Public school choice at the primary and secondary levels is a keyelement of the U.S. No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB). If aschool does not meet assessment goals for two consecutive years, bylaw the district must offer students the opportunity to transfer to aschool that is meeting its goals. Thus we have developed an online,content-based recommender system, called SmartChoice. Itprovides parents with school recommendations for individual studentsbased on parents' preferences and students' needs, interests,abilities, and talents.

AAAI 2008 Workshop Reports

SPARK'08 was the first edition of a workshop series designed to provide a stable, long-term forum where researchers could discuss the applications of planning and scheduling techniques to real problems. Animated discussion characterized the workshop, which was collocated with Eighteenth International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS-08) held in Sydney, Australia in September 2008.

This summer's AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-08) and its sister Conference on Innovative Applications of AI (IAAI-08) continued their long tradition of being a focal point of AI. This year's conferences were held in Chicago at the Hyatt Regency McCormick Place, July 13-17, 2008. The multidimensional conference offerings included nine invited talks, 251 technical papers, 22 innovative applications of AI papers, three competitions (poker, AI video, and general game playing), three special tracks (AI and the web, integrated intelligence, and physically grounded AI), 15 tutorials, 15 workshops, and 11 intelligent system demonstrations, as well as a number of awards, a doctoral consortium, student poster session and programs, and a vendor exhibit. An additional 175 people exclusively attended the tutorials, workshops, or exhibit.

The AAAI 2008 Workshop on Mobility and Manipulation (held during the Twenty-Third AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence) showcased advances in mobility and manipulation through a half-day workshop and an exhibition. The workshop focused on possible solutions to both technical and organizational challenges to mobility and manipulation research. This article presents the highlights of that discussion along with the content of the accompanying exhibits.

We address user system interaction issues in product search and recommender systems: how to help users select the most preferential item from a large collection of alternatives. As such systems must crucially rely on an accurate and complete model of user preferences, the acquisition of this model becomes the central subject of our paper. Many tools used today do not satisfactorily assist users to establish this model because they do not adequately focus on fundamental decision objectives, help them reveal hidden preferences, revise conflicting preferences, or explicitly reason about tradeoffs. In this article, we provide some analyses of common areas of design pitfalls and derive a set of design guidelines that assist the user in avoiding these problems in three important areas: user preference elicitation, preference revision, and explanation interfaces.

Selecting extended logic programming with the answer-set semantics as a "generic" nonmonotonic logic, we show how that logic defines preferred belief sets and how preferred belief sets allow us to represent and interpret normative statements. Conflicts among program rules (more generally, defaults) give rise to alternative preferred belief sets. Finally, we comment on formalisms which explicitly represent preferences on properties of belief sets. Such formalisms either build preference information directly into rules and modify the semantics of the logic appropriately, or specify preferences on belief sets independently of the mechanism to define them.

Over the last few years, a number of areas of natural language processing have begun applying graph-based techniques. These include, among others, text summarization, syntactic parsing, word-sense disambiguation, ontology construction, sentiment and subjectivity analysis, and text clustering. In this paper, we present some of the most successful graph-based representations and algorithms used in language processing and try to explain how and why they work.

The titles of the eight symposia were as follows: (1) AI Meets Business Rules and Process Management, (2) Architectures for Intelligent Theory-Based Agents, (3) Creative Intelligent Systems, (4) Emotion, Personality, and Social Behavior, (5) Semantic Scientific Knowledge Integration, (6) Social Information Processing, (7) Symbiotic Relationships between Semantic Web and Knowledge Engineering, (8) Using AI to Motivate Greater Participation in Computer Science The goal of the AI Meets Business Rules and Process Management AAAI symposium was to investigate the various approaches and standards to represent business rules, business process management and the semantic web with respect to expressiveness and reasoning capabilities. The Semantic Scientific Knowledge Symposium was interested in bringing together the semantic technologies community with the scientific information technology community in an effort to build the general semantic science information community. The Social Information Processing's goal was to investigate computational and analytic approaches that will enable users to harness the efforts of large numbers of other users to solve a variety of information processing problems, from discovering high-quality content to managing common resources. The purpose of the Using AI to Motivate Greater Participation in Computer Science symposium was to identify ways that topics in AI may be used to motivate greater student participation in computer science by highlighting fun, engaging, and intellectually challenging developments in AI-related curriculum at a number of educational levels.

Some examples of analog networks are genetic regulatory networks, metabolic networks, neural networks, analog electronic circuits, and control systems. Both the synthesis and reverse engineering of analog networks are recognized as knowledge-intensive activities, for which few systematic techniques exist. The proposed approach is called analog genetic encoding (AGE) and realizes an implicit genetic encoding of analog networks. This is illustrated by some examples of application to the design of electronic circuits, control systems, learning neural architectures, and the reverse engineering of biological networks.