BNAIC is the annual Benelux Conference on Artificial Intelligence. In 2017, the 29th edition of BNAIC was organized by the Institute of Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Engineering (ALICE), University of Groningen, under the auspices of the Benelux Association for Artificial Intelligence (BNVKI) and the Dutch Research School for Information and Knowledge Systems (SIKS). BNAIC 2017 took place in Het Kasteel, Melkweg 1, Groningen, The Netherlands, on Wednesday November 8 and Thursday November 9, 2017. BNAIC 2017 included invited speakers, research presentations, posters, demonstrations, a deep learning workshop (organized by our sponsor NVIDIA) and a research and business session.

The four BNAIC 2017 keynote speakers were:

  • Marco Dorigo, Universite Libre de Bruxelles
    Swarm Robotics: Current Research Directions at IRIDIA

  • Laurens van der Maaten, Facebook AI Research
    From Visual Recognition to Visual Understanding

  • Luc Steels, Institute for Advanced Studies (ICREA), Barcelona
    Digital Replicants and Mind-Uploading

  • Rineke Verbrugge, University of Groningen
    Recursive Theory of Mind: Between Logic and Cognition

Furthermore, three FACt talks (FACulty focusing on the FACts of Artificial Intelligence) were scheduled:

  • Bert Bredeweg, Universiteit van Amsterdam
    Humanly AI: Creating smart people with AI

  • Eric Postma, Tilburg University
    Towards Artificial Human-like Intelligence

  • Geraint Wiggins, Queen Mary University of London/Vrije Universiteit Brussel
    Introducing Computational Creativity

Authors were invited to submit papers on all aspects of Artificial Intelligence. We received 68 submissions in total. Of the 30 submitted Type A regular papers, 11 (37%) were accepted for oral presentation, and 14 (47%) for poster presentation. 5 (17%) were rejected. Of the 19 submitted Type B compressed contributions, 17 (89%) were accepted for oral presentation, and 2 (11%) for poster presentation. None were rejected. All 6 submitted Type C demonstration abstracts were accepted. Of the submitted 13 Type D thesis abstracts, 5 (38%) were accepted for oral presentation, and 8 (62%) for poster presentation. None were rejected. The selection was made using peer review. Each submission was assigned to three members of the program committee, and their expert reviews were the basis for our decisions. All submissions accepted for oral or poster presentations and all demonstration abstracts appear in the electronic preproceedings, made available on the conference web site during the conference (http://bnaic2017.ai.rug.nl/). All 11 Type A regular papers accepted for oral presentation will appear in the postproceedings, to be published in the Springer CCIS series.

We are grateful to our sponsors for their generous support of the conference:

  • Target Holding
  • NVIDIA Deep Learning Institute
  • Anchormen
  • Quint
  • the Netherlands Research School for Information and Knowledge Systems (SIKS)
  • SIM-CI
  • Textkernel
  • LuxAI
  • IOS Press
  • Stichting Knowledge-Based Systems (SKBS)
  • SSN Adaptive Intelligence

Reports on the different sessions of the conference can be found here: