Coronavirus Fears Will Leave Empty Seats at a Top AI Conference
QIANG YANG, a professor at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, was looking forward to AAAI, one of the big artificial intelligence conferences, which takes place in New York this week.
Yang was due to present an award-winning paper describing a way for an AI algorithm to perform image recognition by drawing from different data sets without ever revealing their contents. He decided to cancel his trip due to the global health emergency triggered by the coronavirus in China. Yang estimates that around 800 attendees from mainland China, about a fifth of the 4,000 registered for the conference, will miss the event due to a travel ban imposed by the US on Monday.
