Conference Report on the Inaugural 2023 IEEE Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IEEE CAI 2023) [Conference Reports]

The inaugural 2023 IEEE Conference on Artificial Intelligence was held June 5-6 at the Hyatt Regency Santa Clara in California's Silicon Valley. This new event was several years in the making and included co-sponsorship by four IEEE societies including the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (as lead organization for the first two years), IEEE Computer Society, IEEE Signal Processing Society, and IEEE Systems, Man and Cybernetics Society. Given the co-sponsorship, the event is managed by a steering committee with members from all four societies and with a team from one of the societies annually running the event as the lead sponsor for that year. Our initial ideas for the event began in 2019 and developed through 2020 during the covid-19 pandemic. After attending an AI Exposition, we determined that a large event would require cooperation across multiple societies, and starting a new conference series during a pandemic would not be wise. Plans were made to launch the series in 2023 while we solved the co-sponsorship arrangements. We were pleased to work with staff from the IEEE Computer Society in the planning and development of the conference itself, with content focused on the six verticals of interest noted previously in IEEE CIM (AI in transportation, energy, healthcare, earth systems, industrial optimization, and societal implications of these applications). We faced additional headwinds going into 2023 as recession fears loomed across corporate America leading to budget cuts for conference engagement. The poorly timed bankruptcy of Silicon Valley Bank also did not help matters. However, we remained eager to have a fully in-person post-pandemic conference with as much personal interaction as possible.