Summary of 2009 Meeting of Artificial Intelligence Committee
Sue Ellen Haupt, Outgoing Chair
John Williams, Incoming Chair
The annual meeting of the Committee on Artificial Intelligence Applications to Environmental Science was held on Monday, January 12 in conjunction with the AMS Annual Meeting, beginning at 7:00 P.M. at 1130 restaurant in Phoenix, AZ. As usual, we invited the “extended committee” to participate. The meeting was jointly led by Sue (old and on-going business) and John (plans for future activities).
Attendees to All or
Part of the Meeting:
John Williams NCAR jkwillia@ucar.edu
Sue Haupt Penn State seh19@psu.edu
Joel Finnis UBC jfinnis@eos.ubc.ca
Mike Baldwin Purdue baldwin@purdue.edu
Kim Elmore OU/NSSL kim.elmore@noaa.gov
Mike Richman OU School of Met. mrichman@ou.edu
Robyn Ball Texas A&M rball@stat.tamu.edu
Ben Root OU/SOM/ARRC ben.root@ou.edu
John Trostel Georgia Tech/SRRC john.trostel@gtri.gatech.edu
William Hsieh Univ. British Columbia whsieh@eos.ubc.ca
Andy Spencer Rose-Hulman Inst of Tech spenceal@rose-hulman.edu
Inanc Senocak Boise State Univ. senocak@boisestate.edu
Amy McGovern OU amcgovern@ou.edu
Tim Supinie OU Timothy.A.Supinie-1@ou.edu
David John Gagne OU djgagne@ou.edu
Vladimir Krasnopolsky NCEP vladimir.krasnopolsky@noaa.gov
Antonello Pasini CNR pasini@iia.cnr.it
Armando Pelliccioni ISPESL armando.pelliccioni@ispesl.it
Valliappa Lakshmanan NSSL/OU lakshman@ou.edu
Philippe Tissot TAMUCC/CBI ptissot@lighthouse.tamucc.edu
Melinda Diehl U Maine melinda.diehl@maine.edu
Angelica Villarreal TAMUCC avillarreal3@islander.tamucc.edu
Francois Neville U Maine fneville@adelphia.net
Caren Marzban Univ. of Washington marzban@stat.washington.edu
Items of Business:
· Sue reviewed last year’s meeting notes.
· Sue noted major accomplishments in the past year:
o Held 2008 conference.
o Instituted the AI Forecasting Contest.
o Published a book written by the committee.
o Supported Vladimir’s IEEE session – this year it will be a standard conference.
o Planned and convened the conference for 2009.
· Sue reviewed a few issues raised at the STAC meeting with support from John and Philippe:
o Committees are encouraged to nominate people for awards. Since AI doesn’t actually present specific awards, for us, this means nominating Fellows. Sue did nominate an AI person for Fellow this year, but not successfully. This process might be easier if the committee included a Fellow. After some discussion, we decided to work to find a Fellow for committee membership next year. Caren will pass a name along to the Chair.
o Sue presented a case for more travel grants for students who are presenting papers at conferences. The extended AI committee discussed this issue a bit and there is a general feeling that prioritizing funding to target students with papers should be a goal. We should at least be doing that within our committee. A first attempt was made for the 2008 conference. A more concerted effort should be made for 2009. Philippe agreed to help identify students who want to present at our conference and have a need for travel funds to do that. We would like to try to cover registration in advance to help with financial planning for the students. There was also discussion regarding developing our own externally funded student travel grants. John T suggested soliciting funds from Mathworks and Kim suggested Tipco. Sue expressed concern about competing with AMS for external funding. The new chair should follow up.
o Space Weather is likely to be added as a STAC committee/board. AI should find an opportunity to partner with them in the future.
