Techniques in this symposium series were he calls the "twenty-first century for analyzing terrorist networks (1) AI Technologies for Homeland Security; strategic threat triad," which consists were reported by Alphatech (2) Challenges to Decision of failed states, global terrorism, and and the University of Arizona. Popp noted that and retrieving information for Robots: Verbal Interaction with convergence of these three elements counter intelligence was demonstrated Embodied Agents and Situated Devices; is highly destabilizing and a key by Jim Hendler of the University (5) Knowledge Collection from strategic concern to the national security of Maryland. They also aimed to chart out future from Stanford University, Lawrence For example, systems that are research agenda by identifying specific Livermore Laboratories, SRI International, based on probabilistic or decisiontheoretic interesting issues in various and Syracuse University. Homeland security applications for unable to cope with change by themselves, The recurrent themes from data mining and mobile robots were as neither probability theory the presentations included the following: reported by Alphatech and the University nor decision theory says much about of South Florida, respectively. How do The highlights of the symposium let alone how they should be modified.

Every year four new councilors are Raymond J. Mooney, University of elected to serve three-year terms on Chair: Thomas Roth-Nominating Committee encourages Conference Chair is Bruce Porter, Berghofer (trb at dfki.uni-kl.de), Committee, in turn, will nominate to miss 2006! From Reactive to Anticipatory eight candidates for councilor The calls for papers for both conferences, Cognitive Embodied Systems in the spring. Cochairs: Cristiano recommendations, the committee workshop proposals, student abstracts, Castelfranchi (c.castelfranchi at will actively recruit individuals in intelligent systems demonstrations, istc.cnr.it), Christian Balkenius order to provide a balanced slate of and the robot competition will (Christian.Balkenius at lucs.

A general game playing system is one that can accept a formal description of a game and play the game effectively without human intervention. Unlike specialized game players, such as Deep Blue, general game players do not rely on algorithms designed in advance for specific games; and, unlike Deep Blue, they are able to play different kinds of games. In order to promote work in this area, the AAAI is sponsoring an open competition at this summer's Twentieth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence. This article is an overview of the technical issues and logistics associated with this summer's competition, as well as the relevance of general game playing to the long range-goals of artificial intelligence.

After rigorous evaluation, 150 papers were accepted for oral presentation, and 79 for poster presentation. The analogical and case based reasoning category features 6 papers; auctions and market-based systems features 5 papers, and automated reasoning ... out over the Ocean, the winter State University), Amy Greenwald features 12 papers. Twenty papers sky is brilliant panoply of (Brown University), Marti Hearst will be published in constraint stars and comets, beckoning to (University of California, Berkeley), satisfaction and satisfiability; game adventurers... who seek to divine Sridhar Mahadevan (University of theory and economic models features its mysteries. Machine his year marks the twenty-fifth for Artificial Intelligence pioneer and visionary Jay M. ("Marty") learning, the category with the and the twentieth National Tenenbaum4 who will speak on largest number of papers, has 35, Conference on AI (AAAI-05).1 The "The Future of AI and the Web"; while machine perception has 6.

Developed by the Bielefeld AI group, Max can imitate human gestures and exhibit humanlike synthetic speech and coverbal gesture while constructing an airplane from a construction kit in cooperation with a human partner. In an invitational bodily communication could be captured communication. Does a body need flesh highly acclaimed speakers from various Italy) who presented ongoing research and blood?, linguist Jens Allwood disciplines presented their perspectives on mode-specific lexicons, (University of Göteborg, Sweden) pertaining to conceptual issues such as "gestionaries," "gazeionaries" asked, or might wire and metal be of embodiment; the phylo-and and "touchionaries," as an equivalent sufficient, or a simulation in virtual ontogenesis of communication; bodily of dictionaries in spoken language. When apes can learn to control gestures; understanding and communicating How these ideas could be integrated a robot arm through an electrode intentions, emotions, in human-machine interaction was implanted in their brains, philosopher and symbols; and the role of bodily addressed by computer scientist Joëlle Proust (Institut Jean-action in language and speech. The Catherine Pelachaud (Université de Nicod, Paris, France) added, then talks were centered around the two Paris 8, Montreuil, France).

