This award will help to subsidize the participation of graduate students in the fourth Northeast Student Colloquium on Artificial Intelligence (NESCAI) to be held April 16-18, 2010 at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. This conference is to include oral and poster presentations by students,invited talks by senior AI researchers, and student-run tutorials. The conference will be largely run by a program committee consisting of doctoral students under the guidance of senior faculty. The program committee will conduct a review process to select the projects chosen for oral and poster presentations. In addition to graduate students, the conference plans to encourage attendance by outstanding senior undergraduates through a special undergraduate track, in the hope that it will increase undergraduate enthusiasm for research and thus the likelihood that they will go on to graduate work. The project integrates research and education and commits to broadening diversity.
(NESCAI-2010) was held April 16th through the 18th, 2010, and it was a great success. The meeting was attended by 124 students from 25 universities across the northeast United States and Canada. The conference was held at University of Massachusetts, Amherst. NESCAI-10 featured 66 student papers, presented as posters. In addition, 24 selected papers were presented as talks in two parallel sessions. There were also three invited keynote talks: "Reading the Social Pages: Understanding and Predicting the Demographics and Behavior of Facebook Users" (by Jonathan Chang of Facebook), "Some Opportunities for Knowledge Representation and Reasoning in Web Search and Advertising" (by Ron Brachman of Yahoo! Labs), and "Where do Rewards Come From?" (by Prof. Andy Barto of UMass Amherst). NESCAI provides a forum for students to discuss a wide range of cutting edge research in artificial intelligence in a casual, low-pressure environment. The conference provides a first experience of academic conferences for many younger students and additional networking opportunities for more experienced students. In particular, NESCAI provided a special dinner for female participants in order to strengthen connections between women in AI. Students found the conference very helpful. Many expressed a strong interest in attending future conferences.
