My trip to the AAAI 2024 conference in Vancouver, Canada, was a great experience and my first trip to a larger machine learning conference after the COVID-19 period. As a researcher in emergenCITY, I had the honor to present our joint research work: “Learning Discrete-Time Major-Minor Mean Field Games” together with collaborators from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, NYU Shanghai, Google DeepMind and Cohere.

The conference was an excellent forum for presenting our work and discussing with international experts on mean field games or game theory. In various technical sessions and poster sessions, we had the pleasure to see state-of-the-art investigations on the topic of mean field games and related topics. In addition to the academic sessions, the AAAI conference boasted a number of great tutorials and workshops, one of which was a tutorial of our coauthor on mean field games. The discussions taking place at the conference have already shaped future collaborations and potential publications.

Beyond academic discussions and furthering collaborations, I also got the opportunity to explore the center of Vancouver together with attendees of the AAAI conference. I visited touristic attractions such as the Vancouver lookout, the Gastown Steam Clock and the big Stanley Park. Organized through the Whova app, an event-management-platform, we had dinners and group gatherings throughout the conference.

Overall, it was very interesting to see Vancouver, and the conference venue is very beautiful. I am thankful for this opportunity and would like to express my gratitude to all my collaborators for making this experience possible.

Author: Kai Cui

Kai Cui is a PhD student and researcher at the Self-Organizing Systems Lab at TU Darmstadt and part of emergenCITY’s research area Communication (COM). There, he is interested in applying reinforcement learning and mean field methods to optimize network configurations and drone communication networks. He received his M.Sc. degree in Computer Science, and in Electrical Engineering and Information Technology with focus on automation systems from TU Darmstadt in 2019.