AAAI Spring Symposium on Artificial Intelligence for Development (AI-D)

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The AAAI Spring Symposium on Artificial Intelligence for Development (AI-D) will explore opportunities for harnessing AI to promote the socioeconomic development and enhance the quality of life of disadvantaged populations, including those within developing countries. Beyond discussing and sharing ideas, we hope to catalyze the creation of AI-D as a subfield of the more established broader area of information and communication technology for development (ICT-D).

Machine learning, inference, planning, and perception have the potential to bring great value to the developing world in a wide array of areas, including healthcare, education, transportation, and agriculture.  AI methods promise to provide new directions for enhancing and extending novel economic concepts like microfinance and microwork. The methods can be used to assist with the detecting and responding to natural and human-caused disasters. Reasoning systems might one day help to extend medical care to remote regions through automated diagnosis and effective triaging of limited medical expertise and transportation resources.  Unprecedented quantities of data are being generated in the developing world on human health, financial transactions, movement, and communications. AI methods can help to tease out insights from this data on social relationships and dynamics, human mobility patterns, and population responses to crises.  Models and systems that leverage such data might one day guide public policy, monitor interventions, and to provide insights about population responses to crises.

To date, ICT-D efforts have led to valuable ideas and insights. However, ICT-D efforts have rarely focused on opportunities to harness machine learning and reasoning to create intelligent systems, services, models, and analyses. We view the AAAI Spring Symposium at Stanford as a focal point and launching pad for bringing together a critical mass of researchers who share an interest in applying AI research to development challenges.  We invite paper contributors and other interested people to join us for what promises to be an exciting and engaging symposium on AI for Development

The symposium program has been posted here and includes a mix of invited talks, paper presentations, and poster presentations.  Beyond presentations on research, we will have panels and open discussions on key topic areas to encourage brainstorming, to identify key opportunities and challenges in AI-D, and to pose next steps for establishing a vibrant AI-D research community that will engage in sustained efforts in this area. For more information about the symposium see the supplementary symposium web site: http://ai-d.org.

Dates:
AAAI Spring Symposia at Stanford will be held on March 22-24, 2010