On Friday the 22nd of June the 1st NSVKI Student Conference was held in Nijmegen. The intend of this conference was to give students the opportunity to present their own work (thesis, projects) to their peers from the entire country. For the presenting students this is a very useful first experience with lecturing at a conference and submitting a paper. For the audience it is very interesting to see what AI research might mean for them, and hopefully they feel some of the enthusiasm of the young presenting scientists.
In total, we received six papers from three different universities. The topics of these papers were very versatile, ranging from multi-agent systems to cognitive modeling. The papers turned out to be of good quality, and were all selected for publication in the proceedings and for oral presentation.
On the conference day there were mostly students from Groningen, Utrecht and Nijmegen. The afternoon started with Pim Haselager giving an introduction on conferences, containing some funny anecdotes, and pushing students to engage in discussions and ask questions. After that we continued with two sessions each containing three presentations of twenty minutes. The first presentation was held by Hylke Buisman, Gijs Kruitbosch and Nadya Peek (Universiteit van Amsterdam) about a simulation platform to study multiagent resource allocation. Next, Frank Leoné (Radboud University Nijmegen) talked about his research on the simulation of parts of the parietal cortex involved in visual perception during eye and body movements. The first part was ended with a presentation of Twan Goosen (Radboud University Nijmegen) about improving artificial evolution of robot controllers using interleaving of evolution in simulation and the real world.
After a short coffee break we continued with Joris Janssen (Radboud University Nijmegen). He talked about modelling certain aspects of the origin of cerebral organization using evolutionary robotics. The fifth speaker was Chris Janssen (University of Groningen) talking about user modelling used in a game for depression prevention. Our final lecturer was Vivian Blankers (Radboud University Nijmegen) who talked about her research on writer identification comparing handwritten letters. The day ended with some drinks and later a barbecue.
We were very happy about the active discussion sessions, in which a lot of students participated. Furthermore, it has to be said that all speakers had an interesting story of good quality. From the audience we got very positive reactions. People found it very nice to see examples of research that they might have done themselves. We heard from a lot of people that they liked this better than a symposium with senior scientists. It was easier to understand the speakers and to participate in the discussions.
To conclude, we could say that it was a very successful initiative and we hope this conference becomes an annual event with even more participants next year. If you are interested you can find the proceedings on the conference website (through http://www.nsvki.nl) or maybe you will see some of the speakers at the BNAIC 2007.