RoboCup is an international initiative with the main goals of fostering research and education in artificial intelligence and robotics, as well as of promoting science and technology to world citizens. The idea behind RoboCup is to provide a standard problem for which a wide range of technologies can be integrated and examined, as well as being used for project-oriented education, and to organize annual events open to the general public, at which different solutions to the problem are compared. The eighth annual RoboCup -- RoboCup 2004 -- was held in Lisbon, Portugal, from 27 June to 5 July. In this article, a general description of RoboCup 2004 is presented, including summaries concerning teams, participants, distribution into leagues, main research advances, as well as detailed descriptions for each league.

Running services in many small processes improves fault tolerance since any number of services can fail due to programming faults without affecting the rest of the system. While it is clearly important to be able to handle a wide range of failures, application authors should not be required to implement routines to test and react in every known mode of failure for every application, even if the failures are abstracted to a common interface. Thus, the framework also provides transparent fault-tolerance to users of system services. Errors in software and hardware are detected, and corrective action is taken. Services can be restarted or removed from the system, and clients are reconnected to the same service or to another service implementing the same interface without intervention from the application programmer. The Washington University team successfully demonstrated its failure-tolerant framework on its robot, Lewis (figure 6).

Today, approximately 10 percent of the world's population is over the age of 60; by 2050 this proportion will have more than doubled. Moreover, the greatest rate of increase is amongst the "oldest old," people aged 85 and over. While many older adults remain healthy and productive, overall this segment of the population is subject to physical and cognitive impairment at higher rates than younger people. This article surveys new technologies that incorporate artificial intelligence techniques to support older adults and help them cope with the changes of aging, in particular with cognitive decline.

Many description logics (DLs) combine knowledge representation on an abstract, logical level with an interface to 'concrete' domains like numbers and strings with built-in predicates such as >, +, and prefix-of. These hybrid DLs have turned out to be useful in several application areas, such as reasoning about conceptual database models. We propose to further extend such DLs with key constraints that allow the expression of statements like 'US citizens are uniquely identified by their social security number'. Based on this idea, we introduce a number of natural description logics and perform a detailed analysis of their decidability and computational complexity. It turns out that naive extensions with key constraints easily lead to undecidability, whereas more careful extensions yield NExpTime-complete DLs for a variety of useful concrete domains.

Software agents can be used to automate many of the tedious, time-consuming information processing tasks that humans currently have to complete manually. However, to do so, agent plans must be capable of representing the myriad of actions and control flows required to perform those tasks. In addition, since these tasks can require integrating multiple sources of remote information ? typically, a slow, I/O-bound process ? it is desirable to make execution as efficient as possible. To address both of these needs, we present a flexible software agent plan language and a highly parallel execution system that enable the efficient execution of expressive agent plans. The plan language allows complex tasks to be more easily expressed by providing a variety of operators for flexibly processing the data as well as supporting subplans (for modularity) and recursion (for indeterminate looping). The executor is based on a streaming dataflow model of execution to maximize the amount of operator and data parallelism possible at runtime. We have implemented both the language and executor in a system called THESEUS. Our results from testing THESEUS show that streaming dataflow execution can yield significant speedups over both traditional serial (von Neumann) as well as non-streaming dataflow-style execution that existing software and robot agent execution systems currently support. In addition, we show how plans written in the language we present can represent certain types of subtasks that cannot be accomplished using the languages supported by network query engines. Finally, we demonstrate that the increased expressivity of our plan language does not hamper performance; specifically, we show how data can be integrated from multiple remote sources just as efficiently using our architecture as is possible with a state-of-the-art streaming-dataflow network query engine.