BICA*AI 2020 Conference holds on MEPhI online platform
06.10.2020

Annual International Conference on Brain-Inspired Cognitive Architectures for Artificial Intelligence will be held 10-11 October and 10-15 November. Meetings will be held on a new platform developed at the National Research Nuclear University "MEPhI" — Virtual Convention Center (VCC).

More than 200 scientists from all over the world will present their projects in various fields of science and technology at the international conference BICA * AI 2020. The participants' developments will help to improve cognitive architectures - schemes for developing artificial intelligence and teaching it to various functional human roles.  The conference will feature reports on virtual reality technologies, artificial intelligence, robotics, neurophysiology, cognitive, social, economic, and pedagogical sciences, as well as cybersecurity, the organizing committee said.

"The format of the conference is a two-day virtual event in October and a five-day online meeting in November. There will be poster and plenary presentations, panel discussions, reports by invited speakers — all of which will be held in a virtual environment”, said the conference organizer, Professor MEPhI Cybernetics Department of Institute of Cyber Intelligence Systems Alexey V. Samsonovich.

The Virtual Convention Center (VCC) platform, which will host the conference, was developed by scientists from MEPhI in 2020. The idea is to transfer the latest computer game technologies to the field of scientific communications. VCC is better than analogs: it adapted for holding scientific conferences, Samsonovich noted.

According to the developers, the VCC includes intelligent synthetic characters capable of both serving members and giving talks. Thus, not only real people but also virtual characters controlled by artificial intelligence will be able to take part in the conference on this platform. BICA conferences have been held for 10 years, starting in 2010. Previously, they took place in Washington, Palermo, Kyiv, Boston, Lyon, New York, Moscow, Prague, and Seattle. Participants' materials are published in scientific journals indexed in the international databases Web of Science and Scopus. This year the conference is being held online for the first time. The VCC platform was developed by the scientists of the ICIS MEPhI Alexei Samsonovich, Artur Chubarov, and colleagues with funding from the Russian Science Foundation grant 18-11-00336.