De Groot was going on a year long trip to the U.S. and the highlight of his journey was a visit to Herb Simon and Allen Newell. I met Allen for the first time when I came for a two semester long visit to Carnegie Mellon University in 1968. This encounter was a distinct factor in my later decision to join the faculty at Carnegie Mellon University. I interacted with Allen much more closely when I became department head in 1979. He was for me a mentor and a sounding board for ideas I wanted to pursue for computer science at Carnegie Mellon University. I enjoyed working with many good friends on the faculty, but Allen was really special. Many of us will remember him for his evenhanded treatment of all students at the Black Friday meetings. He would never pursue his own agenda, he would always look for the merit of a student's work and not whether the rules were violated. He was a staunch defender of the rule that replaces all rules, which says that the only thing that counts is whether or ...

A special session entitled "Future Directions In Artificial Intelligence" was held at the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Washington, D.C. in August. The session, chaired by Jack Minker, was held to honor Soviet cyberneticist Alexander Yankelovich Lerner's seventieth birthday. Minker described Dr. Lerner's contributions to science. Participants Saul Amarel, Nils Nilsson, John McCarthy and Patrick Winston gave a technical presentation, followed by questions from the audience. Following the session, 228 attendees signed a letter wishing Dr. Lerner a happy birthday, and 233 attendees signed a petition to be sent to Yuri Andropov of the Soviet Union requesting that Dr. Lerner be given permission to emigrate so that he may join his daughter and her family in Israel.

Artificial intelligence (AI), on the 50th anniversary of its naming, is an autonomous discipline. The field has an established record of success, as exemplified by three recent achievements presented at AAAI-06/IAAI-06. It is now mature enough to collaborate productively with its sister disciplines, realizing the dream of ubiquitous computational intelligence. AI, a field still young as sciences go, is golden in achievement and promise. The 50th anniversary of the naming of our field, at Dartmouth College in 1956, is a time for reminiscence, celebration, and prognostication.

AAAI-17 Has Moved in Time and Place! We are delighted to announce that AAAI-17 will be held February 4-9 at the Hilton San Francisco Union Square! AAAI-17 program cochairs Shaul Markovitch and Satinder Singh will continue the traditions of past years with a strong technical program, including three special tracks, as well as rich outreach programs for students, women, and sister conferences. Special technical tracks will include cognitive systems, computational sustainability, and integrated systems. For complete details on the technical program, and the call for papers, please see www.aaai.org/aaai17.php. San Francisco is full of delights for every visitor.

This honor was announced at the recent AAAI-16 Conference in Phoenix. 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. Tom Dietterich, AAAI President, Manuela Veloso, AAAI Past President and Awards Committee Chair, and Rao Kambhampati, AAAI President-Elect, presented the AAAI Awards in February at AAAI-16 in Phoenix. The 2016 AAAI Classic Paper Award was given to the authors of the two papers deemed most influential from the Fifteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, held in 1998 in Madison, Wisconsin, USA.

The Thirtieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-16) and the Twenty-Eighth Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-16) will be held February 12-17 at the Phoenix Convention Center in Phoenix, Arizona, USA. Phoenix is America's sixth largest city, yet still has real cowboys, rugged mountains, and the kind of cactus most people see only in cartoons. Phoenix is the gateway to the Grand Canyon, and its history is a testament to the spirit of puebloans, ranchers, miners, and visionaries. Projected against this rich backdrop is a panorama of urban sophistication, with a host of museums, including the Pueblo Grande Museum and Archaeological Park and the Heard Museum, sports stadiums, restaurants, and shopping. Nearby Tempe is the site of Arizona State University, home of a leading AI research community.

The planning for AAAI-16 in Arizona, February 12-17, 2016 has begun! We hope you will join us for a memorable anniversary year. AAAI-16 Program Cochairs Dale Schuurmans and Michael Wellman plan to build on all the innovations introduced in the past few years, and will introduce a few of their own. Special technical tracks will include Cognitive Systems (Chairs: David Leake (Indiana University) and James Lester (North Carolina State University), Computational Sustainability (Chairs: J. Zico Kolter (Carnegie Mellon University) and Claire Monteleoni (George Washington University), and Integrated Systems (Chairs: Patrick Doherty (Linköping University) and Malik Ghallab (CNRS). Please check the inset on the following page for important deadlines.

Each year a small number of fellows are recognized for their unusual distinction in the profession and for their sustained contributions to the field for a decade or more. An official dinner and ceremony was held in their honor during AAAI-15 in Austin, Texas. The honorees for 2015 were as follows. Rama Chellappa (University of Maryland) For significant contributions to Markov random fields, 3D recovery from single and mutiple images and image/video-based recognition Marco Dorigo (Université Libre de Bruxelles) For seminal contributions to the foundations of swarm intelligence, including ant colony optimization and swarm robotics Holger H. Hoos (University of British Columbia) For significant contributions to the field of automated reasoning and the development of widely used methods for algorithm selection and configuration Adele E. Howe (Colorado State University) For significant contributions to the theory, practice and evaluation of automated planning, scheduling and other AI technologies, as well as service to the AI community Thorsten Joachims (Cornell University) For significant contributions to the theory and practice of machine learning and information retrieval AAAI announced its new class of AAAI Senior Members at the recent AAAI-15 Conference in Austin. Senior Member status is designed to recognize AAAI members who have achieved significant accomplishments within the field of artificial intelligence.

Check Out the New AAAI Member Site! AAAI is pleased to announce the launch of the new AAAI member site. By now you should have received email and login information for the new AAAI member site. Using this site, you can renew your membership in AAAI and update your contact information directly. In addition, you will be directly connected with other members of the largest worldwide AI community via the AAAI online directory and other social media features. Direct links are available for new AI Magazine features, such as the online and app versions.

AAAI is delighted to announce that the IBM Watson Team has been selected as the winner of the 2013 AAAI Feigenbaum Prize. Jennifer Chu-Carroll of IBM accepted the award during AAAI-13 on behalf of the entire team for their successful Jeopardy challenge in 2010. The team was specifically honored for demonstrating that a synthesis of AI techniques, including symbolic knowledge representation, natural language understanding, and statistical machine learning, can achieve human-level performance in real-time factual questionanswering. The Feigenbaum Prize is awarded biennially to recognize and encourage outstanding artificial intelligence research advances that are made by using experimental methods of computer science. The associated cash prize of $10,000 is provided by the Feigenbaum Nii Foundation. The 2013 AAAI Classic Paper Award was given to the authors of the most influential papers from the Twelfth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, held in 1994 in Seattle, Washington.