12
February
2019
|
23:53
Asia/Singapore

NUS is Asia's top institution for AAAI conference

NUS was found to be the top performing institution in Asia at world-renowned AI conference

A recent study conducted by Microsoft has revealed that NUS is amongst the top performing institutions at one of the world’s most prestigious artificial intelligence (AI) conferences.

The conference is hosted by The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), and is held annually with the purpose of promoting innovative research in AI and the free exchange of ideas between authorities in the field.

Founded 40 years ago, the AAAI is an international, non-profit, scientific society with over 4,000 members of the most prolific experts in AI, with several members being recipients of the coveted Turing Award which is often described as the Nobel Prize of computing.

On 18 January, Microsoft published the results of an investigation into the institutional trends of AAAI conferences over the last 25 years and it was discovered that NUS ranked 13th worldwide based on all accepted papers by the AAAI.

With the digital revolution changing the way we live, work and play, results such as these affirm the University’s international reputation in leading the charge for AI innovation.

NUS has had 146 papers accepted since 1994, outdoing other esteemed Ivy League universities such as Cornell and Brown, and ranking as the highest Asian academic institution (as of 12 February).

NUS also ranked 13th for the number of citations attributed to AAAI papers, with its papers being referenced in over 2,609 academic publications, again making it the top performing Asian institution in this study.

Professor Ho Teck Hua, NUS Senior Deputy President and Provost and Executive Chairman of AI Singapore, a national programme to boost Singapore’s AI capabilities, was heartened by the findings. “With the digital revolution changing the way we live, work and play, results such as these affirm the University’s international reputation in leading the charge for AI innovation. Ultimately, the cutting-edge work being undertaken by our researchers and shared at conferences like AAAI is helping to address important societal challenges and empowering people both locally and abroad to thrive in the future digital economy,” he said.

The 33rd AAAI conference took place from 27 January to 1 February in Honolulu, Hawaii. 

This year, a team from the NUS Computing’s Media Management Research Lab received the prize for the best student poster for their work entitled “Mind Your Language: Abuse and Offence Detection for Code-Switched Languages”.

Additionally, other groups from NUS had papers accepted on AI topics as diverse as synthesising speech from lip reading, to generating photorealistic faces for facial recognition software. In total, 21 papers from NUS academics were accepted by AAAI this year. 

See the results of the study.