Guest Editorial: FAIR 2019 special issue

Abstract

In this special issue, we feature selected papers from the inaugural Forum for Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR), established and hosted by the Centre for Artificial Intelligence Research (CAIR)1. FAIR 2019 was held at the UCT Graduate School of Business Conference Centre in Cape Town, between 3 and 6 December 2019. The Department of Science and Technology’s (DST) latest White Paper on Science, Technology and Innovation (2019) identifies Artificial Intelligence (AI) and advanced Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) as priority areas for South Africa. It recognises that these technologies will change the way the South African society and economy function. The potential of AI is already being unlocked in key areas of South African society. For example, South Africa’s power utility, Eskom, has identified AI as a future area for research and innovation, and is exploring the use of machine learning for real-time monitoring and fault prediction at their power stations (Bhugwandin et al., 2019). The South African Revenue Service is aggressively building an in-house AI capability for analysing and detecting non-compliance in tax returns (South African Revenue Services, 2020). The South African AI research community has also grown substantially over the last few years. While AI is generally considered to be a subdiscipline of Computer Science (Stone et al., 2016), it is at heart multidisciplinary: active AI research groups in South African universities can be found in Computer Science, Engineering, Philosophy, Information Systems, Statistics and Applied Mathematics departments. Within this context, FAIR was established to provide a venue for South African AI researchers from a broad range of disciplines to meet, interact and publish their work. Research contributions were solicited in five tracks, namely applications of AI, ethics and AI, knowledge representation, machine learning, and other topics in AI. A total of 72 submissions were received, consisting of full papers, work in progress and extended abstracts (of work under review or published elsewhere). Full paper submissions were blind reviewed by at least two independent reviewers from the relevant disciplines and 20 full papers were accepted for publication in the conference proceedings (Davel & Barnard, 2019).