The Web Conference 2024 in Singapore

In May 2024, a majority of the Preferred.AI members were involved in The Web Conference 2024, in various capacities, as organizers, authors, and attendees. The conference itself was held at Resorts World Sentosa Convention Centre.

The first two days of the conference hosted up to fifteen parallel sessions of workshops, tutorials, special days, etc. One of the tutorials, titled “Text-Attributed Graph Representation Learning: Methods, Applications, and Challenges“, were presented by Hady, who was on-site, and Delvin, who was remote.

The main conference occurred over the last three days, featuring keynotes, as well as oral presentations on various tracks, including research, industry, Web4Good, History of the Web, resource, etc. Interestingly, this was also the first time that poster presentations became a significant feature of the conference, with five poster sessions featuring all accepted papers. One of those presented along with a poster session was a demo, titled “Cornac-AB: An Open-Source Recommendation Framework with Native A/B Testing Integration“, which featured A/B testing capability with the Cornac recommender library, authored by Darryl, Tuan, and Hady.

Another work presented as a poster was a short paper by Bryan Tan, which he pursued as an undergraduate research project. The work was titled “Term Importance for Transformer-Based QA Retrieval: A Case Study of StackExchange“, and co-authored with Hady.

Importantly, we were also there as organizers. Hady was one of the Program Co-chairs of the conference. Everyone was helping out too, Jia Peng with the Whova setup, Ezekiel with the promo video uploads (main and companion), Ween and Hongtuo with the photography (days 1-3, days 4-5), Hoang and Darryl with the presenting laptops, Hieu with the poster sessions, while Quang, Phuong, and Dilan helped with registration.

Needless to say, while we were busy, we still found time to have fun, with the two social events: Welcome Reception at Tipsy Unicorn, and the Evening Special at Universal Studios Singapore.