UPDATE 1: With the global health situation only improving slowly, more conferences have moved to online meetings. All 2021 conferences in this list will be held virtually. - May 6th, 2021

February 2nd marks the start of a year filled with AI conferences. The 35th AAAI organized by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence is the first of many important conferences this year. It can be quite challenging to keep an overview of the multitude of different AI Expert gatherings across the globe, ranging from small-scale meetups to international conferences with thousands of attendees.

Therefore, we have gathered the most important conferences below, based on scientific relevance. The relevance is indicated by the h5-index which Google Scholar computes for the publications of each conference, based on the authors H-indices.

Below you will find introductions to the following segments:

1. Top Computer Vision Conferences
2. Top General Machine Learning Conferences
3. Top AI Conferences on Specific Topics

Top Computer Vision Conferences 2021

IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)

19.-25. June 2021   Location: Virtual   h5-index: 299   Website: cvpr2021.thecvf.com   Focus: Computer Vision

The Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) is an annual conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, which is regarded as one of the most important conferences in its field.

IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)

11.-17. October 2021   Location: Virtual   h5-index: 176   Website: iccv2021.thecvf.com/home   Focus: Computer Vision

The International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) is a research conference sponsored by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) held every other year. It is considered to be one of the top conferences in computer vision, alongside CVPR and ECCV, and it is held on years in which ECCV is not.

Top Machine Learning Conferences 2021

International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR)

3.-7. May 2021   Location: Virtual   h5-index: 203   Website: iclr.cc   Focus: Deep Learning

ICLR is one of the fastest growing artificial intelligence conferences in the world. The International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) is the premier gathering of professionals dedicated to the advancement of the branch of artificial intelligence called representation learning, but generally referred to as deep learning.

ICLR is globally renowned for presenting and publishing cutting-edge research on all aspects of deep learning used in the fields of artificial intelligence, statistics and data science, as well as important application areas such as machine vision, computational biology, speech recognition, text understanding, gaming, and robotics.

The conference is presided by "Godfathers of AI" Yann LeCun and Yoshua Bengio.

Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS)

6.-14. December 2021   Location: Virtual   h5-index: 198   Website: nips.cc

The Conference and Workshop on Neural Information Processing Systems (abbreviated as NeurIPS and formerly NIPS) is a machine learning and computational neuroscience conference held every December. The conference is currently a double-track meeting (single-track until 2015) that includes invited talks as well as oral and poster presentations of refereed papers, followed by parallel-track workshops.

Landmark publications in the past include object detector Faster R-CNN and the Attention Is All You Need paper that introduced the Transformer architecture.

International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML)

18.-24. July 2021   Location: Virtual   h5-index: 171   Website: icml.cc

The International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) is the premier gathering of professionals dedicated to the advancement of the branch of artificial intelligence known as machine learning.

ICML is globally renowned for presenting and publishing cutting-edge research on all aspects of machine learning used in closely related areas like artificial intelligence, statistics and data science, as well as important application areas such as machine vision, computational biology, speech recognition, and robotics.

ICML is one of the fastest growing artificial intelligence conferences in the world. Participants at ICML span a wide range of backgrounds, from academic and industrial researchers, to entrepreneurs and engineers, to graduate students and postdocs.

AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)

2.-9. February 2021   Location: Virtual   h5-index: 126   Website: aaai.org

The 35th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-21) will have a diverse technical track, student abstracts, poster sessions, invited speakers, tutorials, workshops, and exhibit and competition programs, all selected according to the highest reviewing standards. AAAI-21 welcomes submissions on mainstream AI topics as well as novel crosscutting work in related areas.

Among the highlights this year is the Liquid Time-Constant Networks paper by Hasani et al. (news.mit.edu).

Top AI Conferences on Specific Topics in 2021

ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI)

8.-13. May 2021   Location: Virtual   h5-index: 95   Website: chi2021.acm.org   Focus: Human Computer Interaction (HCI)

The 2021 ACM CHI Virtual Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems is the premier international conference on Human-Computer Interaction. CHI – pronounced ‘kai’ – is a place where researchers and practitioners gather from across the world to discuss the latest in interactive technology. CHI is generally considered the most prestigious in the field of HCI and attracts thousands of international attendees annually.

Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL)

1.-6. August 2021   Location: Virtual   h5-index: 135   Website: 2021.aclweb.org   Focus: Language Processing

ACL is the premier conference of the field of computational linguistics, covering a broad spectrum of diverse research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language. It will be held jointly with the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing of the Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP).

ACM International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD)

14.-18. August 2021   Location: Virtual   h5-index: 90   Website: kdd.org/kdd2021   Focus: Data Mining

The Special Interest Group for Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining of the Association for Computing Machinery hosts the annual premier forum for data mining researchers and practitioners from academia, industry, and government to share ideas, research results and experiences.

AI Conferences 2021 Ranked

AI Conferences 2021 sorted by Relevance

AI Conferences 2021 sorted by Date

What Now

We certainly have an exciting year ahead of us. New scientific breakthroughs will be announced at the expert meetings listed above. But sifting through conference proceedings naturally requires a lot of time and expertise. Instead of digging through countless pages, you can stay up to date with our i.am.ai AI Newsletter.

To talk to an AI Expert about the latest technologies and practical applications for your business, say hi@am.ai.