Preface

It is with great pleasure that we present these refereed proceedings of the 35th Canadian Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Canadian AI 2022 to the readers. The Canadian AI conference is one of the world longest running AI conferences, setup by exceptional researchers who went on to be the founders of many subdisciplines of AI and it has run uninterrupted since 1976. This volume showcases the latest cutting-edge research conducted by the AI community in Canada, which is one of the main contributors of AI research worldwide. Due to the on-going COVID-19 pandemic, the conference took place virtually but also in an hybrid format in Toronto, Ontario, from 30 May to 3 June, 2022. This means that while presentations and panels were held online, in-person social events were also scheduled in Toronto for the participants who were able to attend in-person. These in-person participants also had viewing rooms and isolated presentation facilities at their disposal during the event.

We received 110 submissions from universities and institutions from 16 countries, with each submission being reviewed by 3 program committee members. The reviewing process led to the acceptance of 36 regular papers and 6 short papers for presentation and publication, which resulted in an overall acceptance rate of 38%. Moreover, 6 additional papers were accepted for presentation and publication in the Graduate Student Symposium co-chaired by Amilcar Soares from Memorial University and Renata Dividino from Brock University.

The accepted papers cover a wide range of AI topics, including uncertainty, security, natural language processing, knowledge representation, neural nets and deep learning, AI applications, agent systems and robotics as well as AI ethics. Moreover, we had a series of colocated events on Responsible AI co-chaired by Ebrahim Bagheri from Ryerson University and Eleni Stroulia from University of Alberta, with a joint invited keynote, a panel on ethical implications of AI as well as a tutorial on AI and the Law.

The conference also featured an Industry track chaired by Letitia Golubitsky from Bank of Montréal, whose main highlight was “Industrial AI: AI-bank of the future”. This theme was chosen due the increasing deployment of AI technologies at scale by banks. The track was composed of two sessions: the first on presentations of use-cases from accepted papers, and the second was on a panel dedicated to this year's topic of AI in the banking industry. The participants to the panel included the doers and makers of AI in the Canadian banking industry.

This volume would not have been possible without the great work of many people that we would like to thank. First, we would like to thank the authors who submitted their work and, for those whose papers were accepted, prepared their camera-ready papers and their presentations. Our deepest thanks go also to the program committee and additional reviewers who read the papers and made recommendations that lead to the program we put together for this conference.

Our program benefited greatly from the high quality of the work done by the chairs of the Graduate Student Symposium, Industry track and the collocated events on Responsible AI. They have all assembled world-class and informative panels.

Our set of diverse keynote speakers : Nicolas Papernot (University of Toronto and Vector Institute), Diana Inkpen (University of Ottawa), David Poole (University of British Columbia), and Julia Stoyanovich (New York University) delivered really timely and thoughtful talks. We deeply thank them for their contribution to our conference program.

The main sponsor of the Canadian Conference on Artificial Intelligence is the Canadian Artificial Intelligence Association (CAIAC). For their vital support over the last year, we thank their executive committee, namely Richard Khoury, Denilson Barbosa, Mark Crowley, Gabriel Murray and Leila Kosseim as well as Luiza Antonie and Pooya Moradian Zadeh, who were PC co-chairs of Canadian AI 2021 for their experimented advices. Many thanks to Fabrizio Gotti for expertly maintaining the conference website, and to Kalonji Kalala Hercule, our proceedings chair, who put together this volume.

We gratefully acknowledge the hard and excellent work done by the general chair of AI-CRV Steven Waslander and the team around him in planning and running the conference, which is an especially challenging task in a context of pandemics.

Finally, last but not least, we gratefully thank the conference sponsors who financially and in other capacities supported the conference, namely The Canadian Artificial Intelligence Association, DeepMind, CIFAR, Advanced Symbolics Inc. and finally Beneva.

Sébastien Gambs (Université du Québec à Montréal) and Iluju Kiringa (University of Ottawa)

PC co-chairs of Canadian AI 2022