With great delight and honor, we welcome all readers, including researchers and practitioners working in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its applications, to the refereed proceedings of the 36th Canadian AI conference held at McGill University, Montreal, in 2023 from June 5-9, 2023. The conference stands as a testament to the dedication of exceptional researchers who, since its inception in 1976, have shaped the landscape of AI and laid the foundation for numerous sub-disciplines within the field.
Canadian AI 2023 was held in person after the COVID-19 pandemic and attended by a large audience group. The conference was organized into four tracks, with the number of papers accepted as described below out of the 150 submissions received in all tracks from 25 countries worldwide.
Research Paper Track: This was the main track which was further divided into Full paper or Long paper and Short paper tracks. The full paper track included the submission and presentation of papers up to 12 pages long, while the short papers had a limit of 6 pages. The full paper track had 97 submissions, with 29 accepted, and the Short paper track had 25 submissions, with 10 accepted.
Graduate Student Symposium (GSS): The GSS, on the first day of the conference, had an impressive lineup of keynote, spotlight, and poster presentations, with submitted research papers limited to 2-page abstracts or 4-page papers. The GSS Track had 18 submissions, with 17 accepted for presentation.
Industry Track: The second half of the first day of CANAI 2023 had abstract and paper submissions. The half-day program consisted of presentations, talks, papers, posters, and abstract submissions representing work from the industry and products incorporating AI artifacts. Industry Track had 10 submissions, with 6 accepted.
Responsible AI Track: The last two days of the conference presented the Responsible AI program, consisting of posters, student presentations, and invited talks. The work presented in this track was not included in the proceedings.
Keynotes: This year the conference boasted a great lineup of keynote and invited talks from Jimmy Lin (University of Waterloo), Alona Fyshe (University of Alberta), Richard Zemel (Columbia University), Marwa El Halabi (Samsung SAIT AI Lab), Adriana Romero Soriano (Meta AI - FAIR), and Emily Denton (Google). There were multiple panel discussions that included experts from the industry and academia.
Awards
Several awards were given to highly deserving candidates at this conference after careful scrutiny by members of the awards committees.
Richard Zemel (Columbia University) received the Lifetime Achievement Award
Xin Wang (University of Calgary) received the Distinguished Service Award
Sriram Ganapathi Subramanian (University of Waterloo) received the Ph.D. Dissertation Award
Puyuan Liu (University of Alberta) received the MSc Thesis Award.
We congratulate all the award winners for their outstanding contributions to AI research and knowledge dissemination.
Stats
The general acceptance rate for the conference main tracks (full and short papers) was of 32% (39 accepted out of 122 submitted). All full papers in the main tracks received at least 3 reviews. The accepted papers cover several AI topics, including uncertainty, security, natural language processing, knowledge representation, neural nets, deep learning, and AI applications.
Acknowledgements
We sincerely thank the chairs of the track who helped organize and coordinate the GSS, Industry, and Responsible AI tracks. The Graduate Student Symposium was co-chaired by Reihaneh Rabbani (McGill University) and Qiang Ye (Memorial University). The industry track was co-chaired by David Beach (Thales Canada) and Karim Ali (Invision AI), where the highlighted topic was AI in Critical Applications: Can We Rely on AI? The Responsible AI track was co-chaired by Ebrahim Bagheri from Toronto Metropolitan University, Sébastien Gambs from Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), and Eleni Stroulia from the University of Alberta. This year the first day of the Responsible AI track hosted research presentations by NSERC CREATE-funded students from multiple universities, which added a vibrant new pool of participants at Canadian AI. Also, for the first time, CANAI 2023 was organized as a co-located event with four other conferences and meetings, including Computer and Robot Vision (CRV) under the umbrella of the Computer Science Canada (CS-CAN) consortium.
We are immensely grateful for the invaluable contributions and tireless efforts of numerous individuals who have made this volume a reality. First and foremost, we express our deep appreciation to the authors who entrusted us with their research contributions. Their innovative research and presentations have formed the foundation of this publication. We would also like to sincerely thank the program committee and additional reviewers who generously dedicated their time and expertise to assess and evaluate the submitted papers. Their evaluation process and valuable recommendations have played a crucial role in shaping the high-quality program we have assembled for this conference.
We thank Renata Dividino (Brock University) for the organization and timely publication of the proceeding of Canadian AI 2023. We would also like to thank Fabrizio Gotti for maintaining and promptly updating the conference website, which greatly helped with the conference's execution. We also like to thank the student volunteers Donghao Qiao (Ph.D., Queen’s University) in pre-conference publicity of the call for papers and Ahmed Harby (Ph.D. candidate, Queen’s University) for helping with the organizational work during the conference.
Lastly, we would like to express our profound appreciation to the sponsors and supporters whose generous contributions and unwavering support have made this conference possible. The main sponsor of the Canadian Conference on Artificial Intelligence is the Canadian Artificial Intelligence Association (CAIAC). We thank their executive committee for their support over the last year, namely Richard Khoury, Denilson Barbosa, Mark Crowley, Gabriel Murray, Leila Kosseim, and Luiza Antonie. We also want to thank Beneva, CIFAR, DeepMind, and the Applied AI Institute (Concordia University) for their financial support.
Farhana Zulkernine (Queen’s University) and Amilcar Soares (Memorial University of Newfoundland)
