How two students from St. Petersburg made it to AAAI, the major AI conference in Singapore

Two students from St. Petersburg went through the full academic journey: from writing a research paper and anxiously awaiting reviews to talking face to face with the world's leading scientists at the AAAI poster session in Singapore.

What AAAI is and why researchers aim for it

AAAI (Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence) is one of the oldest and most respected academic AI conferences. It ranks alongside NeurIPS, ICML and ICLR: this is where work is published that later underpins products from Google, Meta and OpenAI.

Getting in is hard. The acceptance rate rarely exceeds 20%, meaning four out of five submitted papers are rejected during peer review. An accepted paper is not just a line on a résumé but an entry ticket to a community of people who set the direction of the entire industry.

This year the conference took place in Singapore. The two St. Petersburg students went there not as tourists but as authors of an accepted study. Their experience shows from the inside how the international academic world of AI works.

How selection works

The road to presenting at AAAI is far more complicated than simply "write a paper and send it in." The authors describe each stage:

• Submission: a strict format, page limits, and mandatory compliance with conference standards
• Blind review: several reviewers read the work anonymously, without knowing the authors' names
• Rebuttal: after receiving the reviews, authors can respond in writing to the criticism before the program committee makes its final decision
• Waiting: weeks of uncertainty while the committee processes thousands of submissions from around the world
• Poster session: authors of accepted papers present their research in person and talk directly with relevant attendees

The authors single out the rebuttal as a key and often underrated tool: a well-written response to reviewers' criticism can change the final decision. The students explain how to build an argument properly and what to pay attention to.

What happens on site

Singapore turned out to be more than an exotic backdrop: it was also a suitable venue for a dense exchange of ideas among scientists from around the world. Poster sessions are set up so that any attendee can walk up to an author and talk, with no appointment and no formal protocol. Leading researchers whose names appear on the most-cited papers stand nearby and are ready to discuss details. This is the fundamental difference between an in-person conference and watching recorded talks online.

"No video can replace a conversation at a poster, where a leading

scientist can pick apart your work in twenty minutes", which captures why researchers spend money and time to attend in person.

The authors also candidly cover the practical side of the trip: how to plan logistics and budget, how to navigate a program with dozens of parallel tracks, and how not to get lost among thousands of attendees.

What this means

The story of the two St. Petersburg students is a practical guide for anyone considering an international academic career in AI. Conferences at the level of AAAI remain the main gateway to the global scientific community: connections made there turn into joint projects, internships and positions at the world's leading research labs.

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