For the first 54 years of his life, Dennis DeGray was an active guy. In 2007 he was living in Pacific Grove, Calif., not far from the ocean and working at a beachside restaurant. Then, while taking out the trash one rainy night, he slipped, fell, and hit his chin on the pavement, snapping his neck between the second and third vertebrae. DeGray was instantly rendered, as he puts it, "completely nonfunctional from the collarbone south." He's since depended on caregivers to feed, clothe, and clean him and meet most any other need.

The long-term future of space exploration at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is dependent on the full exploitation of autonomous and adaptive systems, but mission managers are worried about the reliability of these more intelligent systems. The main focus of the workshop was to address these worries; hence, we invited NASA engineers working on autonomous and adaptive systems and researchers interested in the verification and validation of software systems. The dual purpose of the meeting was to (1) make NASA engineers aware of the verification and validation techniques they could be using and (2) make the verification and validation community aware of the complexity of the systems NASA is developing. The workshop was held 5 to 7 December 2000 at the Asilomar Conference Center in Pacific Grove, California.

The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence held its 1991 Fall Symposium Series on November 15-17 at the Asilomar Conference Center, Pacific Grove, California. This article contains summaries of the four symposia: Discourse Structure in Natural Language Understanding and Generation, Knowledge and Action at Social and Organizational Levels, Principles of Hybrid Reasoning, Sensory Aspects of Robotic Intelligence.