The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) presented the AAAI-02 Workshop Program on Sunday and Monday, 28-29 July 2002 at the Shaw Convention Center in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. The AAAI-02 workshop program included 18 workshops covering a wide range of topics in AI. The workshops were Agent-Based Technologies for B2B Electronic-Commerce; Automation as a Caregiver: The Role of Intelligent Technology in Elder Care; Autonomy, Delegation, and Control: From Interagent to Groups; Coalition Formation in Dynamic Multiagent Environments; Cognitive Robotics; Game-Theoretic and Decision-Theoretic Agents; Intelligent Service Integration; Intelligent Situation-Aware Media and Presentations; Meaning Negotiation; Multiagent Modeling and Simulation of Economic Systems; Ontologies and the Semantic Web; Planning with and for Multiagent Systems; Preferences in AI and CP: Symbolic Approaches; Probabilistic Approaches in Search; Real-Time Decision Support and Diagnosis Systems; Semantic Web Meets Language Resources; and Spatial and Temporal Reasoning.

The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, in cooperation with Stanford University's Department of Computer Science, presented the 2002 Spring Symposium Series, held Monday through Wednesday, 25 to 27 March 2002, at Stanford University. The nine symposia were entitled (1) Acquiring (and Using) Linguistic (and World) Knowledge for Information Access; (2) Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Entertainment; (3) Collaborative Learning Agents; (4) Information Refinement and Revision for Decision Making: Modeling for Diagnostics, Prognostics, and Prediction; (5) Intelligent Distributed and Embedded Systems; (6) Logic-Based Program Synthesis: State of the Art and Future Trends; (7) Mining Answers from Texts and Knowledge Bases; (8) Safe Learning Agents; and (9) Sketch Understanding.

The Fifteenth Annual International Conference of the Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society (FLAIRS) was held in Pensacola Beach, Florida, 14 to 16 May 2002. Spanning a broad spectrum of AI research, the conference was composed of a general track and 14 themed special tracks. Conference highlights included invited talks by James Allen, Randall Beer, Jeff Bradshaw, Bill Clancey, Clark Glymour, and Pat Hayes. Two parallel workshops on causality and categorization and studies of expert knowledge and skill followed the conference.

Delivering effective customer service over the internet requires attention to many aspects of knowledge management if it is to be both satisfying for customers and economical for the company or other organization. In RightNow ESERVICE CENTER, such management is built into the architecture and supported by automatically gathering metainformation about the documents held in the core knowledge base. A variety of AI techniques are used to facilitate the construction, maintenance, and navigation of the knowledge base. Customers using ESERVICE CENTER report dramatic decreases in support costs and increases in customer satisfaction because of the ease of use provided by the self-learning features of the knowledge base.

The infrastructure of modern society is controlled by software systems. These systems are vulnerable to attacks; several such attacks, launched by "recreation hackers," have already led to severe disruption. This article is set in the context of self-adaptive survivable systems: software that judges the trustworthiness of the computational resources in its environment and that chooses how to achieve its goals in light of this trust model. Self-adaptive survivable systems contain models of their intended behavior; models of the required computational resources; models of the ways in which these resources can be compromised; and finally, models of the ways in which a system can be attacked and how such attacks can lead to compromises of the computational resources.

In this article, we first survey the three major types of computer music systems based on AI techniques: (1) compositional, (2) improvisational, and (3) performance systems. For this reason, previous approaches, based on following musical rules trying to capture interpretation knowledge, had serious limitations. An alternative approach, much closer to the observation-imitation process observed in humans, is that of directly using the interpretation knowledge implicit in examples extracted from recordings of human performers instead of trying to make explicit such knowledge. In the last part of the article, we report on a performance system, SAXEX, based on this alternative approach, that is capable of generating high-quality expressive solo performances of jazz ballads based on examples of human performers within a case-based reasoning (CBR) system.

The operation of a human organization requires dozens of everyday tasks to ensure coherence in organizational activities, monitor the status of such activities, gather information relevant to the organization, keep everyone in the organization informed, and so on. Based on this vision, this article reports on ELECTRIC ELVES, a system that has been operational 24 hours a day, 7 days a week at our research institute since 1 June 2000. Tied to individual user workstations, fax machines, voice, and mobile devices such as cell phones and palm pilots, ELECTRIC ELVES has assisted us in routine tasks, such as rescheduling meetings, selecting presenters for research meetings, tracking people's locations, organizing lunch meetings, and so on. We also report the results of deploying ELECTRIC ELVES in our own research organization.

With the emergence of electronic-commerce systems, successful information access on electroniccommerce web sites becomes essential. To provide an efficient solution for information access, we have built the NATURAL language ASSISTANT (NLA), a web-based natural language dialog system to help users find relevant products on electronic-commerce sites. The system brings together technologies in natural language processing and human-computer interaction to create a faster and more intuitive way of interacting with web sites. By combining statistical parsing techniques with traditional AI rule-based technology, we have created a dialog system that accommodates both customer needs and business requirements.

The RoboCup Rescue Physical Agent League Competition was held in the summer of 2001 in conjunction with the AAAI Mobile Robot Competition Urban Search and Rescue event, eerily preceding the September 11 World Trade Center (WTC) disaster. Four teams responded to the WTC disaster through the auspices of the Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue (CRASAR), directed by John Blitch. Blitch, through his position as program manager for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Tactical Mobile Robots Program, was a supporter of the competition; he also served as a member of the rules committee and a judge. USF participated by chairing the rules committee, judging, assisting with the logistics, providing commentary, and demonstrating tethered and wireless robots whenever entrants had to skip around during the competition.

Botball is a national program in which teams of middle and high school students design, build, and program small autonomous mobile robots to compete in a highly charged interactive (but nondestructive) tournament. Botball students learn to program in c, construct feedback and control loops, create electromechanical systems, and integrate it all together while they work on a team. Botball takes place in regional tournaments across the country and culminates in a National Botball Tournament traditionally hosted by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence at its annual conference. This program puts reusable equipment into schools and, at the Botball Teacher Workshops, trains teachers in robotics and the integration of robotics into their curriculum.