By Eric Bell, Fazel Keshtkar, Roman Barták, and Keith Brawner
The Thirty-Third International Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society Conference (FLAIRS-34) was to be held May 17-19, 2021, at the Double Tree Ocean Point Resort and Spa in North Miami Beach, Florida, USA. Due to COVID-19 pandemic and travel restriction, the conference held both virtual and in-person. The planned conference events included tutorials, invited speakers, special tracks, and presentations of papers, posters, and awards. The conference chair was Keith Brawner from the Army Research Laboratory. The program co-chairs were Roman Barták from Charles University, Prague, and Eric Bell, USA. The special tracks were coordinated by Fazel Keshtkar from St John’s University.
The Florida Artificial Intelligence Society (FLAIRS) was founded in 1987 to promote and advance artificial intelligence research in the state of Florida and to foster the exchange of ideas and collaboration among the state’s researchers from universities and industry through an annual conference. Shortly thereafter the FLAIRS conference, a general AI conference, grew to become a major venue for AI researchers from around the world to present their work. The conference continues its in-cooperation status with the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.
The call for papers attracted 188 papers submission, 69 to the general conference and 119 to the special tracks, and 12 poster abstracts. The accepted submissions included 90 full papers, 48 from the general conference and 42 from the special tracks, 37 short papers presented as posters, and 12 poster abstracts that appeared in the proceedings. The best paper award went to Nan Xu, Oluwaseyi Feyisetan, Abhinav Aggarwal, Zekun Xu, Nathanael Teissier for “Density-Aware Differentially Private Textual Perturbations Using Truncated Gumbel Noise”. The best student paper went to Lukas Malburg, Maximilian Hoffmann, Simon Trumm, Ralph Bergmann for “Improving Similarity-Based Retrieval Efficiency by Using Graphic Processing Units in Case-Based Reasoning”. The next FLAIRS conference (FLAIRS-35) will be held May 16-18, 2022 in Juno Ridge, Florida, USA. Information about FLAIRS-35, including the call for papers, is available online at http://www.flairs-35.info/.
Eric Bell is a data scientist and computational linguist. His research interests are in the area of data science, human language technology, and social media analytics. His email address is [email protected].
Fazel Keshtkar is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at St John’s University. His research areas are in Artificial Intelligence (AI), Natural Language Processing and Generation (NLP/NLG), Computational Linguistics (CL), Machine Learning, and Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS). His email address is [email protected].
Roman Barták is a Full Professor of Computer Science at Charles University, Prague. His research areas are in intelligent autonomous agents, model-based approaches, constraint reasoning, and automated planning and scheduling. His email address is [email protected].
Keith Brawner is a researcher and project manager at the Army Research Laboratory. His research interests are in the areas of machine learning for educational applications, and cognitive architectures. His email address is [email protected].