhu, Ke Deng, Ping Yu, Christoph Bergmeir, Sebastian Sardina, Christian Guttmann, Jefery Chan, and Guodong Long. We thank them all. Finally, last but by no means least we would like to thank Vesna Sabljakovic-Fritz, Executive Secretary for IJCAI, without li whom we would not have even known where to start! Organising IJCAI-2017 has been a great experience that we are very grateful to have had, and we hope that the conference will be a great experience for everyone who participates. - Carles Sierra (Program Chair) - Fahiem Bacchus (Conference Chair)
