This year's conferences were held in Perhaps one of the true litmus tests of any conference is the caliber of the invited speakers. Sensibility: Sentiment Analysis, Opinion and research manager at Microsoft Research) The distinguished Robert S. Englemore Mining, and the Computational who gave his AAAI presidential Memorial Award Lecture was delivered Treatment of Subjective Language"), address, "Artificial Intelligence in the by Kenneth Ford (Florida Institute while Seth C. Goldstein (Carnegie Open World." Mel lon University) discussed revolutionary Chris Urmson (Carnegie Mellon In his lecture, "Toward Cognitive work in self-reconfiguring programmable University), a leading member of the Prostheses," Ford discussed human-centered matter composed of ensembles of submillimeter robots in his DARPA Urban Grand Challenge winning computing to amplify talk, "Realizing Claytronics: A Challenge team, described the race and winning human cognition and perception. Instead of the learning for network analysis in ("From Images to Scenes: Using popular competition, which has his talk, "Making Sense of Complex Lots of Data to Infer Geometric, Photometric, pushed the envelope of mobile robotics Networks." David Haussler (University and Semantic Scene Properties since its inception, this year was of California, Santa Cruz) traced the from a Single Image"), and Lillian host to a Robot Workshop and Exhibition.

Partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) provide a principled framework for sequential planning in uncertain single agent settings. An extension of POMDPs to multiagent settings, called interactive POMDPs (I-POMDPs), replaces POMDP belief spaces with interactive hierarchical belief systems which represent an agent's belief about the physical world, about beliefs of other agents, and about their beliefs about others' beliefs. This modification makes the difficulties of obtaining solutions due to complexity of the belief and policy spaces even more acute. We describe a general method for obtaining approximate solutions of I-POMDPs based on particle filtering (PF). We introduce the interactive PF, which descends the levels of the interactive belief hierarchies and samples and propagates beliefs at each level. The interactive PF is able to mitigate the belief space complexity, but it does not address the policy space complexity. To mitigate the policy space complexity - sometimes also called the curse of history - we utilize a complementary method based on sampling likely observations while building the look ahead reachability tree. While this approach does not completely address the curse of history, it beats back the curse's impact substantially. We provide experimental results and chart future work.

The task of identifying synonymous relations and objects, or synonym resolution, is critical for high-quality information extraction. This paper investigates synonym resolution in the context of unsupervised information extraction, where neither hand-tagged training examples nor domain knowledge is available. The paper presents a scalable, fully-implemented system that runs in O(KN log N) time in the number of extractions, N, and the maximum number of synonyms per word, K. The system, called Resolver , introduces a probabilistic relational model for predicting whether two strings are co-referential based on the similarity of the assertions containing them. On a set of two million assertions extracted from the Web, Resolver resolves objects with 78% precision and 68% recall, and resolves relations with 90% precision and 35% recall. Several variations of resolver's probabilistic model are explored, and experiments demonstrate that under appropriate conditions these variations can improve F1 by 5%. An extension to the basic Resolver system allows it to handle polysemous names with 97% precision and 95% recall on a data set from the TREC corpus.

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. Details check the IJCAI-09 and IAAI-09 websites County Arboretum, the Huntington about both conferences will be for updates to the slate of speakers. The IJCAI-09 conference will be the "Rose." Pasadena has a lively arts scene, on Innovative Applications of Registration, hotel, and student with such diverse offerings as the famous Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-09) will be housing information and forms are Pasadena Playhouse or Ice held in Pasadena, California at the available on the IJCAI-09 conference House Comedy Club, which has Pasadena Convention Center, July 11-web site at ijcai-09.org.

