3–5 Dec 2024
Nagoya University
Asia/Tokyo timezone

What's "unconference"?

A Key: Open Discussion

The point of the workshop is to have your input and build the future vision (see the "Workshop Goals"). To this end, having everyone engage in an open discussion about the workshop questions is far more important than giving/listening presentations. We have accommodated several "unconference sessions" to have everyone's inputs in most effective manner and consolidate them into building the future vision of scientific AI/ML research.

Unconference: How Does It Work?

We will have 4 unconference sessions. Each sessions is organized by a facilitator who gives a few "charge questions". The goal is to have everyone engage and summarize key points to answer the questions. But asking inputs from many people is inefficient and we will miss many inputs. The unconference works in the following steps.

  1. Create sub-groups (3-6 people/group). 
  2. In each group, briefly introduce yourself and learn about others (5 minutes)
  3. Then start a discussion to answer the charge questions (15 minutes)
  4. Present your group's discussion outcome to the whole session (5 minutes/group)
  5. Consolidate every group's output as a summary list of answers

This way, we have everyone engage the question and answers are discussed and summarized at the individual, subgroup, and session level.

The bird view of four unconference session goals are:

  • Identify challenges in science ... session per science domain
  • Identify promising AI/ML techniques ... session per science domain
  • Build synergies across science domains ... session for the whole workshop
  • Prioritized list of scientific AI/ML research ... session for the whole workshop

The above list is in the order of increasing scope and complexity. We encourage participants to preview the list of questions in each session (coming soon) and prepare your inputs for the discussion.