According to a 2008 OECD review of national policies for education in South Africa, typically only 15 percent to 18 percent of secondary school students who sit for their final year exams every year qualify automatically for university-level education; and this number seems to be decreasing as more students choose to complete subjects on so-called standard grade instead of higher grade, a trend that is especially apparent for mathematics and science, the two fields with critical skills shortages in the country. The South African tertiary education sector is quite small for a country with a population of around 50 million, with 11 "traditional" universities, 6 technical universities, and 6 comprehensive universities. The latter university types focus on more technical or vocational education. The public sector also funds 16 research institutions. In spite of these obstacles, South African universities participate in world-class research activities in many fields and range among the best on the African continent.

The Association for the Advancement of e are pleased to introduce Worldwide AI -- a new column in AI Magazine Artificial Intelligence now serves a global audience, and our members, meeting participants, councilors, and officers reside in countries throughout the world. Worldwide AI is designed to meet our expanded audience's interests. In the columns that will appear in this and forthcoming issues, readers will find a continuing source of news and information on significant research projects and accomplishments, academic and community events, and experiences fielding notable applications of AI. We expect that increased awareness about AI activities around the world will fuel new opportunities for communication and collaboration. The inaugural columns in this issue of Worldwide AI describe artificial intelligence trends in India and South Africa.

Posters, the AAAI/SIGART Doctoral of AAAI; submit papers to the conference Consortium, and more!

Conference on Case-Based Reasoning (ICCBR) has continuously been the preeminent international meeting on case-based reasoning (CBR). Through 2009, ICCBR had been a biennial conference, held in alternation with its sister conference, the European Conference on Case-Based Reasoning (ECCBR), which was located in Europe. At the 2009 ICCBR, the ICCBR Program Committee elected to extend an offer of consolidation with ECCBR. The offer was accepted by the ECCBR 2010 organizers and they considered it approved by the ECCBR community, as the two conferences shared a majority of Program Committee members. Therefore, starting in 2010, ICCBR and ECCBR are merged in a single conference series, called ICCBR.

ICINCO 2012 will be held July 28-31, 2012 in Rome, Italy This page includes forthcoming AAAI sponsored conferences, conferences presented Sixth International RuleML Symposium by AAAI Affiliates, and conferences held in cooperation with AAAI. RuleML-2012 will be Magazine also maintains a calendar listing that includes nonaffiliated conferences held August 27-31, 2012 in Montpellier, at www.aaai.org/Magazine/calendar.php. Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge ICWSM-12 will be held June 4-7 at Flairs-2012 will be held May 23-25, Management. AAAI-12 will be Representation and Reasoning. Twenty-Fourth Innovative Applications Twenty-Second International Conference of Artificial Intelligence Conference. on Automated Planning and IAAI-12 will be held July Scheduling.

Of course, this is far from the first attempt to plot a course toward human-level AGI: arguably this was the goal of the founders of the field of artificial intelligence in the 1950s, and has been pursued by a steady stream of AI researchers since, even as the majority of the AI field has focused its attention on more narrow, specific subgoals. The ideas presented here build on the ideas of others in innumerable ways, but to review the history of AI and situate the current effort in the context of its predecessors would require a much longer article than this one. Thus we have chosen to focus on the results of our AGI roadmap discussions, acknowledging in a broad way the many debts owed to many prior researchers. References to the prior literature on evaluation of advanced AI systems are given by Laird (Laird et al. 2009) and Geortzel and Bugaj (2009), which may in a limited sense be considered prequels to this article. We begin by discussing AGI in general and adopt a pragmatic goal for measuring progress toward its attainment. An initial capability landscape for AGI The heterogeneity of general intelligence in will be presented, drawing on major themes from humans makes it practically impossible to develop developmental psychology and illuminated by a comprehensive, fine-grained measurement system mathematical, physiological, and informationprocessing for AGI. While we encourage research in defining perspectives. The challenge of identifying such high-fidelity metrics for specific capabilities, appropriate tasks and environments for measuring we feel that at this stage of AGI development AGI will be taken up. Several scenarios will a pragmatic, high-level goal is the best we can be presented as milestones outlining a roadmap agree upon. I advocate beginning with a system that has minimal, although extensive, built-in capabilities. Many variant approaches have been proposed A classic example of the narrow AI approach was for achieving such a goal, and both the AI and AGI IBM's Deep Blue system (Campbell, Hoane, and communities have been working for decades on Hsu 2002), which successfully defeated world chess the myriad subgoals that would have to be champion Gary Kasparov but could not readily achieved and integrated to deliver a comprehensive apply that skill to any other problem domain without AGI system.

On the day before the exhibition the participants convened a workshop of 18 short talks. Each track's exhibitors presented a summary of their exhibit. In addition, four guest speakers provided a broader context for all of the exhibitors' efforts. The first guest speaker was the National Science Foundation's Sven Koenig, who highlighted several federal programs that support projects in embodied intelligence. Koenig also provided insights into some of these program's specific priorities, such as international collaborations and educational engagement.

The reports should address the following questions: 1. When and why did the competition start? How many times has the competition been held since its inception? How frequently is the competition held and is it colocated with other events?

This report summarizes the conference and related activities. For the first time in AIIDE's history, the main program of the conference was preceded by three workshops: Intelligent Narrative Technologies workshop, the workshop on Nonplayer Character AI, and the Artificial Intelligence in the Game Design Process workshop. All three attracted a substantial audience and led to exciting debates and fruitful discussions (figure 1). In total, 24 papers were presented in the three workshops. The Intelligent Narrative Technologies workshop included papers on story representation, dialogue generation, narrative visualization, and authoring interfaces for interactive narrative, and a panel on corpus-based approaches to modeling narrative.

Soft sets, as a mathematical tool for dealing with uncertainty, have recently gained considerable attention, including some successful applications in information processing, decision, demand analysis, and forecasting. To construct new soft sets from given soft sets, some operations on soft sets have been proposed. Unfortunately, such operations cannot keep all classical set-theoretic laws true for soft sets. In this paper, we redefine the intersection, complement, and difference of soft sets and investigate the algebraic properties of these operations along with a known union operation. We find that the new operation system on soft sets inherits all basic properties of operations on classical sets, which justifies our definitions.