The 26th Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (PAKDD 2022) was held in Chengdu, China on May 16-19, 2022.

As one among many to celebrate the 126th anniversary of Southwest Jiaotong University, the event was organized by the School of Computing and Artificial Intelligence in collaboration with Sichuan Institute of Artificial Intelligence. Against the backdrop of the global COVID-19 pandemic, this conference was held both online and offline at the same time. The opening ceremony was presided over by Prof. Li Tianrui, Co-chairman of the Program Committee of the Conference and Professor of the School of Computing and Artificial Intelligence. Prof. Yang Dan, President of the University, delivered a speech at the opening ceremony.

Participants of the conference include world renowned scholars and professors around the world, such as Prof. Jian Pei at Simon-Fraser University, Prof. Bernhard Schölkopf, fellow of the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, Germany, and member of the German National Academy of Sciences (Leopoldina), Vincent S. Tseng, Professor of National Chiao Tung University and Chairman of the PAKDD Steering Committee, Prof. Longbing Cao from the University of Technology Sydney, Prof. Zheng Yu , Vice President of JD Group and Chief Data Scientist of JD Digital Technology, Prof. Chen Enhong, Executive Dean of the School of Data Science at the University of Science and Technology of China, Prof. Wen Jirong, Dean of the School of Information at Renmin University of China, and Prof. Yu Yang of Nanjing University.

Prof. Yu Zheng, Chairman of the Conference, briefed the participants on the history of the PAKDD conference, and Prof. Yu Yang, Co-Chair of the Program Committee of the Conference, spoke on the collection, review, acceptance and subjects of the papers.

Speech by Prof. Zheng Yu, Vice President of JD. COM

Prof. Jian Pei of Simon Fraser University, Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, Canadian Academy of Engineering, IEEE and ACM, delivered a keynote speech entitled "Exact, Concise, and Consistent Data-Driven Interpretation".

Keynote speech by Prof. Jian Pei, a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, Canadian Academy of Engineering, IEEE and ACM

Prof. Wen Jirong, Dean of the School of Information of Chinese University and Executive Dean of Gaoling School of Artificial Intelligence of Renmin University of China, gave a report entitled "Wenlan - A Large-scale Multi-modal Pre-trained Model".

Report by Prof. Wen Jirong of Renmin University of China

Prof. Bernhard Schölkopf, fellow of the German Academy of Sciences, Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems and ACM, delivered a keynote speech "From Statistical to Causal Machine Learning", sharing with his audience the latest research results of his team.

Keynote Speech by Prof. Bernhard Schölkopf of the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems

The PAKDD 2022 International Conference received a total of 627 papers from 18 countries on such topics as data mining, data warehousing, machine learning, artificial intelligence, big data and other research hotspots, 121 of which were accepted after meticulous review by 45 senior members and 320 members of the Program Committee. Those accepted account for 19.3% of the total, covering hot issues in knowledge discovery and data mining.

The multiple parallel sessions on different topics have attracted more than 200 online and offline participants from more than 20 countries and regions and demonstrated research achievements in areas such as neural networks and deep learning, big data and data science, artificial intelligence and knowledge engineering. Eventually, the organizing committee selected the Best Paper, the Best Student Paper and the Best Application Paper from all the submissions, and announced winners of the Most Influential Paper Award in the past decade, Early Career Research Award, and Distinguished Research Contributions Award, paying tribute to the scholars for their outstanding contributions to knowledge discovery and data mining.

The next PAKDD conference will be held in Osaka, Japan in May 2023, as announced at the Closing Ceremony of the Conference.