· Sue led a discussion on whether to hold a conference in 2010 and, if so, what format it should take. She had already put in a placeholder with the AMS staff but not yet submitted a call for papers. The extended committee agreed that a conference is in order. The format should include joint sessions, but also have room for general AI papers, both in terms of technique development and in terms of novel applications. Some committees to target for a joint conference next year and who agreed to contact someone:
o Probability and Statistics (Sue)
o Air Pollution (Sue)
o ARAM (John)
o Hydrology (Philippe)
o Polar (J ???)
o IIPS (Lak)
A final issue relative to the 2010 conference is whether to hold a third annual forecasting contest. The group generally agreed that we should. John indicated that some colleagues at NCAR have already offered to provide data and organize the criteria and judging. John will follow up on that.
· John led a discussion of what educational activities the committee should sponsor in the near future. There is a possibility of applying for funding from NCAR to hold a 2 week workshop in Boulder in the summer of 2011. A second possibility is to hold another short course at the 2010 annual meeting. A third possibility is to hold an Educational Forum at the annual meeting. Our understanding is that this is an approximately 2 hour overview of a topic targeted at the level of beginning graduate students. A vote was taken on how to prioritize these possibilities with the result:
1. Summer Workshop in 2011
2. Educational Forum in 2010
3. Short Course (no votes)
The committee will pursue organizing both a Summer Workshop and Educational Forum. John will take the lead on both.
· Sue Haupt was unanimously elected to an additional year on the AMS AI Committee as Past Chair.
· John reminded the extended committee about the listserve that Philippe set up a couple years ago that is never used. This would be a good forum for online discussion. Lak suggested a blog as an alternative and set one up while we spoke.
· John and Sue commented that the website has been well maintained by Ron Holmes. Sue will determine if he wants to continue this service. Vladimir pointed out that there are 2 links on the AMS webpage. We should ask them to remove the link to the old page.
· Should the committee write a BAMS article on AI (parallel to the book) or on the Forecasting Contest? Kim, Lak, and Mike agreed to write an article on the Forecasting Contest in a format such as meeting notes.
· John pointed out that taking advantage of NCAR’s program for hosting visitors is a good opportunity to spur collaboration among our committee and community.
· Should we continue to hold our business meetings over dinner at a restaurant or take advantage of the meeting rooms at the conference center to enable the STAC chair to more easily attend? The overwhelming response was that the dinner meetings have been highly successful at involving “extended” committee members and should be continued.
· Should the committee elect a student member? The response was highly positive. Lak suggested that the committee hold an email discussion on criteria for student membership before voting on a new student member.
· Armando brought up the idea of the committee posting validation data sets for the purpose of calibrating our techniques. Discussion pointed out that our contest data is one way to provide that service. It was agreed that links to our previous contests’ data should be maintained on our website along with links to the papers presented on how the data was used.
Other Business
Handled Later:
· Sue Haupt approached the chair of the Air Pollution committee (Mike Brown) regarding another joint session in 2010 and he agreed.
· Sue Haupt talked to Barb Brown of the Probability and Statistics committee about a joint session in 2010 and she agreed.
Conference Attendance
Summary:
SEH spot-counted attendance in sessions:
Joint session with Air Pollution
M 10:30: 55
M 1:30: 31-41
Applications Session
M 4:00: 47-51
T 8:30: 19-42 (low early, but larger later)
Joint with Hydrology
T 11:00: 35-40
T 1:30: 45-52
AI Forecasting Contest
T 3:30: 33
19 for discussion
Joint Session with Climate
W 8:30: 17-27 (low early, trickled in)
Action Items to
complete via email and individual effort:
· Sue and John will work together to produce meeting notes.
· Sue and John will write Call for Papers for 2010 meeting.
· John will investigate Summer Workshop at NCAR in 2010 or 2011.
· John will investigate holding an Education Forum at the 2010 meeting.
· John will lead in organizing the 2010 conference.
· Lak will invite everyone for a blog.
· Mike, Lak, and Kim will contact BAMS to investigate writing a review of the AI Forecasting Contest.
· Sue will communicate with Ron regarding the status of the website.
· John will work with colleagues at NCAR to set up the 2010 AI Forecasting Contest.
· Committee will e-discuss criteria for student members.
· Sue will coordinate with Ron on maintaining links on our webpage to previous contest data.
· People named above will communicate with other committees regarding joint sessions for 2010, keeping John informed.