We are very pleased to republish here extended versions of a sample of the papers drawn from the Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence Conference (IAAI-06), which was held July 17-20, 2006, in Boston, Massachusetts. Three of these articles describe deployed applications and two describe emerging applications. By this measure, artificial intelligence is going strong. Evidence comes from the annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI), the premier conference on AI applications. The papers presented at the conference provide compelling case studies of the value and impact of AI technology.

This special issue of AI Magazine covers select applications from the IAAI conference held in 2008 in Chicago. The articles address a broad range of very challenging issues and contain great lessons for AI researchers and application developers. Your rice cooker, toaster, and washing machine have their own minds. Your car parks itself; its transmission adapts itself to your driving preferences, and it tells the dealership which parts it thinks it will need to have replaced three months from now. Your PDA knows your preferences and acts as your personal radio station, playing only music you like.

This special issue of AI Magazine on dialogue with robots brings together a collection of articles on situated dialogue. The contributing authors have been working in interrelated fields of human-robot interaction, dialogue systems, virtual agents, and other related areas and address core concepts in spoken dialogue with embodied robots or agents. Several of the contributors participated in the AAAI Fall Symposium on Dialog with Robots, held in November 2010, and several articles in this issue are extensions of work presented there. The articles in this collection address diverse aspects of dialogue with robots, but are unified in addressing opportunities with spoken language interaction, physical embodiment, and enriched representations of context. Research on computational models and mechanisms for supporting spoken dialogue dates back to the earliest days of AI research, including Alan Turing's reflection about how machine intelligence could be evaluated.

When creating algorithms or systems that are supposed to be used by people, we should be able to adopt a "binocular" view of users' interaction with intelligent systems: a view that regards the design of interaction and the design of intelligent algorithms as interrelated parts of a single design problem. This special issue offers a coherent set of articles on two levels of generality that illustrate the binocular view and help readers to adopt it. You're more likely to hear it when listening to folks who are interested in the human side of computer use-- such as people in the field of human-computer interaction (HCI). But how much distance is there between these two fields? After all, the algorithms developed in AI research are often intended to be deployed in systems that involve some sort of interaction with users.

This special issue of AI Magazine brings seven articles presenting extended versions of papers from IAAI 2013. These articles were selected for their description of AI technologies that are either in practical use or close to it. Five of the articles describe deployed application case studies. These articles present fielded AI applications that distinguish themselves for their innovative use of AI technology. One article describes an emerging application.

We selected them for significance, novelty, and (in several cases) common task focus. Every year, AI Magazine devotes one fourth of its annual production to a special issue based on the Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI) conference. Because IAAI is the premier venue for documenting the transition of AI technology into application, these special issues provide a snapshot of the state of the art in AI with the practical syllogism in mind; they present work that has value because it delivers value in use. As a result, it is good to read these articles from a practical perspective. Papers that document deployed systems clarify the motivating application constraints, the match (and mismatch) between problems and technology, the innovations required to surmount barriers to deployment, and the impact of technology on application through practical measures of cost and benefit.

The Workshop on Connectionist-Symbolic Integration: From Unified to Hybrid Approaches was held on 19 to 20 August 1995 in Montreal, Canada, in conjunction with the Fourteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. The focus of the workshop was on learning and architectures that feature hybrid representations and support hybrid learning. The general consensus was that hybrid connectionist-symbolic models constitute a promising avenue to the development of more robust, more powerful, and more versatile architectures for both cognitive modeling and intelligent systems. The workshop was cochaired by myself and Frederic Alexandre. It featured 23 presentations, including 2 invited talks and 2 panel discussions.

This editorial introduces the articles published in the AI Magazine special issue on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI), based on a selection of papers that appeared in the IAAI-05 conference, which occurred July 9-13 2005 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. IAAI is the premier venue for learning about AI's impact through deployed applications and emerging AI application technologies. Case studies of deployed applications with measurable benefits arising from the use of AI technology provide clear evidence of the impact and value of AI technology to today's world. The emerging applications track features technologies that are rapidly maturing to the point of application. The six articles selected for this special issue are extended versions of papers that appeared at the conference.

In this and the next issue of AI Magazine, we will present extended versions of papers presented at IAAI-12 (held in Toronto, Ontario, Canada) that were selected for their description of AI technologies that are either in practical use or close to it. We also present an article by Ramon Lopez de Mantaras based on his 2011 Robert S. Engelmore Memorial Lecture. Our selections for this issue begin with Playing with Cases: Rendering Expressive Music with Case-Based Reasoning by Ramon Lopez de Mantaras and Josep Lluís Arcos, based on the Robert S. Engelmore Memorial Lecture at IAAI-11 in San Francisco, California. Lopez de Mantaras received the Robert S. Engelmore Memorial Lecture Award for his pioneering research contributions in a breadth of artificial intelligence areas, especially pattern recognition and case-based reasoning, leading to novel applications in design, diagnosis, and music, and for extensive international leadership and service for the AI community. He is also a founding member of several AI companies.

"An Innovative Application from the DARPA Knowledge Bases Programs: Rapid Development of a Course-of-Action Critiquer," by Gheorghe Tecuci, Mihai Boicu, Mike Bowman, and Dorin Marcu, describes a critiquing agent for military courses of action, a challenge problem set by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA) High-Performance Knowledge Bases Program. Murray Burke, the DARPA manager for this program, introduces the article by setting the context for the application. Ontologies also play a key role in the creation and management of a web portal developed by Steffen Staab and his colleagues at the University of Karlsruhe, discussed in their article, "Knowledge Portals: Ontologies at Work." "L As in past years, papers were solicited in two categories: (1) deployed applications and (2) emerging applications and technologies. Deployed applications are 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 systems that are close to deployment and clearly show an innovative implementation of AI technologies. Papers submitted in this track can also describe efforts that examine the utility of different AI techniques for specific applications. All these case studies 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 technical challenges provided by real-world problems. Six deployed applications and 12 emerging application papers were presented plus 2 invited talks. Although no single theme emerges from this panoply of excellent applications, they served to demonstrate that the field continues to be fertile ground for innovation.