Delivering effective customer service over the internet requires attention to many aspects of knowledge management if it is to be both satisfying for customers and economical for the company or other organization. In RightNow ESERVICE CENTER, such management is built into the architecture and supported by automatically gathering metainformation about the documents held in the core knowledge base. A variety of AI techniques are used to facilitate the construction, maintenance, and navigation of the knowledge base. These techniques include collaborative filtering, swarm intelligence, fuzzy logic, natural language processing, text clustering, and classification rule learning. Customers using ESERVICE CENTER report dramatic decreases in support costs and increases in customer satisfaction because of the ease of use provided by the self-learning features of the knowledge base.

The Fourteenth Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence Conference (IAAI-2002) was held from 28 July to 1 August in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, in conjunction with the Seventeenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-2002). As in past years, papers were solicited in two categories: (1) deployed applications and (2) emerging applications and technologies. Deployed application papers describe systems that have been in use for at least several months by individuals or organizations other than their developers, have measurable benefits, and incorporate AI technologies. Emerging applications are technologies and systems that are close to deployment and clearly show an innovative implementation of AI technologies. These papers are of value not only to other application developers looking for guidance in applying various techniques to their own applications but also to researchers who need to understand the unique technical challenges provided by real-world problems.

Send applications and inquiries to May Cheh; National Library of Medicine, 8600 Rockville Pike, Mail Stop 54, Bethesda, MD 20894-6075; Email: cheh@nlm.nih.gov

February 10: IJCAI-03 Electronic After the conference, an expense report Mark your calendars now for IJCAI-poster submission deadline will be required to account for the 03! The Eighteenth International February 12: IJCAI-03 Hard-copy funds awarded.

To them that had had, more would be given (Lodge 1986, p. 172). "Morris read through the letter. Was it a shade too fulsome? No, that was another law of academic life: it is impossible to be excessive in the flattery of one's peers." There we met Morris That book was made by Mr. Mark I read these lines as a new truth." I haven't even gotten my Who is talking floor, and stepped out on to his regular on the British version of the here? More importantly, whom balcony to inhale the air, scented Discovery Channel), and womanizer should I believe? Messenger, as his wife Twain" disguised as Huck?

The evolution of the World Wide Web from a repository of HTML data to a source of varied distributed services creates exciting opportunities for offering complex, integrated services over the web. The syntactic problems of such integration are being addressed by the advent of the web services stack of standards.1 However, the promise of service integration will not be delivered unless services can be integrated semantically as well. The 2002 AAAI workshop entitled "Intelligent Service Integration" examined this new challenge for the AI community.

The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, in cooperation with Stanford University's Department of Computer Science, presented the 2002 Spring Symposium Series, held Monday through Wednesday, 25 to 27 March 2002, at Stanford University. The nine symposia were entitled (1) Acquiring (and Using) Linguistic (and World) Knowledge for Information Access; (2) Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Entertainment; (3) Collaborative Learning Agents; (4) Information Refinement and Revision for Decision Making: Modeling for Diagnostics, Prognostics, and Prediction; (5) Intelligent Distributed and Embedded Systems; (6) Logic-Based Program Synthesis: State of the Art and Future Trends; (7) Mining Answers from Texts and Knowledge Bases; (8) Safe Learning Agents; and (9) Sketch Understanding.

Henry Lieberman surveyed successful techniques for programming by example, an approach where end users teach procedures to computers by demonstrating a sequence of actions on concrete examples as they how to accomplish it. This new conference series domain-independent inference practical exercises and illustrated promotes multidisciplinary research structures and reusable domain-specific the concepts with applications, including on tools and methodologies for efficiently ontologies. A related workshop of its knowledge content for communities. He received his Ph.D. in 1. portal.acm.org. For any inquiries, please email info@kcap.org.

He leaves a legacy of groundbreaking, deep insights that have changed the course of AI. "Only one same reason is shared by all of us: we wish to create worlds as real as, but other than the world that is." The quotation captures what was special about Ray: He had an adventurer's desire to go beyond the boundaries of our current understanding, together with a mathematician's insistence on precision. Ray the adventurer was always eager to try new ideas and directions. He was not afraid to enter murky areas, and he always left them better illuminated. He introduced terms to the AI community such as default logic, closed-world assumption, and cognitive robotics; he opened avenues of theoretical research with new resolution proof methods and logics for nonmonotonic reasoning, diagnosis, and action; and he was the prime mover in the Cognitive Robotics initiative that has led to a whole new program of research.

The Eighteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-02) and the Fourteenth Conference on Innovative Applications of AI (IAAI- 02) were positively received by those who attended. This report provides a few snapshots of the vast and varied content of the 2002 conferences. Proceedings of AAAI-02 and IAAI-02 are available from AAAI Press (www.- aaaipress.org).