The 32nd Irish Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science (AICS 2024), hosted by University College Dublin (UCD) in collaboration with Dublin City University (DCU), featured high-quality research in AI and cognitive science, with a focus on trustworthy AI, fairness, and bias mitigation. Of 82 submissions, 44 papers were accepted, covering applications in healthcare, smart mobility, financial forecasting, anomaly detection, and sports analytics, alongside fundamental machine learning advancements. Keynote speakers Dr. Susan Leavy (UCD) discussed AI's societal impact, while Prof. Eamonn Keogh (UC Riverside) critiqued research in time series anomaly detection. AICS 2024 reafirmed its role as Ireland's leading AI research forum, fostering discussions on cutting-edge advancements and their societal implications.
CEUR
ceur-ws.org
Of the 82 submissions, we had 44 accepted papers this year. During the course of the twoday conference, 28 full-track, 12 student track, and four nectar track papers were presented. Of course, none of this would have been possible without the commitment of our Program Committee, of which there were 68 members. Among them were senior academics, postdoctoral researchers, and senior doctoral candidates. The hard work of the committee meant that all full track papers received at least three reviews and all student track papers received at least two reviews. Both the tracks were evaluated identically, maintaining the same review quality.
The papers presented at the conference covered the fields of AI and cognitive science covering healthcare, ethics, machine learning robustness, explainability, and real-world applications. A key theme was the need for trustworthy AI, with studies addressing fairness, transparency, bias mitigation in datasets and models, and the societal impact of AI. Unsurprisingly, given this focus, there were many papers focused on healthcare describing AI-driven models that improve speech recognition for individuals with impairments, medical diagnostics, and physical fatigue estimation using wearable sensors. Other application areas included smart mobility, ifnancial forecasting, anomaly detection, space, and sports analytics. There were also papers focused on fundamental developments in machine learning, including optimization, security, robustness, class imbalance, calibration, eficiency, reliability, neural architecture search, and multimodal data integration. Overall, the papers presented highlighted the balance between theoretical advances and practical solutions, emphasizing the importance of trustworthy AI while addressing technical challenges and societal impact.
There were two keynote talks by Prof. Eamonn Keogh, University of California Riverside, and Dr. Susan Leavy, UCD. On the first day of the conference, Dr. Leavy gave a talk entitled “AI, Society and Collective Intelligence” discussing how AI is reshaping society, particularly by transforming the information ecosystem and how people acquire knowledge. This talk explores the societal impact of large language models and emerging eforts to mitigate associated risks. On the second day, Prof. Keogh gave a talk entitled “The Emperor’s New Algorithm: Why Most Time Series Anomaly Detection Papers Are Wrong”. This talk highlighted focused on Time Series Anomaly Detection which aims to identify unusual patterns in time series data. The talk highlighted challenges in this research field and argued that most recent papers in the field lack true contributions due to flawed experimental methods. The talk ended with an exploration of ways to improve the quality of research in this field.
Acknowledgments We are thankful for the support of the conference programme committee and our sponsors. The Programme Commitee • Yalemisew Abgaz (Dublin City University) • Kolawole Adebayo (Dublin City University) • Kashif Ahmad (Munster Technological University) • Mansoor Ahmed (Maynooth University) • Helard Becerra (University College Dublin) • Christian Beder (Munster Technological University) • Raymond Bond (University of Ulster) • Bojan Božić (Technological University Dublin) • Derek Bridge (University College Cork) • Paul Buitelaar (University of Galway) • Padraig Cunningham (University College Dublin) • Kevin Curran (University of Ulster) • Mathieu D’Aquin (University of Lorraine) • Steven Davy (Technological University Dublin) • Soumyabrata Dev (University College Dublin) • Malachy Eaton (University of Limerick) • Malick Ebiele (University College Dublin) • Cathy Ennis (Technological University Dublin) • Muftah Fraifer (University of Limerick) • Roghaiyeh Ramisa Gachpaz Hamed (Trinity College Dublin) • Vaibhav Gandhi (Middlesex University) • Kuruvilla George (Trinity College Dublin) • Saim Ghafoor (Atlantic Technological University) • James Gillespie (Ulster University) • Paul Greaney (Atlantic Technological University) • Derek Greene (University College Dublin) • Eoin Grua (University of Limerick) • Eric Gyamfi (University College Dublin) • Shagufta Henna (Atlantic Technological University) • Julio Noe Hernandez Torres (Trinity College Dublin) • Aoife Hill (Atlantic Technological University Letterkenny) • Donny Hurley (Atlantic Technological University) • Georgiana Ifrim (University College Dublin) • M M Manjurul Islam (Ulster University) • Gareth Jones (Dublin City University) • Mark Keane (University College Dublin) • Karina Litvinova (Atlantic Technological University) • Philip Long (Atlantic Technological University) • Mahsa Mahdinejad (University of Limerick) • Marion McAfee (Atlantic Technological University) • Michael McCann (Atlantic Technological University) • John P. McCrae (NUI Galway) • Ian McLoughlin (Atlantic Technological University) • Aidan Meade (Technological University Dublin) • Paul Moran (Atlantic Technological University Letterkenny) • Aidan Murphy (University College Dublin) • Irene Murtagh (Technological University Dublin) • Matthias Nickles (University of Galway) • Diarmuid O’Donoghue (Maynooth University) • Ruairi O’Reilly (Munster Technological University) • Colm O’Riordan (University of Galway) • Alison O’Shea (Munster Technological University) • Harshvardhan J. Pandit (Dublin City University) • Debbie Rankin (Ulster University) • Daniel Riordan (Munster Technological University) • Lucas Rizzo (Technological University Dublin) • Tony Robinson (Ulster University) • Bianca Schoen-Phelan (Dublin Institute of Technology) • Niladri Sett (SRM University) • Manya Singh (University College Dublin) • Joshua Tobin (Trinity College Dublin) • Nestor Velasco Bermeo (University College Dublin) • Xhemal Zenuni (South East European University)
We would like to thank University College Dublin and the Artificial Intelligence Association of Ireland for supporting this year’s conference.