Marvin Lee Minsky, a founder of the field of artificial intelligence and professor at MIT, celebrated his 80th birthday on August 9, 2007. This article seizes an opportune time to honor Marvin and his contributions and influence in artificial intelligence, science, and beyond. The article provides readers with some personal insights of Minsky from Danny Hillis, John McCarthy, Tom Mitchell, Erik Mueller, Doug Riecken, Aaron Sloman, and Patrick Henry Winston -- all members of the AI community that Minsky helped to found. The article continues with a brief resume of Minsky's research, which spans an enormous range of fields. It concludes with a short biographical account of Minsky's personal history.

This book proposes to separate knowledge from software and to make it a commodity that is called knowware. The architecture, representation and function of Knowware are discussed. The principles of knowware engineering and its three life cycle models: furnace model, crystallization model and spiral model are proposed and analyzed. Techniques of software/knowware co-engineering are introduced. A software component whose knowledge is replaced by knowware is called mixware. An object and component oriented development schema of mixware is introduced. In particular, the tower model and ladder model for mixware development are proposed and discussed. Finally, knowledge service and knowware based Web service are introduced and compared with Web service. In summary, knowware, software and hardware should be considered as three equally important underpinnings of IT industry. Ruqian Lu is a professor of computer science of the Institute of Mathematics, Academy of Mathematics and System Sciences. He is a fellow of Chinese Academy of Sciences. His research interests include artificial intelligence, knowledge engineering and knowledge based software engineering. He has published more than 100 papers and 10 books. He has won two first class awards from the Academia Sinica and a National second class prize from the Ministry of Science and Technology. He has also won the sixth Hua Loo-keng Mathematics Prize.

Hackman delivered a talk entitled "Humans, Robots, and Teams" that leveraged work in The conference's outstanding paper award went to "Humanoid Robots as a Passive-Social Medium: A Field Experiment at a Train Station" by Kotaro The best student paper award went to Guy Hoffman and Cynthia Breazeal for their paper, titled "Effects of Anticipatory HRI-2007 was the second step "Speed Adaptation for a Robot Walking Spurred by included teamwork, social robotics, momentum has been built for HRI-advances in robotics technologies and adaptation, observation and metrics, 2008, which will be held in Amsterdam, communications, many researchers attention, user experience, and The Netherlands, March 12-15, are studying how to use these field testing. The 21st International FLAIRS Conference (FLAIRS-21) will be held May 15 - 17, 2008 at the Grand Bay Miami Hotel in the village of Coconut Grove, Miami, Florida, USA. The conference hotel is on the waterfront of Biscayne Bay close to downtown Miami and South Beach. FLAIRS-21 will feature technical papers, special tracks, and General Chair invited speakers on artificial intelligence. Architectures: Agents and distributed AI, Intelligent user interfaces, Natural lane@ict.usc.edu

Symposia will be limited to between forty and sixty participants. Each participant will be expected to attend a single symposium. In addition to invited participants, a limited number of other interested parties will be allowed to register in each symposium on a first-come, first-served basis. Working notes will be prepared and distributed to participants in each symposium, but will not otherwise be available unless published as an AAAI Technical Report or edited collection. The final deadline for registration is October 12, 2007. For registration information, please contact AAAI at fss07@aaai.org or visit AAAI's web site (www.aaai.org/Symposia/Fall/fss07.

Approximately November 9-11, at the Westin Arlington and IAAI-08, please see www.aaai.org/

This year's program, to be held in conjunction later this spring!

We Papers submitted to the II track should For a complete list of deadlines, program are delighted to announce this permanent highlight synergistic effects of integrating information, and to check for change as we expand the venue components from distinct areas further updates, please visit the AAAIfor the conference throughout the of AI to achieve intelligent behavior.

Imagine an Internet-scale knowledge system where people and intelligent agents can collaborate on solving complex problems in business, engineering, science, medicine, and other endeavors. Its resources include semantically tagged websites, wikis, and blogs, as well as social networks, vertical search engines, and a vast array of web services from business processes to AI planners and domain models. Research prototypes of decentralized knowledge systems have been demonstrated for years, but now, thanks to the web and Moore's law, they appear ready for prime time. This article introduces the architectural concepts for incrementally growing an Internet-scale knowledge system and illustrates them with scenarios drawn from e-commerce, e-science, and e-life.

Rob Miller (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) will be held July 22-26, 2007 in Vancouver, Holger Hoos (University of British Columbia) British Columbia, Canada.

Two overarching goals were promoted for the 2005 Mobile Robot Competition. The first was to give the competitions an exhibitionstyle format to make them as accessible to different areas of research as possible. This was change would place the competitions and exhibitions demonstrated at the Fourteenth Annual AAAI directly in line with the conference, Mobile Robot Competition and Exhibition, an teams would need to handle the challenges involved event hosted at the Twentieth National Conference with noisy, cluttered, and unstructured on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2005). The robot event had a particularly strong human environments. Scavenger Hunt: Autonomous robots were required to search a cluttered and crowded environment This year, AAAI changed the venue format for a defined list of objects and were from a convention center to a hotel setting. The Scavenger as defined by the team, and feedback Hunt event was organized by Douglas from the participants. Blank from Bryn Mawr College, the Robot Robot Challenge: Robots were required to attend Challenge and the Open Interaction Task were the conference autonomously, including organized by Ashley Stroupe from the Jet registering for the conference, navigating the Propulsion Laboratory, the research component conference hall, talking with attendees, and of the exhibition was organized by Magdalena answering questions.