Eric Horvitz, AAAI president, and Alan Mackworth, AAAI past president and Awards Committee chair, presented the AAAI Awards in July at AAAI-08 in Chicago. The 2008 AAAI Classic Paper Award was given to the authors of the most influential paper from the Eighth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, held in 1990 in Boston, Massachusetts. The award was presented to Steven Minton, Mark D. Johnston, Andrew B. Philips, and Philip Laird for "Solving Large-Scale Constraint Satisfaction and Scheduling Problems Using a Heuristic Repair Method." This paper was honored for its seminal contribution to stochastic local search for constraint satisfaction and its broad influence on local search algorithms and applications in artificial intelligence. In addition, Pattie Maes and Rodney A. Brooks received honorable mention for "Learning to Coordinate Behaviors" and their pioneering work on machine learning applied to the field of robotics, and on advancing the field of behavioral robotics.

The annual business meeting of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence will be held at 12:45 PM, Monday, July 14, 2008 in the Hyatt Regency McCormick Place in Chicago, Illinois. We hope you are planning to join us for AAAI-08 and IAAI-08 in Chicago, Illinois, July 13-17, 2008. The AAAI-08 program will feature Eric Horvitz's AAAI presidential address, as well as five outstanding invited talks. The invited speakers include Alexei A. Efros (Carnegie Mellon University) whose talk is titled From Images to Scenes: Using Lots of Data to Infer Geometric, Photometric and Semantic Scene Properties from a Single Image; David Haussler (University of California, Santa Cruz) who will present a talk called 100 Million Years of Evolutionary History of the Human Genome; Lillian Lee (Cornell University), speaking about Sense and Sensibility: Sentiment Analysis, Opinion Mining, and the Computational Treatment of Subjective Language; Mark Newman (University of Michigan), with a presentation titled Making Sense of Complex Networks; and Stuart Russell (University of California, Berkeley) speaking about What Is To Be Done? IAAI-08 invited speakers include Kenneth M. Ford (Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, IHMC), who will present the Robert S. Engelmore Memorial Award Lecture on Toward Cognitive Prostheses; Seth Copen Goldstein (Carnegie Mellon University), whose talk is titled Realizing Claytronics: A Challenge for AI; and Chris Urmson (Carnegie Mellon University), speaking about Boss, the Urban Challenge, and the Promise of Autonomous Driving.

AAAI-10 will be held in Atlanta, Georgia! 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. Please mark your calendars, and visit www.aaai.org/Conferences/AAAI/ AAAI recently launched a series of AAAI Member Events with an inaugural evening in Palo Alto on February 21, 2008. Member events allow members of a local community to gather for an evening of lively discussion and networking surrounding a presentation by a preeminent AI researcher or industry representative.

The Twenty-Third AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-08) will be held July 13-17, 2008, at the Hyatt Regency McCormick Place in Chicago, Illinois. The Twentieth Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-08) will be collocated with AAAI-08, and will be held July 15-17 (see www.aaai.org The program cochairs for 2008, Dieter Fox (University of Washington) and Carla Gomes (Cornell University) will continue the innovations introduced during the past two years of the conference, and have added a few new touches. Included in these will be a new special track on Physically Grounded AI and the opportunity for all technical paper authors to submit supplementary materials during the review process. An overview of the special tracks is included below.

AAAI-08 Is Coming to the Windy City! Save the date--July 13-17, 2008! Please mark your calendars now for the Twenty-Third AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-08) and the Twentieth Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence Conference (IAAI-08)! The conferences will be held July 13-17, at the Hyatt Regency Mc-Cormick Place in Chicago, Illinois. AAAI-08 program cochairs are Dieter Fox (University of Washington and Carla Gomes (Cornell University); the IAAI-08 conference chair is Mehmet Goker, PricewaterhouseCoopers, LLP.

Researchers from all areas of AI are encouraged to submit proposals to demonstrate their systems. Submissions will be evaluated on the basis of their innovation, relevance, scientific contribution, presentation, and usability, as well as potential logistical constraints. For complete information about the program and how to submit, please see aaai.org/Conferences/ AAAI-08 Is Coming to the Windy City! Save the date--July 13-17, 2008!

The winning papers were selected by the program cochairs with the help of some members of the Senior Program Committee. Alan Mackworth, AAAI President, and Ron Brachman, AAAI Past President and Awards Committee Chair, presented the AAAI awards in July at AAAI-07 in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Award winners received a certificate and a check for $1,000. The 2007 AAAI Classic Paper Award was given to the authors of the most influential paper from the Seventh National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, held in 1988 in St. Paul, Minnesota. The award was presented to Peter Cheeseman, Matthew Self, Jim Kelly, Will Taylor, and Don Freeman for "Bayesian Classification."

Mark your calendars now for AAAI-07, which will be the second AAAI conference to be held in Canada. You will note a slight name change in the conference to account for this trend! We are delighted to announce this permanent change as we expand the venue for the conference throughout the whole of North America. The Twenty-Second AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-07) will be held July 22-26, 2007, at the Hyatt Regency Vancouver in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, in cooperation with the Canadian Society for the Computational Studies of Intelligence (CSCSI/CSEIO) and the University of British Columbia. The Nineteenth Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence will be collocated with AAAI-07, and will be held July 24-26 (for details see the links at www.aaai.org/Conferences/).

Ron Brachman, AAAI Past President and Awards Committee Chair, and Alan Mackworth, AAAI President, presented the AAAI Awards in July at AAAI-06 in Boston, Massachusetts. Award winners received a certificate and a check for $1,000. For more information about nominations for AAAI 2007 Awards, please contact Carol Hamilton at hamilton@aaai.org or 650-328-3123. The 2006 AAAI Classic Paper Award was given to the authors of the most influential papers from the Sixth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, held in 1987 in Seattle, Washington. A joint award was presented this year to Philip E. Agre and David Chapman for "Pengi: An Implementation of a Theory of Activity" and to Michael P. Georgeff and Amy L. Lansky for "Reactive Reasoning and Planning."

We hope you are planning to join us for AAAI-06 and IAAI-06 in Boston Massachusetts, July 16-20, 2006. The response has been overwhelming, as AAAI celebrates 50 years of AI in the United States. A host of new programs will be showcased at the conference, including special tracks on AI and the Web and Integrated Intelligent Capabilities, Senior Member Papers, Nectar Papers, Member Abstracts and Posters, and a Poker Competition. A record 361 papers and abstracts will be presented at AAAI-06 and IAAI-06, and eight outstanding invited talks will be presented by Tim Berners-Lee, Bruce Buchanan, Sebastian Thrun, Pedro Domingos, Neil Jacobstein, Ken Koedinger, Karen Myers, and Dan Roth. For more details about the conference, please see Sara Hedberg's article elsewhere in this issue.