Preface

We are pleased to introduce this volume which constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 34th Canadian Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Canadian AI 2021, which was planned to take place in Vancouver, BC, Canada. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, however, it was held virtually during May 25–28, 2021. The Canadian AI conference is one of the longest running AI conferences, running first biennially from 1976 to 2000, then annually ever since. This volume showcases the latest research conducted by the AI community in Canada and worldwide. 

We received 144 submissions, from 30 Canadian universities and international submissions from 18 countries. All submissions were reviewed by at least 3 Program Committee members and as a result of their recommendations 30 regular papers and 23 short papers were accepted for presentation and publication. In addition, the Graduate Student Symposium co-chaired by Dan Lizotte and Michael Cormier ran their paper selection process and 11 papers were accepted for presentation and publication. The selected papers cover a wide range of topics, including machine learning, pattern recognition, natural language processing, knowledge representation, cognitive aspects of AI, ethics of AI, and other important aspects of AI research.

This volume would not be possible without the volunteer work of the program committee and additional reviewers who reviewed and made recommendations for papers. Their reviews and recommendations informed the program we put together for this conference. We would like to thank all the authors who submitted their work and many thanks to the authors of the accepted papers for preparing their camera-ready papers and their online presentations.

Our program was enriched by the Industry track chaired by Brian Keng and three keynotes given by Canadian AI experts. We thank all our keynote speakers for contributing to our conference program with their interesting and thought-provoking talks: Osmar Zaiane (University of Alberta), Graham Taylor (University of Guelph) and Doina Precup (McGill University).  

The Canadian Conference on Artificial Intelligence is sponsored by the Canadian Artificial Intelligence Association (CAIAC). We thank the executive committee of CAIAC for their support in the past year: Leila Kosseim, Xin Wang, Richard Khoury, Denilson Barbosa and Ziad Kobti. Many thanks to Fabrizio Gotti for maintaining the conference website. 

We are grateful to the general chair of AI-CRV, Fred Popowich, and his team for their help in planning and running the virtual conference. We would like to also acknowledge and thank the CRV co-chairs, Liam Paul and Helge Rhodin for many constructive discussions in our planning of the conference.

We thank the conference sponsors who provided financial support: The Canadian Artificial Intelligence Association, Huawei, Ivado and Borealis AI.

Luiza Antonie, Pooya Moradian Zadeh

PC co-chairs of Canadian AI 2021