Reports of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence's 2021 Spring Symposium Series

The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence's 2021 Spring Symposium Series was held virtually from March 22-24, 2021. There were ten symposia in the program: Applied AI in Healthcare: Safety, Community, and the Environment, Artificial Intelligence for K-12 Education, Artificial Intelligence for Synthetic Biology, Challenges and Opportunities for Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning, Combining Machine Learning and Knowledge Engineering, Combining Machine Learning with Physical Sciences, Implementing AI Ethics, Leveraging Systems Engineering to Realize Synergistic AI/Machine-Learning Capabilities, Machine Learning for Mobile Robot Navigation in the Wild, and Survival Prediction: Algorithms, Challenges and Applications. This report contains summaries of all the symposia. The two-day international virtual symposium included invited speakers, presenters of research papers, and breakout discussions from attendees around the world. Registrants were from different countries/cities including the US, Canada, Melbourne, Paris, Berlin, Lisbon, Beijing, Central America, Amsterdam, and Switzerland. We had active discussions about solving health-related, real-world issues in various emerging, ongoing, and underrepresented areas using innovative technologies including Artificial Intelligence and Robotics. We primarily focused on AI-assisted and robot-assisted healthcare, with specific focus on areas of improving safety, the community, and the environment through the latest technological advances in our respective fields. The day was kicked off by Raj Puri, Physician and Director of Strategic Health Initiatives & Innovation at Stanford University spoke about a novel, automated sentinel surveillance system his team built mitigating COVID and its integration into their public-facing dashboard of clinical data and metrics. Selected paper presentations during both days were wide ranging including talks from Oliver Bendel, a Professor from Switzerland and his Swiss colleague, Alina Gasser discussing co-robots in care and support, providing the latest information on technologies relating to human-robot interaction and communication. Yizheng Zhao, Associate Professor at Nanjing University and her colleagues from China discussed views of ontologies with applications to logical difference computation in the healthcare sector. Pooria Ghadiri from McGill University, Montreal, Canada discussed his research relating to AI enhancements in health-care delivery for adolescents with mental health problems in the primary care setting.