1st International Joint Conference on Learning & Reasoning

Nikos Katzouris

National Center for Scientific Research “Demokritos”

The rapid progress in machine learning has been the primary reason for a fresh look in the transformative potential of AI as a whole during the past decade. A crucial milestone for taking full advantage of this potential is the endowment of algorithms that learn from experience with the ability to consult existing knowledge and reason with what has already been learned. Integrating learning and reasoning constitutes one of the key open questions in AI, and holds the potential of addressing many of the shortcomings of contemporary AI approaches, including the black-box nature and the brittleness of deep learning, and the difficulty to adapt knowledge representation models in the light of new data. Integrating learning and reasoning calls for approaches that combine knowledge representation and machine reasoning techniques with learning algorithms from the fields of neural, statistical and relational learning.

Aiming to address such challenges, the 1st International Joint Conference on Learning & Reasoning (IJCLR 2021), which was sponsored by TAILOR, took place as a virtual conference from October 25-27 2021. IJCLR 2021 brought together, for the first time, four international conferences and workshops, addressing various aspects of integrating machine learning and machine reasoning:

  • The 30th International Conference on Inductive Logic Programming (ILP).
  • The 15th International Workshop on Neural-Symbolic Learning & Reasoning (NeSy).
  • The 10th International Workshop on Statistical Relational Artificial Intelligence (StarAI).
  • The 10th International Workshop on Approaches and Applications of Inductive Programming (AAIP).

The conference featured presentation of cutting-edge research in a number of parallel sessions for each participating event, in addition to a number of joint invited talks from leading researchers in the field, tutorials, poster sessions and a panel discussion on “Future Challenges in Learning & Reasoning”.

The virtual conference was organized by the Institute of Informatics of the National Center for Scientific Research (NCSR) “Demokritos”, in Athens, Greece. The conference had more than 550 registrants and a very high participation overall.

The video recordings from IJCLR 2021 are available online for everyone to watch.