The AAAI-25 Program Committee invites proposals for the Tutorial and Lab Forum of the Thirty-Ninth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-25). The Tutorial and Lab Forum will be held February 25 - 26, 2025. Anyone interested in presenting a tutorial or lab at AAAI-25 should submit a proposal as detailed below.

Connection to Collaborative Bridge Theme

New communities often emerge when two or more disciplines come together, in order to explore new opportunities and perspectives; today both are plentiful. The purpose of this year’s collaborative bridge theme is to help cultivate this process. Tutorials and labs act as catalysts for these bridges, they help to codify recent research results and tools and to present them to the research community in a timely fashion. Our goal for this year’s forum is to present to the community a diverse set of powerful formalisms, methods and tools that are representative of the diversity of AI as a whole. Hence, we solicit proposals for tutorials and labs that present major and emerging results in representative AI subdisciplines, not just those that are most popular at the moment.

What Is the Tutorial Forum?

The Tutorial Forum provides an opportunity for researchers and practitioners to spend time each year freely exploring exciting advances in disciplines outside their normal focus. We believe this type of forum is essential for the cross fertilization, cohesiveness, and vitality of the AI field. We all have a lot to learn from each other; the Tutorial Forum promotes the continuing education of each member of AAAI. To encourage maximum participation by technical conference registrants, only a small commitment fee will be charged for admittance to the tutorials.

What is the Lab Forum?

In its beginning the AI field focused on proposing theories of computational intelligence, on designing formal models and algorithms, and on characterizing their behavior through analysis and experimentation. Today AI offers a powerful set of modeling tools and decision systems that are having a pervasive impact on a diverse set of real world applications. The purpose of the Lab Forum is to train members of AAAI in using these tools. Often, but not always, tutorials focus on formalisms and algorithms, while labs can focus on teaching methodologies for effectively applying AI tools and modeling frameworks. Labs are often most effectively taught using real world case studies. Also note that tutorials and labs are not exclusive, having tutorials and labs on the same topic can be a powerful combination.

Topics

Our goal is to present a diverse program that includes core areas of AI, new techniques from allied disciplines that can inform research within AI, tools for modeling and solving programs, and emerging applications of AI techniques to new areas. In addition to tutorials and labs that teach a core area or tool set within AI, we encourage proposals from areas that are closely related to AI, such as core robotics, operations research techniques relevant for AI, linguistics research applicable to language processing. With the introduction of the new lab forum, we strongly encourage proposals that have a hands-on component. We additionally solicit tutorials and labs by organizers of various competitions within the subfields of AI (RoboCup, planning competition, SAT competition, etc.) describing the current state of the art and tools available for new researchers to enter these competitions. We also solicit proposals from applied researchers who may have used AI techniques in deployed applications within industry. Novel proposals are highly encouraged.

Duration

Often tutorials in the past have been half a day (3 hours, 30 minutes, plus 30-minute break), but we also encourage shorter, quarter-day tutorials (1 hour, 45 minutes).

Submission Requirements

Each proposal should ideally be 2-3 pages long, excluding CVs of presenters and supplementary materials, in AAAI style format. The proposal should include the following items numbered in this order:

1. Title of the tutorial or lab
2. Type: Tutorial or Lab
3. Sub-area within AI/Keywords: Please give a few keywords of different granularity. For example a tutorial on AlphaGo should write: Game Playing, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, AlphaGo.
4. Name, affiliation, and email addresses of presenters
5. Suggested duration: Half day (3 hours, 30 minutes, plus 30-minute break) or quarter day (1 hour, 45 minutes).
6. Goal of the tutorial or lab (1-2 paragraphs): Who is the target audience? What will the audience walk away with? What makes the topic innovative? What core concepts, methods, and modeling frameworks will be conveyed? What scenarios will be used to illustrate?
7. If a lab, what tools will be employed? How will they be provided? What computing capabilities must participants bring and what lab setup will the organizers provide? What information does AAAI need to know to support the labs?
8. Tutorial or Lab outline (1 paragraph): A short abstract of the tutorial/lab content.
9. History: List of previous venues and approximate audience sizes, if the same or a similar tutorial or lab has been given elsewhere.
10. Estimated number of participants: Please estimate the audience size (a large audience is not always preferable).
11. Prerequisite knowledge (1 paragraph): What knowledge is assumed of the target audience.
12. Content (as many paragraphs as needed): Detailed outline of the tutorial or lab.
13. (Optional) Supplementary materials: List of supplemental materials augmented with samples, such as past tutorial slides and survey articles, whenever possible. Be as complete as possible.
14. (Optional) Lab Component: Describe the hands-on component (if there is one) and what the audience will learn from it.
15. CVs of presenters: A short CV (1-2 pages at most) for each presenter that includes their name, affiliation, current position (e.g., Ph.D. student, Postdoc, Professor, Researcher, etc.), mailing address, phone number, and email address. The CVs should also describe their background in the tutorial or lab area, including a list of relevant publications and/or presentations; any available examples of work in the area (ideally, a published tutorial-level article or presentation materials on the subject); evidence of teaching experience (courses taught or references); and evidence of scholarship in AI or computer science.

Submission Procedure

Proposals should be submitted by September 22, 2024. The submission file must be in PDF format using the AAAI style file. All information should be collated into one PDF file for submission. If it is necessary to refer to information in another format, such as video, the link to this material should be contained in the submitted PDF.

Decisions about the tutorial/lab program will be sent out by Oct 27, 2024. Speakers should be prepared to finalize their tutorial/lab descriptions and bios by Nov 15, 2024, and to post completed course materials on their websites by February 1, 2025.

For More Information

Inquiries concerning submissions and suggestions for the tutorial and lab forum may be directed to the forum co-chairs at aaai25tlchairs@aaai.org. All other inquiries should be directed to AAAI at aaai25@aaai.org.

AAAI-24 Tutorial and Lab Forum Co-Chairs

John P. Dickerson (Arthur AI & University of Maryland)

Nicholas Mattei (Tulane University)