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.

Researchers and technology developers from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), other government agencies, academia, and industry recently met in Pasadena, California, to take stock of past and current work and future challenges in the application of AI to highly autonomous systems. In our lifetime, through the eyes of simple robots, grand vistas on other worlds have been unveiled for the first time. Enigmatic questions compel us to go further, to touch these distant landscapes and learn the secrets of the solar system. However, in trying, we find our reach wanting, limited by the link to Earth on which our probes depend. We are learning that to explore further, these probes must go alone, and to go alone, they must become much more intelligent.

The notion of software agents has been around for more than a decade. Since its beginning, the definition of agent, like the definition of intelligence, has been quite controversial and often provoked hot discussions. Questions such as the following normally come up in such arguments: What is an agent? Should a piece of software be categorized as an agent by looking at its behavioral characteristics or by the methodology using which it was produced? Is a printer daemon an agent?

This special issue celebrates the anniversary by presenting perspectives on AAAI's history, on the future of AAAI, and on the past and future of artificial intelligence. It highlights the many voices contributing to AAAI by featuring personal remembrances and visions from many people, including founders of AAAI, presidents who guided the society's development, and others spurring on AI research and applications. While a single issue can only scratch the surface, this special issue clearly illustrates the spirit, accomplishment, and optimism that will drive the next 25 years. It is fitting for AI Magazine to present such a commemoration: 2005 is the twenty-fifth anniversary of the magazine as well. From the beginning, AI Magazine has brought the AI community together to share ideas and advances and to introduce newcomers to the challenges and accomplishments of the field.

In AI, psychology, and education, a growing body of research supports the view that learning is a goal-directed process. Psychological experiments show that people with varying goals process information differently, studies in education show that goals have a strong effect on what students learn, and functional arguments in machine learning support the necessity of goalbased focusing of learner effort. At the Fourteenth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, a symposium brought together researchers in AI, psychology, and education to discuss goaldriven learning. This article presents the fundamental points illuminated at the symposium, placing them in the context of open questions and current research directions in goal-driven learning. Learning is a central area of study for researchers interested in human cognition as well as those interested in machine intelligence.

As Hofstadter points out, analogies are fluid, meaning that the analogy between two entities can be drawn differently depending on how these entities are represented. The analogy that is drawn, in turn, can change the representation of the entities being compared. Thus, the analogy between Hofstadter and Sagan can be seen as positive: Both have explained important concepts in their fields to a wide audience and transmitted the excitement of these ideas. Both have inspired a number of people within their fields. Unfortunately, a more negative analogy between Sagan and Hofstadter is possible.

Originally founded in 1987 as a conference to promote and advance AI within the state of Florida, over the years, FLAIRS has attracted national and international participation--56 percent of this year's papers had international authors. After a period of eight years, the Fifteenth International Conference of the Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society (FLAIRS 2002) returned to the emerald coast of Pensacola Beach, Florida. John Kolen (UWF-IHMC) was the conference general chair, and Susan Haller (University of Wisconsin at Parkside) and Gene Simmons (University of South Alabama) were the program cochairs. FLAIRS is a general conference for reporting AI research, and the 104 papers presented at FLAIRS-2002 covered a broad spectrum of research areas. The conference consisted of 3 parallel sessions of 21 tracks, including 14 special tracks highlighting specific themes.