The combined 35th BNAIC and 32nd BeNeLearn conference took place on 8-10 November 2023 in Delft, the Netherlands. It was organized by the Delft University of Technology, under the auspices of the Benelux Association for Artificial Intelligence (BNVKI) and in cooperation with the Netherlands Research School for Information and Knowledge Systems (SIKS).
BNAIC/BeNeLearn 2023 marked the return of the conference series to Delft, where it was held a decade before in 2013. This time, in 2023, the conference was held in the Mechanical Engineering faculty, and jointly organised by a team from TU Delft Mechanical Engineering and Computer Science.
The 2023 conference aligned with the format of recent previous editions. Papers were solicited in several tracks: novel full contributions (A), abstracts of previously-published work (B), demonstrations (C), and abstracts of BSc/MSc student theses (D).
The programme included poster spotlight talks, daily poster sessions, an industry paper session, a EurAI session with participants from Poland, technical paper sessions, the now traditional BNAIC FACt session, the BNVKI general assembly, and invited talks by Jan-Willem van de Meent (UvA) and Ann Nowé (VUB). The conference was preceded by a co-located ELLIS Benelux PhD event.
An industry panel, demo session, and reception was held in the NextDelft building, sponsored by Mondai, the Delft House of AI. A dinner was held at the historic restaurant Heinde & Ver Delft, accompanied by a classical music quartet from Leiden.
Attendance at BNAIC/BeNeLearn 2023 was some 220 people. BNVKI sponsored the attendance of BSc/MSc students, and SIKS sponsored the attendance of SIKS PhD students.
The Best Paper award went to “Laser Learning Environment: A new environment for coordination-critical multi-agent tasks” by Yannick Molinghen et al. The Best Thesis award was won by Eline Bovy for a thesis entitled “The Underlying Belief Model of Uncertain Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes” (photo below). The Best Demo award went to “A Mobile Application for Near Real-Time Strawberry Quality Prediction” by Junhan Wen et al.
The conference chairs extend their thanks to the whole organising committee, the student volunteers, and the support staff of TU Delft Mechanical Engineering faculty. The conference sponsors are also warmly thanked. These were at level platinum: BNVKI, SIKS; at level gold: Convergence AI Port Center, Dyflexis, ORTEC, TU Delft AI Initiative; and at level silver: ASML.
Accepted papers are found on the conference website: https://bnaic2023.tudelft.nl. A volume of the Springer CCIS series is forthcoming with revised versions of selected type A papers; this will form the published conference proceedings.
BNAIC 2024 will be held in Utrecht, the Netherlands, in November 2024.
