AAAI announced its new class of AAAI Senior Members at the recent AAAI-12 Conference in Toronto. Senior Member status is designed to recognize AAAI members who have achieved significant accomplishments within the field of artificial intelligence. To be eligible for nomination for Senior Member, candidates must be consecutive members of AAAI for at least five years and have been active in the professional arena for at least ten years. Manuela Veloso, incoming AAAI President, and Eric Horvitz, AAAI Past President and Awards Committee Chair, presented the AAAI Awards in August at AAAI-12 in Toronto. The 2012 AAAI Distinguished Service Award recognizes one individual for extraordinary service to the AI community.

A series of special events celebrating the Alan M. Turing Centenary, including the ACM A. M. Turing Award Lecture by Judea Pearl, the 2012 Inaugural AAAI Turing Lecture by Christos Papadimitriou, and a special performance of "Hello Hi There" will be featured at AAAI-12 in Toronto. We hope you are planning to join us for AAAI-12, and collocated events IAAI-12 and EAAI-12, in Toronto, July 22-26, 2012. The AAAI-12 technical program will kick off with the opening reception in the Sheraton Centre Toronto Hotel on the evening of Monday, July 23, followed by the presentation of the annual AI Video Competition Awards. On Tuesday morning, July 24, the program chairs will welcome attendees, and conference and AAAI awards will be presented. The awards ceremony will be followed by the AAAI Presidential Address by Henry Kautz and then by the first of several Turing Centenary special events.

A series of special events celebrating the Alan M. Turing Centenary, including the 2012 Inaugural AAAI Turing Lecture by Christos Papadimitriou (University of California, Berkeley) and a special performance of "Hello Hi There" will be featured at AAAI-12 in Toronto. The Twenty-Sixth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-12) and the Twenty-Fourth Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-12) will be held in Toronto, Canada at the Sheraton Centre Hotel, July 22-23, 2012. The AAAI technical program will consist of the main technical track and four special tracks on AI and the Web, Cognitive Robotics (new!), Computational Sustainability and AI, and Robotics (new!), as well as a Best Paper Track, highlighting significant AI results presented at our sister conferences in the past two years. The program will also feature the keynote Presidential Address "Revisiting the Dream," by Henry Kautz, a joint IAAI / AAAI invited talk by Tom Gruber, and other invited talks by Regina Barzilay (CSAIL, Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Ross King (Aberystwyth University), Josh Tenenbaum (Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT), Sebastian Thrun (Google / Stanford University), and Luis von Ahn (Carnegie Mellon University). The third iteration of the AAAI Symposium on Educational Advances on AI will be collocated with AAAI (details follow), and the AAAI program will also include 12 half-day tutorials, 10 workshops, the AAAI Robotics Program, AAAI Poker Competition, the Video Competition, Student Abstract Posters, the AAAI/SIGART Doctoral Consortium, and more!

Please Join Us for AAAI / IAAI 2012 in Toronto! The Twenty-Sixth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-12) will be held July 22-26, 2012, at the Sheraton Centre in Toronto, Canada. The Twenty-Fourth Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-12) will be collocated with AAAI-12, and will be held July 24-26 (see www.aaai.org/Conferences/ The AAAI program cochairs for 2012, Joerg Hoffmann (INRIA, France) and Bart Selman (Cornell University, NY, USA) will continue the innovations introduced during the past several years of the conference, including two new special tracks. An overview of the special tracks follows. For the full technical Call for Participation, as well as all program deadlines and guidelines, please visit the AAAI-12 website at www.aaai.org/aaai12. AAAI-12 will also include all of these ongoing programs! For complete details about any of the AAAI-12 programs, please visit the AAAI-12 website, www.aaai.org/aaai12.

