Association for Advancement of Artificial Intelligence hosts 39th annual conference in Philadelphia

The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence held its annual conference on artificial intelligence from Feb. 25 to March 4 at the Pennsylvania Convention Center. 

The eight-day conference series aimed “to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines” and featured Penn faculty members. Attendees engaged in technical paper presentations, speaker sessions, workshops, and discussions on the application of cutting-edge research in artificial intelligence. 

The conference boasted many activities for students over the course of eight days, including a hackathon and job fair. The virtual hackathon was held from Feb. 17-24, and finalists presented their projects on Feb. 26 at the AAAI-25 opening reception. The hackathon was designed to promote innovation in how AI is used in various industries, including healthcare, finance, and sustainability. 

Shalini and Rajeev Misra Presidential Assistant Professor Nadia Figueroa was one of the Bridge Program chairs for this conference. Her main research interest focuses on developing human-aware robotic systems. She is a member and faculty advisor at Penn’s General Robotics, Automation, Sensing, and Perception Lab. The GRASP faculty are actively involved in AI research similar to the research found in the AAAI conference. 

Other Penn faculty that were involved in AAAI include professor of Computer and Information Science Osbert Bastani, who was part of the Senior Program Committee for AAAI-24. 

AAAI also hosted a job fair for students with several AI companies, including Openstream AI, which creates special AI agents, and Permanence AI, which develops control systems to ensure the safe deployment of AI.

The conference’s main themes included AI in healthcare, ethics and AI, machine learning and deep learning, and AI in business optimization. AAAI hosted many talks, including “Predicting Career Transitions and Estimating Wage Disparities Using Foundation Models” by economist Susan Athey and “AI, Agents, and Applications” by Andrew Ng.

Additionally, Vivek Gupta, a former postdoctoral researcher for the Cognitive Computation Group at Penn, gave a talk titled “Advancements in AI for Reasoning with Complex Data.” Gupta is currently a computer science professor at Arizona State University and works in the development of AI systems. 

In fall 2024, Penn became the first Ivy League school to offer an undergraduate degree in AI through the Raj and Neera Singh Program in AI. According to a press release from the School of Engineering and Applied Science, the program aims to “produce engineers that can leverage this powerful technology in a way that benefits all humankind.”