Luis A. Leiva - Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning: 33rd Benelux Conference on Artificial Intelligence, BNAIC/Benelearn 2021, Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg, November ... Computer and Information Science

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Welcome to the proceedings of BNAIC/Benelearn 2021, the 33rd edition of the annual Benelux Conference on Artificial Intelligence and the 30th edition of the annual Belgian-Dutch Conference on Machine Learning.

In 2021, this joint conference was organized by the University of Luxembourg, under the auspices of the Faculty of Science, Technology, and Medicine (FSTM) and the Interdisciplinary Lab for Intelligent and Adaptive Systems (ILIAS), and the IT for Innovative Services (ITIS) research department from the Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology (LIST).

Held yearly, the objective of BNAIC/Benelearn is to promote and disseminate recent research developments in Artificial Intelligence in the Benelux. In 2021 we returned to in-person attendance, under CovidCheck regulations, as a three-day event: the conference taking place from Wednesday, November 10 to Friday, November 12, 2021.

BNAIC/Benelearn 2021 included invited keynote speakers, research presentations, posters, and demonstrations. The conference provided ample opportunity for interaction between academia and industry. This year, the chosen motto of the conference was AI in ACTION, to reflect the aforementioned synergies between academia and industry.

For the scientific part, we welcomed four types of contributions, namely, a) regular papers, b) encore abstracts of work already published in 2021, c) posters, and demonstrations, and d) thesis abstracts. We received 105 submissions overall, out of which 46 were regular papers. Of these, 14 were selected for inclusion in this volume of the Springer CCIS series after a second round of reviewing by members of the Program Committee, representing a 30% acceptance rate. All regular papers, posters, and demonstrations received three expert single-blind reviews on average, whereas thesis and encore abstracts were reviewed by at least one Program Committee member.

All scientific contributions were presented as 20-minute talks, for which the conference program comprised four parallel tracks. In addition to these scientific presentations, we had keynote presentations by Fosca Giannotti (ISTI-CNR Pisa, Italy), Katie Atkinson (University of Liverpool, UK), Carles Sierra (IIIA of CSIC, Spain), Manuela Naveau (Kunstuniversitt Linz, Austria), Julie Bernauer (NVIDIA Corporation, USA), and Iris von der Tuin (Utrecht University). We also held a special FACt (FACulty focusing on the FACts of AI) session with presentations by Benoit Macq (Polytechnic School of UCLouvain, Belgium), Gilles Louppe (University of Lige, Belgium), and Christoph Schommer (University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg).

To conclude, we want to express our gratitude to everyone who made this conference possible. Without their efforts, this conference could not have taken place. In addition to all invited speakers mentioned above, many thanks go to our sponsors: Luxembourgs National Research Fund (FNR), the Dutch Foundation for Neural Networks (SNN), the Foundation for Knowledge-Based Systems (SKBS), and the Benelux Association for AI (BNVKI). We also thank all the organizing and Program Committee members for their hard work to guarantee the high quality of this conference, both before and during the conference. We sincerely appreciate all the student volunteers, administrative and secretarial assistants, and, of course, all the academic as well as business sponsors. Finally, we also thank all the authors who made important contributions to the conference.