1st Annual Meeting of the German Chinese Association for Artificial Intelligence

Author: Andreas Lommatzsch

The first annual meeting of the German Chinese Association for Artificial Intelligence (GCAAI) took place at Porsche Digital Lab, on July 27th, 2018.

GCAAI promotes the exchange of educational resources between Germany and Chine in the field of artificial intelligence. They organize meetups and seminars focusing on AI topics. The events feature speakers from academia and industry. Participants gain access to valuable information, have the opportunity to discuss recent trends with scholars, and receive support to find internships or job opportunities.

The meetup at the Porsche Digital Lab has been an exciting event for discussing current projects and research activities in Artificial Intelligence. The meeting started with six short presentations: Dr. Han Xiao, a Senior Research Scientist at Tencent-AI, presented the challenges when teaching machines to comprehend texts and to answer questions. He gave an excellent overview of methods for extracting and summarizing information. In addition, the talk discussed the problem of detecting questions unrelated to a given text/domain.

In the meetup, I gave a short introduction about recommender system and presented the NewsREEL challenge as well as the MediaEval NewsREEL Benchmark. I highlighted the research questions and the unique chance to evaluate news recommender algorithms with consideration of multi-media data coming from an operating news recommender system.

The talks have been a good starting point for fruitful discussions. The meeting continued with a dinner in the Indochinese restaurant in Kreuzberg. The next meeting of the GCAAI is planned for November.