The Twenty-Second National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-07) and the Nineteenth Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-07) will be held in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada at the Hyatt Regency Vancouver, July 22-26, 2007. Please plan to join us for our second conference in Canada! The Twenty-First National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-06) and the Eighteenth Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-06) will be held in Boston, Massachusetts at the Seaport Hotel and World Trade Center, July 16-20, 2006. The AAAI-06 keynote address will be given by Tim Berners-Lee, Director of the World Wide Web Consortium, on Tuesday, July 18. Other invited speakers include Pedro Domingos (University of Washington), Ken Koedinger (Carnegie Mellon University), Karen Myers (SRI International), and Dan Roth (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign).

The Twenty-First National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-06) will be held July 16-20, 2006, at the Seaport Hotel and World Trade Center in Boston Massachusetts. The Eighteenth Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence will be collocated with AAAI-06, and will be held July 18-20. The special track on AI and the Web invites technical papers on the use of AI techniques, systems, and concepts involving the Web. The program chairs are especially interested in receiving papers in two active research areas: (1) using text and language analysis to interpret and understand natural language text found on the web and (2) developing and exploiting semantic web languages and systems that explicitly encode knowledge using languages such as RDF and OWL. Papers submitted to this track should report on theoretical or empirical studies that highlight the role of integration of multiple components in achieving intelligent behavior.

Tom Mitchell, AAAI past president and Awards Committee chair, and Ron Brachman, AAAI president, presented the AAAI awards in July at AAAI-05 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Award winners received a certificate and a check for $1,000. He formerly held the position of associate professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Washington Seattle, and between academic jobs held a variety of industry positions at Harlequin Software, Amazon.com, and other companies. He earned a Ph.D. degree from Yale University, and an M.B.A. degree from the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. Drew McDermott has done work in several areas of artificial intelligence. One of his perennial interests is in planning algorithms, which calculate structures of actions for autonomous agents of various sorts. He did seminal work in the area of hierarchical planning in the 1970s. In the last decade, his focus has switched to regressionbased techniques for classical planning, especially methods ...

Every year four new councilors are elected to serve three-year terms on the AAAI Executive Council. The Nominating Committee encourages all regular members in good standing to place an individual's name before them for consideration. The Nominating Committee, in turn, will nominate eight candidates for councilor in the spring. In addition to members' recommendations, the committee will actively recruit individuals in order to provide a balanced slate of candidates. AAAI members will vote in the late spring of 2006.

The Twenty-First National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-06) and the Eighteenth Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-06) will be held in Boston, Massachusetts at the Seaport Hotel and World Trade Center, July 16-20, 2006. AAAI-06 will mark the launch of activities celebrating AI's fiftieth anniversary. Please join us for this landmark event! AAAI is pleased to announce the launch of the First Annual Artificial Intelligence for Interactive Digital Entertainment Conference. The conference will be held June 1-3, 2005 at the Marriott Hotel in Marina del Rey, California.

The Twentieth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-05) will be held from July 9-13, 2005, at the Westin Convention Center Pittsburgh Hotel in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The Seventeenth Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence will be collocated with AAAI-05, and will be held from July 11-13. Other programs to be held during the course of the conference include the AAAI-05 Workshop Program (from July 9-10), the AAAI-05 Tutorial Forum (from July 9-10), the AAAI-05 Student Abstract and Poster Program (July 12), the Tenth AAAI/SIGART Doctoral Consortium (from July 9-10), the AAAI Intelligent Systems Demonstrations (July 12), the AAAI Mobile Robot Competition and Exhibition (from July 11-13), and the AAAI Game Playing Competition (from July 11-13). Information is also available by email (aaai05@aaai.org). The AAAI-05 workshops will be held on Saturday and Sunday, July 9-10, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Tom Mitchell, AAAI Past President and Awards Committee Chair, and Ron Brachman, AAAI President, presented the AAAI Awards recently at AAAI-04 in San Jose, California. The award winners received a certificate and a check for $1,000. The 2004 AAAI Classic Paper Award was given to the author of the most influential paper from the Fourth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, held in 1984 in Austin, Texas. The Awards Committee selected Hector J. Levesque, of the University of Toronto, to receive this award for his paper, "A Logic of Implicit and Explicit Belief." Levesque was honored for his seminal contributions to the formalization of knowledge and belief.

The annual business meeting of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence will be held at 12:45 PM, Thursday, July 29, 2004 in the San Jose McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, California. AAAI is delighted to continue its cooperative effort with AI Journal, giving unlimited access to the online version of the Artificial Intelligence Journal to all regular AAAI members. AAAI regular members can view and browse tables of contents, view articles published in recent issues of AI Journal, and use the current features available through Elsevier's electronic journal service. They may also view, print, and/or download excerpts of reasonable quantity, provided that the use of such excerpts is personal and does not amount to, or result in, commercial distribution. Participation in this program is included in your normal AAAI membership dues.

The deadline for volunteer applications is April 15, 2004. The Nineteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence will be held July 25-29, 2004 at the San Jose Convention Center in San Jose, California. The Sixteenth Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-04) will be collocated with AAAI-04. Other programs include the Intelligent Systems Demos, the Mobile Robot Competition, the Tutorial Forum, the Workshop Program, the Student Abstract and Poster Program, and the AAAI/SIGART Doctoral Consortium. AAAI-04 and IAAI-04 Calls for Technical Papers, Workshop Proposals, Tutorial Forum Proposals, Student Programs, Intelligent Systems Demonstrations, and other related programs have been mailed to all AAAI members.

Many of you have been receiving the AI Alert newsletter, which highlights selected features from the "AI in the News" section of the AAAI Pathfinder/AI Topics web pages. If you are a member of AAAI and would like to begin receiving this newsletter, along with other AAAI announcements, please subscribe to our AAAI membership list server by sending email to majordomo@aaai.org Be sure to visit the AI Topics web site at www.aaai.org/AITopics/aitopics.html The deadline for nominations is November 1, 2003. The 2004 Spring Symposium Series will be held March 22-24, 2004 at Stanford University.