We will see more and more applications of AI on the mobile devices. This special issue of AI Magazine is devoted to some exemplary works of AI on mobile devices. We include four works that range from mobile activity recognition and air-quality detection to machine translation and image compression. These works were chosen from a variety of sources, including the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence 2011 Special Track on Integrated and Embedded AI Systems, held in Barcelona, Spain, in July 2011.

Planning is the model-based approach to autonomous behavior where the agent behavior is derived automatically from a model of the actions, sensors, and goals. The main challenges in planning are computational as all models, whether featuring uncertainty and feedback or not, are intractable in the worst case when represented in compact form. In this book, we look at a variety of models used in AI planning, and at the methods that have been developed for solving them. The goal is to provide a modern and coherent view of planning that is precise, concise, and mostly self-contained, without being shallow. For this, we make no attempt at covering the whole variety of planning approaches, ideas, and applications, and focus on the essentials.

Pattern-Based Constraint Satisfaction and Logic Puzzles develops a pure logic, pattern-based perspective of solving the finite Constraint Satisfaction Problem (CSP), with emphasis on finding the "simplest" solution. Different ways of reasoning with the constraints are formalised by various families of "resolution rules", each of them carrying its own notion of simplicity. A large part of the book illustrates the power of the approach by applying it to various popular logic puzzles. It provides a unified view of how to model and solve them, even though they involve very different types of constraints: obvious symmetric ones in Sudoku, non-symmetric but transitive ones (inequalities) in Futoshiki, topological and geometric ones in Map colouring, Numbrix and Hidato, and even much more complex non-binary arithmetic ones in Kakuro (or Cross Sums). It also shows that the most familiar techniques for these puzzles can indeed be understood as mere application-specific presentations of the general rules. Sudoku is used as the main example throughout the book, making it also an advanced level sequel to "The Hidden Logic of Sudoku" (another book by the same author), with: many examples of relationships among different rules and of exceptional situations; comparisons of the resolution potential of various families of rules; detailed statistics of puzzles hardness; analysis of extreme instances.

Answer Set Programming (ASP) is a declarative problem solving approach, initially tailored to modeling problems in the area of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KRR). More recently, its attractive combination of a rich yet simple modeling language with high-performance solving capacities has sparked interest in many other areas even beyond KRR. This book presents a practical introduction to ASP, aiming at using ASP languages and systems for solving application problems. Starting from the essential formal foundations, it introduces ASP's solving technology, modeling language and methodology, while illustrating the overall solving process by practical examples.

We are proud to introduce this special issue of the Journal of Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP), dedicated to the full papers accepted for the 28th International Conference on Logic Programming (ICLP). The ICLP meetings started in Marseille in 1982 and since then constitute the main venue for presenting and discussing work in the area of logic programming. We contributed to ICLP for the first time in 1991. The first guest-editor had a paper on logic programming with sets, and the second had two papers on the parallel implementation of the Andorra model. Since then, we continued pursuing research in this exciting area and ICLP has always been the major venue for our work.

Ten Years of AAMAS: Introduction to the Special Issue

In 2011 the Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS) conference series celebrated its 10th anniversary, having begun as the successful merger of three related events that had run for some years previously.

Every year, AI Magazine devotes one fourth of its annual production to a special issue based on the Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence 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. Other articles describe applications that are almost feasible, drawn from papers in the IAAI emergent applications track. These papers provide a window into the search for viable applications at an earlier stage in the process of mating task with technology. All of the articles supply insight into the core question of what is feasible and why, which is a useful lens for us, as readers, to employ in viewing our own work. This special issue of AI Magazine contains expanded versions of five papers that describe deployed applications and two papers that discuss emergent applications from IAAI-11 (the article by Warrick and colleagues is from IAAI-10).

This special issue of AI Magazine on dialog with robots brings together a collection of articles on situated dialog. The contributing authors have been working in interrelated fields of human-robot interaction, dialog systems, virtual agents, and other related areas and address core concepts in spoken dialog 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 dialog with robots, but are unified in addressing opportunities with spoken language interaction, physical embodiment, and enriched representations of context.