Henry Kautz, AAAI President, and Eric Horvitz, AAAI Past President and Awards Committee Chair, presented the AAAI Awards in August at AAAI-11 in San Francisco. The 2011 AAAI Classic Paper Award was given to the authors of the most influential papers from the Tenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, held in 1992 in San Jose, California. The award was presented to Hector Levesque, David Mitchell, and Bart Selman for their two papers, Hard and Easy Distribution of SAT Problems and A New Method for Solving Hard Satisfiability Problems. These papers were honored for their significant contributions to the area of automated reasoning via methods and analyses on satisfiability, providing foundational insights about constraint satisfaction and search. Hector Levesque received his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto in 1981.

AAAI is delighted to announce that Sebastian Thrun, professor of computer science and electrical engineering and director of the Stanford AI Lab at Stanford University, and William A. "Red" Whittaker, professor, Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, have been selected as the winners of the inaugural 2011 AAAI Feigenbaum Prize. This prize is awarded biennially to recognize and encourage outstanding artificial intelligence research advances that are made by using experimental methods of computer science. Thrun and Whittaker, whose teams won the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge and 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge, respectively, are being recognized in particular for high-impact contributions to the field of artificial intelligence through innovation and achievement in autonomous vehicle research, transitioning the concept of an autonomous vehicle from the realm of fiction to reality. The associated cash prize of $10,000 is provided by the Feigenbaum Nii Foundation. The prize will be presented during the opening ceremony of AAAI-11, to be held Tuesday, August 9, at the Hyatt Regency San Francisco.

Henry Kautz, AAAI President, and Eric Horvitz, AAAI Past President and Awards Committee Chair, presented the AAAI Awards in July at AAAI-10 in Atlanta. For information about nominations for AAAI 2011 Awards, please contact Carol Hamilton at hamilton@aaai.org or 650-328-3123. The 2010 AAAI Classic Paper Award was given to the authors of the most influential paper from the Ninth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, held in 1991 in Anaheim, California. The award was presented to David McAllester and David Rosenblitt for Systematic Nonlinear Planning. This paper was honored for contributing seminal principles of systematic nonlinear planning, with wide-ranging influences on the evolution of research on automated planning.

We hope you are planning to join us for AAAI-10, and collocated events IAAI-10 and EAAI-10, in Atlanta, Georgia, July 11-15, 2010. The AAAI-10 technical program will kick off with the opening reception in the Westin Peachtree Plaza on the evening of Monday, July 12, followed by the presentation of the annual AI Video Competition Awards. On Tuesday morning, July 12, the program chairs will welcome attendees, and conference and AAAI awards will be presented. The awards ceremony will be followed by the AAAI-10 keynote address, to be delivered by Leslie Pack Kaelbling (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) entitled "Intelligent Interaction with the Real World." AAAI-10 has an outstanding program of invited presentations, featuring Carla P. Gomes (Cornell University), Barry O'Sullivan (University College Cork), David C. Parkes (Harvard University), and Michael Thielscher (The University of New South Wales).

The Twenty-Fourth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-10) and the Twenty-Second Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-10) will be held in Atlanta at the Westin Peachtree Plaza Hotel, July 11-15, 2010. The AAAI Conference will turn 25 in San Francisco in 2011. You won't want to miss this milestone event. The preliminary list of invited speakers for IJCAI-09 is now available at the conference website and includes Cristina Conati (University of British Columbia), Tom Dietterich (Oregon State University), Luc Steels (Free University of Brussels), Hal Varian (Google and University of California, Berkeley), Gerhard Widmer (Johannes Kepler University), Qiang Yang (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology). Award lectures will also be presented by the winners of the 2009 IJCAI Award for Research Excellence, Victor Lesser (University of Massachusetts Amherst), and the 2009 IJCAI Computers and Thought Award, Carlos Guestrin (Carnegie Mellon University and Andrew Ng (Stanford University).

AAAI-11: The AAAI Conference Turns 25 in San Francisco! AAAI is pleased to announce that the Twenty-Fifth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-11) will be held at the Hyatt Regency in San Francisco, California, August 7-11, 2011. You won't want to miss this milestone event, held for the very first time in the City by the bay. Details about the AAAI-11 program will be posted as they become available at www.aaai.org/aaai11. We hope to see you in San Francisco!