We briefly survey the rise of game theory as a topic of study in artificial intelligence, and explain the term algorithmic game theory. Finally, we give short summaries of each of the six articles appearing in this issue.

Information extraction (IE) can identify a set of relations from free text to support question answering (QA). Until recently, IE systems were domain-specific and needed a combination of manual engineering and supervised learning to adapt to each target domain. A new paradigm, Open IE operates on large text corpora without any manual tagging of relations, and indeed without any pre-specified relations. We explore the steps needed to adapt Open IE to a domain-specific ontology and demonstrate our approach of mapping domain-independent tuples to an ontology using domains from DARPA's Machine Reading Project.

This article gives a detailed description of True Knowledge: a commercial, open-domain question answering platform. The system combines a large and growing structured knowledge base of common sense, factual and lexical knowledge; a natural language translation system that turns user questions into internal language-independent queries and an inference system that can answer those queries using both directly represented and inferred knowledge. The system is live and answers millions of questions per month asked by internet users.

The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, in cooperation with Stanford University's Department of Computer Science, is pleased to present the 2010 Spring Symposium Series, to be held Monday through Wednesday, March 22–24, 2010 at Stanford University. The titles of the seven symposia are Artificial Intelligence for Development; Cognitive Shape Processing; Educational Robotics and Beyond: Design and Evaluation; Embedded Reasoning: Intelligence in Embedded Systems Intelligent Information Privacy Management; It's All in the Timing: Representing and Reasoning about Time in Interactive Behavior; and Linked Data Meets Artificial Intelligence.

By extending Cyc's ontology and KB approximately 2%, Cycorp and Cleveland Clinic Foundation (CCF) have built a system to answer clinical researchers' ad hoc queries. But, surprisingly often, after applying various constraints (medical domain knowledge, common sense, discourse pragmatics, syntax), there is only one single way to fit those fragments together, one semantically meaningful formal query P. The system, SRA (for Semantic Research Assistant), dispatches a series of database calls and then combines, logically and arithmetically, their results into answers to P. Seeing the first few answers stream back, the user may realize that they need to abort, modify, and re-ask their query. Besides real-time ad hoc query-answering, queries can be bundled and persist over time. Until full articulation/answering of precise, analytical queries becomes as straight-forward and ubiquitous as text search, even partial understanding of a query empowers semantic search over semi-structured data (ontology-tagged text), avoiding many of the false positives and false negatives that standard text searching suffers from.

PIM: A Novel Architecture for Coordinating Behavior of Distributed Systems

Applying Software Engineering to Agent Development

Pushing the Limits of Rational Agents: The Trading Agent Competition for Supply Chain Management

Report on the 2008 Reinforcement Learning Competition

This article introduces the challenge of digital preservation in the area of engineering design and manufacturing and presents a methodology to apply knowledge representation and semantic techniques to develop Digital Engineering Archives. This work is part of an ongoing, multiuniversity, effort to create cyber infrastructure-based engineering repositories for undergraduates (CIBER-U) to support engineering design education. The technical approach is to use knowledge representation techniques to create formal models of engineering data elements, workflows and processes. With these formal engineering knowledge and processes can be captured and preserved with some guarantee of long-term interpretability.