The research addressed in the autonomous agents field covers a wide spectrum of levels from the cognitive to the organizational, exploits diverse mechanisms and approaches, and has had a major impact on many aspects of artificial intelligence research. 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. The 2011 AAMAS conference received 575 submissions, and 126 papers were selected for publication as full papers. Representation under all submissions of topics (measured by first keyword) was broad, with top counts in areas such as teamwork, coalition formation, and coordination (31), distributed problem solving (30), game theory (30), planning (26), multiagent learning (24), and trust, reliability, and reputation (17). The tag cloud (figure 1), generated from the titles of the full papers at the conference, conveys a sense of the relative prominence of topics.

The competition consists of two main tracks: the ASP system track and the model and solve track. The traditional system track compares dedicated answer set solvers on ASP benchmarks, while the model and solve track invites any researcher and developer of declarative knowledge representation systems to participate in an open challenge for solving sophisticated AI problems with their tools of choice. This article provides an overview of the ASP Competition series, reviews its origins and history, giving insights on organizing and running such an elaborate event, and briefly discusses the lessons learned so far. The main goal of ASP is to provide a versatile declarative modeling framework with many attractive characteristics. These features allow turning -- with little to no effort -- problem statements of computationally hard problems into executable formal specifications, also called answer set programs.

The workshops took place October 8-9, 2012, at Stanford University. This report contains summaries of the activities of those four workshops. With the advent of the BWAPI StarCraft programming interface, interest in real-time strategy (RTS) game AI has increased considerably. At the 2011 AIIDE conference, several papers on the subject were presented, ranging from build order planning, over state estimation, to plan recognition. In addition, a panel discussion on RTS game AI took place, the StarCraft competition was discussed, prizes were awarded, and two exhibition match replays were shown.

Within the time of a human generation, computer technology will be capable of producing computers with as many artificial neurons as there are neurons in the human brain. Within two human generations, intelligists (AI researchers) will have discovered how to use such massive computing capacity in brainlike ways. This situation raises the likelihood that twenty-first century global politics will be dominated by the question, Who or what is to be the dominant species on this planet? This article discusses rival political and technological scenarios about the rise of the artilect (artificial intellect, ultraintelligent machine) and launches a plea that a world conference be held on the socalled "artilect debate." Many years ago, while reading my first book on molecular biology, I realized not only that living creatures, including human beings, are biochemical machines, but also that one day, humanity would sufficiently understand the principles of life to be able to reproduce life artificially (Langton 1989) and even create a creature more intelligent than we are.

This meeting represented the most significant transformation in the history of IAAI. IAAI-97 consisted of two paper tracks as well as invited talks and panels. The first paper track, Deployed-Application Case Studies, comprised papers about deployed AI systems that are relied on for operations and have clearly defined business value. This track was equivalent to previous IAAI programs. The deployed applications track's standards for innovation recognize four types: (1) first application of an AI technique in a deployed application, (2) application of an AI technique to a new domain, (3) a high business payoff, and (4) a novel integration of techniques.

This special issue issue of AI Magazine presents six articles on some of the most interesting question-answering systems in development today. Included are articles on Vulcan's Project Halo, Cyc's Semantic Research Assistant, IBM's Watson, True Knowledge, and the University of Washington's TextRunner. Even though AI has diversified much beyond the notion of intelligent behavior proposed in the Turing test, QA remains a fundamental capability needed by a large class of systems. The QA problem extends beyond AI systems to many analytical tasks that involve gathering, correlating, and analyzing information in ways that can naturally be formulated as questions. Ultimately, questions are an interface to systems that provide such analytic capabilities, and the need to provide this interface has increased dramatically over the past decade with the explosion of information available in digital form.

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.

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.

It was held on Sunday, 28 July 2002. The workshop papers are available as a technical report from AAAI Press. After a welcome and introductions, David Martin of SRI International started the day's presentations with an overview of the The objective of the language is to enable automated software agents to easily accomplish real-world planning tasks by discovering related services, selecting the most appropriate among them, composing them into effective plans, and invoking them to execute these plans and accomplish their tasks. The ServiceModel specification is aimed at supporting service invocation, composition, and monitoring and consists of a workflow model describing how the service is accomplished in terms of atomic and composite processes and their data and control dependencies. Finally, the ServiceGrounding specification specifies the implementation-specific details of service invocation, related to protocols, message formatting, and type serialization.

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.