The Fourth International Conference on Knowledge Capture was held October 28-31, 2007, in Whistler, British Columbia. The topics covered in the invited talks, technical papers, posters, and demonstrations included knowledge engineering and modeling methodologies, knowledge engineering and the semantic web, mixedinitiative planning and decision-support tools, acquisition of problem-solving knowledge, knowledge-based markup techniques, knowledge extraction systems, knowledge acquisition tools, and advice-taking systems. These events, which were from web-based game-playing systems. The title of his talk was "Human Ken Barker and John Gennari Derek Sleeman noted in his introductory Etzioni's invited talk and had primary responsibilities for comments, knowledge capture is gave some technical details of the systems the conference and workshop programs. In the The best technical paper Since the K-CAP series was initiated, last decade or so, knowledge capture award was presented to Kai Eckert, the K-CAP and European Knowledge has again expanded its horizons significantly Heiner Stuckenschmidt, and Magnus Acquisition Workshop (EKAW) meetings to embrace information-extraction Pfeffer for their paper "Interactive have been held in alternate years, techniques, and more recently Thesaurus Assessment for Automatic with the K-CAP meetings taking place the web and enhanced connectivity Document Annotation."

Moving toward true robot autonomy may require new paradigms, hardware, and ways of thinking. The goal of the AAAI 2008 Workshop on Mobility and Manipulation was not only to demonstrate current research successes to the AAAI community but also to road-map future mobility and manipulation challenges that create synergies between artificial intelligence and robotics. The half-day workshop included both a session on the exhibits and a panel discussion. The panel consisted of five prominent researchers who led a discussion of future directions for mobility and manipulation research. Andrew Ng of Stanford University (along with students Ashutosh Saxena and Ellen Klingbeil) focuses on opening arbitrary doors through learning a few visual keypoints, such as the location and type of door handle.

SPARK'08 was the first edition of a workshop series designed to provide a stable, longterm forum where researchers could discuss Workshop (SPARK) was established to help address this issue. Building on precursory events, SPARK'08 was the first workshop designed Scheduling (ICAPS-08) held in Sydney, Australia, in September 2008. Like its immediate predecessor (the ICAPS'07 Workshop on Moving Planning and Scheduling Systems), the 2008 SPARK workshop was collocated with the International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS), a premier forum for research in AI planning and scheduling, and the International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming (CP). A handful of outstanding application-oriented papers are presented each year at the ICAPS conference. Time and again, in invited talks and in open microphone discussion sessions such as ICAPS's Festivus (where conference participants air their grievances in an open and entertaining way), researchers have lamented the small number of applications papers accepted at conferences such as ICAPS, CP, and the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence.

Developments in mechanical control and complex motion planning have enabled robots to become almost commonplace in situations requiring precise but menial, tedious, and repetitive tasks. Recent robotics research has targeted the mechanical and computational challenges inherent in performing a much broader range of tasks autonomously. These problems are less well-defined, requiring greater intelligence, commonsense reasoning, and oftentimes novel solutions. By most definitions, creativity (the generation of novel and useful ideas) is necessary for intelligence; thus research efforts focusing on robotics and creativity are also efforts toward artificial intelligence. As robots and computer physical systems become more capable, they are increasingly useful in the study of creativity itself.

AAAI was pleased to present the AAAI-08 Workshop Program, held Sunday and Monday, July 13–14, in Chicago, Illinois, USA. The program included the following 15 workshops: Advancements in POMDP Solvers; AI Education Workshop Colloquium; Coordination, Organizations, Institutions, and Norms in Agent Systems, Enhanced Messaging; Human Implications of Human-Robot Interaction; Intelligent Techniques for Web Personalization and Recommender Systems; Metareasoning: Thinking about Thinking; Multidisciplinary Workshop on Advances in Preference Handling; Search in Artificial Intelligence and Robotics; Spatial and Temporal Reasoning; Trading Agent Design and Analysis; Transfer Learning for Complex Tasks; What Went Wrong and Why: Lessons from AI Research and Applications; and Wikipedia and Artificial Intelligence: An Evolving Synergy.

Demonstration materials can take the research and industry presentations, project demonstrations, (Path planning, animation / camera control, tactical / strategic form of a recorded demonstration session, an executable version interactive poster sessions, and product exhibits.