Mathematics Tutor Dr. Richard Hoshino and student Maximilian Kahn ‘19 share exciting news about publishing a paper and going to the annual Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) Conference.
Quest Mathematics Tutor Richard Hoshino attended the annual Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) Conference in New Orleans this year along with 16 students. Two of those students, Max Notarangelo ’19 and Maximilian Kahn ’19, co-wrote papers with Richard that were accepted for the upcoming AAAI 2019 in Honolulu!
“The annual AAAI Conference is easily the most prestigious AI conference in the world, where the world’s top AI researchers submit papers to be presented,” said Richard. “The prestige of AAAI comes from its historically low acceptance rate of papers (usually around 20 to 25%, although it was only 16% this year).”
During the conference, a professor who created an original game called “Birds of a Feather” proposed an Undergraduate Research Challenge for students to analyze this original game, to be presented at AAAI 2019.
For Maximilian Kahn, the AAAI Conference was an eye-opening and mind-expanding experience.
“Seeing what leading researchers were working on—everything from generating pop music using neural networks to creating machines with imagination—made me realize that there are a lot of exciting things we can do with AI in addition to self-driving cars,” he said. “One of the reasons why I am such a big fan of AI is because of the versatility the field offers. For the pragmatists there is machine learning, which can be used to solve problems such as identifying malignant tumours in patients, traffic scheduling, and facial recognition.”
But AI offers a lot more, according to Maximilian.
“There are more foundational areas that can be explored that will excite the theorist, such as defining the notion of causality,” he said. “That is to say, we as humans have an intuitive notion of what causality is, but how can we imbue within AI this same notion? The answer is we have to make ‘causality’ mathematically rigorous.”
Maximilian said he originally hadn’t thought about penning a research paper.
“At first I was not planning on submitting anything because I didn’t think I would meet the submission deadline, but I decided to send a draft of the paper to Richard anyway and he advised that I submit it to the conference,” he said. “While the paper was accepted, it was also torn apart by the reviewers, and so Richard was instrumental in helping me reconstruct the paper to fit the standards of EAAI and ultimately turn it into something I am extremely proud of.”
Maximilian said he would not be attending the AAAI2019 Conference in Honolulu, but he would have Hoshino present his paper.
“I unfortunately will not be able to make it to the conference in Honolulu this year, but Richard has kindly said that he will present the paper on behalf of both of us,” he said. “Richard and I will be presenting our research at the Canadian Mathematical Society’s Winter Meeting in Vancouver this December.”
Max Notarangelo is currently in Budapest on exchange this semester, so he will not be at the Mathematical Society event. He will present his paper, along with Hoshino, in Honolulu.
You can view the research papers here.