Welcome to AI Matters 7(1)

Welcome to the first issue of this year's AI Matters Newsletter! We start with a report on upcoming SIGAI Events by Dilini Samarasinghe and Conference reports by Louise Dennis, our conference coordination officers. In our regular Education column, Duri Long, Jonathan Moon, and Brian Magerko introduce two "unplugged" activities (i.e., no technology needed) to learn about AI focussed on K-12 AI Education. We then bring you our regular Policy column, where Larry Medsker covers several topics on AI policy, including the role of Big Tech on AI Ethics and an interview with Dr. Eric Daimler who is the CEO of the MIT-spinout Conexus.com. Finally, we close with four article contributions. The first article discusses emerging applications of AI in analyzing source code and its implications to several industries. The second article discusses topics in the area of physical scene understanding that are necessary for machines to perceive, interact, and reason about the physical world. The third article presents novel practices and highlights from the Fourth Workshop on Mechanism Design for Social Good. The fourth article provides a report on the "Decoding AI" event that was conducted online by ViSER for high school students and adults sponsored by ACM SIGAI.

Novel practices and highlights from the Fourth Workshop on Mechanism Design for Social Good

The Fourth Workshop on Mechanism Design for Social Good was held virtually in August 2020, with a focus on work bridging research and policy. This article represents the experience of the chairs and discusses novel conference-organizing practices aimed at promoting multi-disciplinary research for social good and increasing racial, linguistic, and geographic diversity and inclusion.

Applied AI matters: AI4Code

The marriage of Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques to problems surrounding the generation, maintenance, and use of source code has come to the fore in recent years as an important AI application area1. A large chunk of this recent attention can be attributed to contemporaneous advancements in Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques and sub-fields. The naturalness hypothesis, which states that "software is a form of human communication" and that code exhibits patterns that are similar to (human) natural languages (Devanbu, 2015; Hindle, Barr, Gabel, Su, & Devanbu, 2016), has allowed for the application of many of these NLP advances to code-centric usecases. This development has contributed to a spate of work in the community --- much of it captured in a survey by Allamanis, Barr, Devanbu, and Sutton (2018) that focuses on classifying these approaches by the type of probabilistic model applied to source code. This increase in the variety of AI techniques applied to source code has found various manifestations in the industry at large. Code and software form the backbone that underpins almost all modern technical advancements: it is thus natural that breakthroughs in this area should reflect in the emergence of real world deployments.

Events

This section features information about upcoming events relevant to the readers of AI Matters, including those supported by SIGAI. We would love to hear from you if you are are organizing an event and would be interested in cooperating with SIGAI.For more information about conference support visit sigai.acm.org/activities/requesting sponsorship. html.

Unplugged assignments for K-12 AI education

In this column, we introduce our two "unplugged" (i.e. no technology needed) Model AI Assignments: Introducing AI and Semantic Networks and Knowledge Representations. We also reflect on the potential benefits of unplugged activities for broadening access to AI-related learning experiences.

AI policy matters

AI Policy Matters is a regular column in AI Matters featuring summaries and commentary based on postings that appear twice a month in the AI Matters blog (https://sigai.acm.org/aimatters/blog/). We welcome everyone to make blog comments so we can develop a rich knowledge base of information and ideas representing the SIGAI members.

Decoding AI

The "Decoding AI" event was conducted online by ViSER for high school students and adults between Oct 10 to Oct 31, 2020 and was sponsored by ACM SIGAI . The proposal for the event was selected by ACM SIGAI from a pool of entries. It was advertised on different social media platforms and registration was available using Google forms and Eventbrite.

Conference reports

This section features brief reports from recent events sponsored or run in cooperation with ACM SIGAI.

Learning to see the physical world

I am fascinated by how rich and flexible human intelligence is. From a quick glance at the scenes in Figure 1A, we effortlessly recognize the 3D geometry and texture of the objects within, reason about how they support each other, and when they move, track and predict their trajectories. Stacking blocks, picking up fruits---we also plan and interact with scenes and objects in many ways.

Conference reports

This section is compiled from reports of recent events sponsored or run in cooperation with ACM SIGAI. In general these reports were written and submitted by the conference organisers.