AI Weekly: Animal Crossing, ICLR, and the future of research conferences online

This week, the world’s machine learning community got a good look at what digital research conferences will look like in a post-coronavirus future, as ICLR kicked off what’s believed to be the first major AI research conference held entirely online. The conference was initially scheduled to be held in person in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) conference is next month and will be partially or entirely digital, while ICML, one of the biggest annual AI research conferences in the world, will be held entirely online in July.

Also this week: An NLP researcher announced plans to host the first-ever AI workshop inside Nintendo’s Animal Crossing: New Horizons this July. Artie lead scientist Josh Eisenberg told VentureBeat that more than 200 people have already signed up to watch the day-long event. Animal Crossing: New Horizons launched March 20 and is now the best-selling game in the U.S. and third-best launch of any game in Nintendo history.