The First International Workshop on the Future of No-Code Digital Apprentices

No-code digital apprentices are a category of assistants that end-users, who lack programming expertise, can effectively teach, supervise and validate. These assistants are capable of making decisions, taking actions with a certain level of autonomy and identify when they are insufficiently trained and seek guidance from the human supervisor in such cases. They rely on a combination of advanced technologies, including natural language processing (NLP), conversational AI, robotic process automation, digital process automation, and business rules to function effectively.

In recent years, AI has made significant strides in various domains, including transformers, large language models, general AI, multi-modal representations, and generative models such as ChatGPT, Codex, HumAIns, Adept, and Auto-GPT. These advancements are poised to transform the field of digital assistants as they are becoming increasingly intelligent, autonomous, and better able to comprehend human work.

This workshop aims to unite researchers from different fields, such as programming languages, natural language processing, computer vision, knowledge representation, planning, human-computer interaction, and business process management. The primary objective is to establish a cross-disciplinary research agenda that will direct future work in the field of no-code digital apprentices and the AI-driven revolution in this area. By bringing together experts with diverse backgrounds, this workshop seeks to advance our understanding of the challenges and opportunities associated with NCDA and to encourage collaboration and innovation across disciplines.

We invite scientists, practitioners, and students from both academia and industry who share a passion for the potential ways in which AI can revolutionize the no-code automation field to participate in and submit their original work to this workshop. We encourage contributions that not only enhance NCDA with AI algorithms but also utilize their combination to address broader AI challenges. Moreover, we aim to attract individuals from research-oriented industrial divisions, such as Microsoft Research, Google Research, IBM Research, Adept.ai, and intelligence automation vendors like UiPath and Automation Anywhere. The workshop seeks to foster an open and collaborative atmosphere for exploring cutting-edge research and discussing innovative ideas in the field.

* You might also find the Resiliency of Intelligent Automation Systems Challenge interesting. Link
* A list of IJCAI23 workshops can be found at ijcai-23-workshops

Important dates

Abstract Submission (optional)	May 18, 2023
Paper Submission Deadline	May 22, 2023
Paper Notification	June 5, 2023
Workshop	August 21, 2023
Camera Ready	TBD

Submission Details

Submissions must be written in English, prepared using the new CEUR-ART 1-column style, formatted in PDF and submitted via EasyChair.

An Overleaf template for LaTeX users is available here. Alternatively, you can download an offline version with the style files for both LaTeX and MS-Word.

Auto-Mates 2023 invites submissions of research, industry and application contributions as well as software demonstrations.

There are two paper submission formats:

Regular papers up to 14 pages (excluding references): must contain enough substance that they can be cited in other publications and may not have appeared before.
Extended Abstracts up to 4 pages (including references): results and ideas of interest to the Auto-Mates audience, including position papers, system and application descriptions and presentations of preliminary results, overview of papers accepted at another conference or which you submitted or plan to submit to another conference. In the latter case, extended abstracts must clearly state the venue where the paper has been accepted or submitted alongside its status.

Cool and exciting demos will be presented in a dedicated session at the workshop. Submissions are via email SUBMIT The submission must include a link to a video of the demo and a text description of both the demo and the core ideas. The submition deadline for the demos is June 2, 2023.

All accepted papers are expected to be presented at the conference and at least one author of each accepted paper must travel to the IJCAI venue in person. Multiple submissions of the same paper to other IJCAI workshops are forbidden.

Submissions should be single blind so the names of the authors will be visible to the reviewers and should be indicated on the submitted files. In justified cases, if you wish your submission to be handled anonymously (i.e., double-blind) please send us an e-mail explaining the reasons. You will receive instructions on how to proceed.

Camera Ready Preparation

Full papers will be published under a CC BY 4.0 license that will be included in an open-access proceedings volume of CEUR Workshop Proceedings, indexed by both Scopus and DBLP. Extended Abstracts are no longer indexed by dblp.org and the case of an abstract of a pre-published paper may require a permission by the copyright holder.

Topics of interest for submission include, but are not limited to:

Autonomous Agents
Semi-Autonomous Agents
AI as a teammate, and digital labor
Teaching methods for no-code/low-code users
AI approaches for digital automation and robotic process automation
Natural language processing for digital interaction and action transformers
Multi-modal-based semantic representation of UI actions
Multi-modal-based interfaces and human-computer interaction with digital apprentices
Specification of tasks using prompts and dialogue
End-user programming, validation, and supervision of AI-based automation systems
Human-in-the-loop AI, human-AI collaboration, and human-centered AI
Training and feedback approaches to support end-user customization of work
Program generation and validation techniques, such as program synthesis
Training and supervision methods
AI for digital apprentices

Keynote

Martin Hirzel

A researcher and the manager of the AI Programming Models team at IBM Research

Martin's research interests include low-code programming, AI for code, and automated machine learning. Martin's papers won awards at several conferences and he is an ACM Distinguished Scientist.

Shen Jiasi

Assistant Professor at HKUST in the CSE Department working on programming languages and software engineering

Jiasi aims to improve software development by automating tasks that currently require substantial manual engineering effort. Her research focuses on developing automatic techniques that analyze, manipulate, and transform software.

Workshop agenda - Tentative timeline

Opening remarks
Keynote speaker (academia)
Cool Demos session
Oral presentations
Breakout\Brainstorming session
keynote speaker (industry)
Oral presentations
Announcement of the Resiliency of Intelligent Automation Systems Challenge winners. Link
Roundtable Discussion

Program Chairs

Dr. Segev Shlomov

AI research scientist @ IBM Research Segev.Shlomov1@ibm.com

Mr. Avi Yaeli

Research scientist @ IBM Research aviy@il.ibm.com

Full Prof. Ronen Brafman

Ben-Gurion University, Israel brafman@bgu.ac.il

Prof. Xinyu Wang

University of Michigan, USA. xwangsd@umich.edu

Dr. Chenglong Wang

Microsoft Research. Redmond, USA chenglong.wang@microsoft.com

Program Commitee

Rotem Dror - University of Pennsylvania
Jose Cambronero - Microsoft
Nadia Polikarpova - University of California San Diego
Eran Yahav - Technion
Rui Dong - University of Michigan
Xinyun Chen - Google
Sergey Zeltyn - IBM Research
Yan Chen - University of Toronto
Yanju Chen - University of California, Santa Barbara
Lior Limonad - IBM Research
Jiani Huang - University of Pennsylvania
Kobi Gal - Ben-Gurion University