You Need the AI Community—and the AI Community Needs You!

Abstract

How could AI research remain active and productive without the AAAI as international, the ECCAI as European, and the GI Technical Committee Kunstliche Intelligenz as German representation of the common interests of all researchers in this domain? What about the important conferences, be it the AAAI conferences or the IJCAI, the ECAI, and—yes, also—the German AI Conference KI? What about the community building journals, the AI Magazine, the AI Communications, and—yes, also—the German Journal on Artificial Intelligence, KI, whose editorial for volume 29, issue 3 you are currently reading? Who would represent the interests of AI at national funding organizations such as the German DFG or on an European or international level? Who would care for the continuity of the main conferences? The probability that you, the reader, are a paying member of AAAI or GI is moderately high. However, the probability that you, the reader, are also an active member of your community is relatively low. Research communities need money, but—much more importantly—they need people, people that give their time to the cause! Serving your community does not just mean that you have a position which you can list in your CV, it means work. Definitely, it is more glamorous and you have more impact if you serve in an international society rather than in a German one and it is very important that there are researchers working in Germany who are active in international societies. Nevertheless, I strongly believe that—even if the world (at least a larger part of it) is a global village— communities first need to grow in the nearer surrounding where you share a common background, can meet more often and talk in person. For this reason, I want to bring to your notice some people who are giving their time and their inspiration to the German AI community: The speaker of the German Technical Committee Kunstliche Intelligenz Antonio Kroger, as well as the vice-speaker Stefan Wolfl for the time, effort and enthusiasm they give to the management and the representation of the German AI community; the chairs and organizers of the German AI Conference 2015, with the general chair Steffen Holldobler from TU Dresden for offering us an attractive program at an attractive location for KI’15 which hopefully will result in many submissions of high quality; Frieder Stolzenburg and Marco Ragni who are the speakers of the special interest group Cognition within the GI Technical Committee ‘‘Knstliche Intelligenz’’ and the guest editors of the current issue for keeping the topic of cognitive oriented AI research active and visible in the German AI landscape, and the editorial board of the German Journal of Artificial Intelligence with the editor in chief KlausDieter Althoff whose member I had the pleasure to be from 2007 until now. During my time in the editorial board I learned a lot, most importantly, how to motivate authors, guest editors, and reviewers to deliver within time. I got to know & Ute Schmid ute.schmid@uni-bamberg.de