Preferred.AI
Aloha, AAAI-2019

Aloha, AAAI-2019

PRESENTATION/TRAVEL/VIDEO•

Aloha, AAAI-2019

In January 2019, four members of Preferred.AI travelled to the AAAI-19 conference held in Honolulu, Hawaii to present 2 papers and 1 tutorial.

The conference was held in Hilton Hawaiian Village Waikiki Beach Resort, a sprawling complex of hotel, restaurants, convention hall, and a beach too!
The conference was held in Hilton Hawaiian Village Waikiki Beach Resort, a sprawling complex of hotel, restaurants, convention hall, and a beach too!

As a premier conference in artificial intelligence, AAAI has always been competitive. This year was especially so. There were a total of 7095 full paper submissions. No wonder the acceptance rate for this year was a low 16.2%, a drastic drop from last year’s 24.6%.

As a country, Singapore held our own against much larger neighbors. With 122 submissions and 25 papers acceptance, the country success rate was a credible 20.5%
As a country, Singapore held our own against much larger neighbors. With 122 submissions and 25 papers acceptance, the country success rate was a credible 20.5%

On Jan 28, Andrew and Hady delivered a 3-hour tutorial on “Recent Advances in Scalable Retrieval of Personalized Recommendations“. This emphasized the importance of retrieval efficiency for recommendation and covered the main strategies such as approximate maximum inner product search, indexable representation learning, discrete representations. We made the materials as well as video recording available.

Andrew and Hady explored the various strategies to increase the retrieval efficiency of recommender systems, while maintaining accuracy
Andrew and Hady explored the various strategies to increase the retrieval efficiency of recommender systems, while maintaining accuracy

On Jan 30, Tuan presented the spotlight for our paper “VistaNet: Visual Aspect Attention Network for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis” that showed the efficacy of review images in helping to identify the textual passages that would be useful for sentiment analysis. The implementation is now available.

Hady and Tuan at the poster session for VistaNet
Hady and Tuan at the poster session for VistaNet

On Jan 31, Maksim gave the spotlight on our paper “CompareLDA: A Topic Model for Document Comparison“, emphasizing that when comparison was a key property, a topic model supervised by pairwise comparisons such as CompareLDA would be more effective. The implementation is also now available.

Maksim explaining how a topic model aligned to comparisons can reveal insightful topics about how entities are ranked with respect to one another
Maksim explaining how a topic model aligned to comparisons can reveal insightful topics about how entities are ranked with respect to one another

While the AAAI-19 program was interesting, the island of O’ahu also offered as picturesque a scenery as any. Maksim captured the winter waves of O’ahu in the following stunning drone video.

During the conference downtime, we explored several attractions around the island. We invite you to share in our experiences with the following montage.

Mahalo!