TU Dublin Hosts Irish Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science

Published: 8 Dec, 2020

Irish scientists are at the forefront of Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science at what is an exciting time to be a scholar in this fascinating discipline of research.

At the 28th Irish Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science (AICS 2020), hosts, Technological University Dublin (TU Dublin), received a record 71 articles at the conference, which was held online for the first since its inception in 1988.

Speaking about AICS 2020, Dr Luca Longo, School of Computer Science at TU Dublin, "Despite the difficulties in collaboration that have affected some scientists during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Cognitive Science researchers have worked together on a disparate range of theoretical topics such as deep transfer, and reinforcement learning, ethics, and the transparency of artificial intelligence as well as many applications in various sectors, including healthcare, the stock market, online news, social media, and biology. While we cannot meet in person this year, the AICS community has proved to be adaptable, making this edition the first-ever virtual AICS conference, allowing everyone to participate without leaving their own homes."

Continuing Dr Longo, said, "Thank you to everyone that participated in the event, and a special word of thanks to the other conference chairs - Dr Lucas Rizzo, Dr Elizabeth Hunter, and Dr Arjun Pakrashi.

This year's keynote speaker was Prof. Francesca Toni from Imperial College London who gave an exciting talk on computational argumentation and explanations. Prof. Toni spoke about how the continued progress in machine learning has led to the automatic formation of computational models, trained from data, which are highly explainable but do suffer from a lack of inferential transparency, explainability, and interpretability. Therefore, explainable artificial intelligence, probably one of the fastest-growing sub-disciplines of artificial intelligence, is aimed at tackling the above issues.

More information about AICS 2020 is available from the conference website here.