Attending ICAART 2021

Last week, I attended the 13th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence (ICAART). On 4 February I presented my work about Online Learning of Non-Markovian Reward Models. On 5 Feb. I chaired two technical sessions. On the last day, (Saturday, 6 Feb.) I could simply attend talks.

There were several interesting papers (for me) and a few interesting keynote talks. The keynote by Gerhard Widmer titled Con Espressione! AI, Machine Learning, and Musical Expressivity was especially interesting: I was not aware how much research has been done in the field of music. Another keynote I found interesting, especially related to my work, was by Guy Van den Broeck about Probabilistic Circuits and Probabilistic Programs. Guy argues that many of the currently used probabilistic graphical models are ‘underpowered’ or incorrectly applied, and that Probabilistic Circuits and Probabilistic Programs are newer, richer and often tractable. There is a three-hour tutorial here (independent of ICAART).