Dear Editor: In the previous issue's President's Quarterly Message (AI Magazine, Vol. 4, No. 4), John McCarthy quoted part of a net message from Jon Doyle, a faculty member here at CMU, to the effect that the students at

Deep Blue beat world chess champion Gary Kasparov in the final game of a tied, six-game match last May 11. Kasparov had beaten the machine in an earlier match held in February 1996. The Fredkin Prize was awarded under the auspices of AAAI; funds had been held in trust at Carnegie Mellon University. The Fredkin Prize was originally established at Carnegie Mellon University 17 years ago by Massachusetts Institute of Technology Computer Science Professor Edward Fredkin to encourage continued research progress in computer chess. The first award of $5,000 was given to two scientists from Bell Laboratories who in 1981 developed the first chess machine to achieve master status.

Editor: AI'S IMPACT ON EMPLOYMENT Thank you for the excellent intention and effort in presenting Nils Nilsson's article on the long-term socioeconomic aspects of increasing application of artificial intelligence. Please let me offer some thoughts on the spread of technology to the third world. In the article, James Albus is quoted with agreement in saying that military conflict is inevitable if the current population explosion is not matched by a corresponding increase in affluence based on improved industrial productivity. The expansion of affluence suggested to avoid more human tragedy is certainly urgent. But it is critical that control of the sources and types of affluence are local to the areas affected.

Alan Turing's decades-old question still influences artificial intelligence because of the simple test he proposed in his article in Mind. In this article, AI Magazine collects presentations about the first round of the classic Turing Test of machine intelligence, held November 8, 1991 at The Computer Museum, Boston. Robert Epstein, Director Emeritus, Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies, and an adjunct professor of psychology, Boston University, University of Massachusetts (Amherst), and University of California (San Diego) summarizes some of the difficult issues during the planning of this first real-time competition, and describes the event. Presented in tandem with Dr. Epstein's article is the actual transcript of session that won the Loebner Prize Competition--Joseph Weintraub's computer program PC Therapist. In 1985 an old friend, Hugh Loebner, told me excitedly that the Turing Test should be made into an annual contest.

Rita G. Minker, an early worker in the field of computer programming, died on October 11, 1988 of cancer at the age of 61 Mrs Minker received a B S degree with High Honors in Mathematics from Douglass College in 1948 and a M A. degree in Mathematics from the University of Wisconsin in 1950 In the summer of 1950 Mrs Minker started to work at the Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey She programmed network problems for one of the early digital computers, the Bell Relay Machine She was among the first computer programmers in the United States On June 24, 1951 she married Jack Minker, whom she had met at the University of Wisconsin The couple moved to Buffalo, New York where Mrs Minker was employed as a mathematician at the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratories. She worked on electronic analog computers on which she simulated the performance of missile systems. In 1952 she was hired by RCA in Camden, New Jersey and became the second computer programmer, and the first woman programmer to work at that company She programmed the Bizmac, RCA's first computer. In April 1964, Mrs. Minker returned to work as a mathematician and computer programmer in the newly formed Division of Computer Research and Technology (DCRT) at the National Institutes of Health (NIHj in Bethesda, Maryland She served as Head, Training Unit in DCRT from 1968-1975, and instituted training courses to permit medical researchers to learn how to program and work with computers and become familiar with statistical methods. In 1975, after having built up the Training Division, she joined the Statistical Software Section, Laboratory of Statistical and Mathematical Methodology of the DCRT She was able to participate and assist medical researchers with their programming and statistics problems she was also in charge of consulting on and maintaining SPSS, a major statistical package.

The Eighth Annual Mobile Robot Competition and Exhibition was held as part of the Sixteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Orlando, Florida, 18 to 22 July. The goals of these robot events are to foster the sharing of research and technology, allow research groups to showcase their achievements, encourage students to enter robotics and AI fields at both the undergraduate and graduate level, and increase awareness of the field. The 1999 events included two robot contests; a new, long-term robot challenge; an exhibition; and a National Botball Championship for high school teams sponsored by the KISS Institute. Each of these events is described in detail in this article. The contests require entrants to tackle a set of established tasks in a competitive environment.

The Twentieth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence was held July 9-13, 2005, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The conference, which marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), received 803 submissions to the technical program. All papers were double-blind reviewed, and 150 papers were accepted for oral presentation, while 79 papers were accepted for poster presentation. The keynote address was delivered by Marvin Minsky. The conference was attended by about 975 representatives from academe and industry.

Extempo Systems, Inc., was founded in 1995 to commercialize intelligent characters. Our team built innovative software and novel applications for several markets. We had some early-adopting customers during the Internet boom, but the company could not survive the significant downturn in corporate IT spending when the bubble burst. In 2004, Extempo ceased operations and was formally liquidated. Although our commercial venture failed, we advanced the technology for intelligent characters and learned a lot about how (not) to take them to market.

The development of intelligent environments is considered an important step toward the realization of the ambient intelligence vision. Intelligent environments are technologically augmented everyday spaces that intuitively support human activity. The IE conferences traditionally provide a leading-edge forum for researchers and engineers to present their latest research and to discuss future directions in the area of intelligent environments. This article briefly presents the content of the Fifth International Conference on Intelligent Environments (IE09), which was held July 20-21 at the Castelldefels campus of the Technical University of Catalonia near Barcelona, Spain. The general chairs were Dolors Royo, Angelica Reyes, and Leandro Navarro of the Technical University of Catalonia.

We present a deployed AI system, Calvin, for cosmogenic isotope dating, a domain that is fraught with these difficult issues. Calvin solves these problems using an argumentation framework and a system of confidence that uses twodimensional vectors to express the quality of heuristics and the applicability of evidence. The arguments it produces are strikingly similar to published expert arguments. Calvin is in daily use by isotope dating experts. An automated tool can do boring and repetitive reasoning, freeing experts to do more difficult and creative work.