Summer 2001 marked the tenth AAAI Mobile Robot Competition and Exhibition. A decade of contests and exhibitions have inspired innovation and research in AI robotics. We also reflect on how the contest has served as an arena for important debates in the AI and robotics communities. The article closes with a speculative look forward to the next decade of AAAI robot competitions.

Serving hors d'oeuvres is not as easy as it might seem! You have to move carefully between people, gently and politely offer them hors d'oeuvres, make sure that you have not forgotten to serve someone in the room, and refill the serving tray when required. These are the challenges that robots have to face in the Hors d'Oeuvres, Anyone?

The 2001 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Mobile Robot Exhibition provided an opportunity for AI researchers to interact and share ideas. Despite some difficulties with environment and timing, the primary objective of disseminating information was achieved. A short summary of each robot demonstrates the variety in form and function among the exhibitions.

It Does So: Review of The Mind Doesn't Work That Way: The Scope and Limits of Computational Psychology

Many of the intelligent tutoring systems that have been developed during the last 20 years have proven to be quite successful, particularly in the domains of mathematics, science, and technology. We have been working on a new generation of intelligent tutoring systems that hold mixed-initiative conversational dialogues with the learner. The tutoring systems present challenging problems and questions to the learner, the learner types in answers in English, and there is a lengthy multiturn dialogue as complete solutions or answers evolve. This article presents the tutoring systems that we have been developing.

In this article, I describe agent-centered search (also called real-time search or local search) and illustrate this planning paradigm with examples. Agent-centered search methods interleave planning and plan execution and restrict planning to the part of the domain around the current state of the agent, for example, the current location of a mobile robot or the current board position of a game. These methods can execute actions in the presence of time constraints and often have a small sum of planning and execution cost, both because they trade off planning and execution cost and because they allow agents to gather information early in nondeterministic domains, which reduces the amount of planning they have to perform for unencountered situations. Agent-centered search methods have been applied to a variety of domains, including traditional search, strips-type planning, moving-target search, planning with totally and partially observable Markov decision process models, reinforcement learning, constraint satisfaction, and robot navigation.

The rubric representation covers at least three topics in this context: (1) how a computational system is represented in its user interface, (2) how the interface conveys its representations of information and the world to human users, and (3) how the system's internal representation affects the human user's interaction with the system. I argue that each of these kinds of representation (of the system, information and the world, the interaction) is key to how users make the kind of attributions of intelligence that facilitate their interactions with intelligent systems. In this vein, it makes sense to represent a systmem as a human in those cases where social collaborative behavior is key and for the system to represent its knowledge to humans in multiple ways on multiple modalities. I demonstrate these claims by discussing issues of representation and intelligence in an embodied conversational agent -- an interface in which the system is represented as a person, information is conveyed to human users by multiple modalities such as voice and hand gestures, and the internal representation is modality independent and both propositional and nonpropositional.

The belief that humans will be able to interact with computers in conversational speech has long been a favorite subject in science fiction, reflecting the persistent belief that spoken dialogue would be the most natural and powerful user interface to computers. With recent improvements in computer technology and in speech and language processing, such systems are starting to appear feasible. There are significant technical problems that still need to be solved before speech-driven interfaces become truly conversational. This article describes the results of a 10-year effort building robust spoken dialogue systems at the University of Rochester.

This article gives an overview of current research on animated pedagogical agents at the Center for Advanced Research in Technology for Education (CARTE) at the University of Southern California/Information Sciences Institute. Animated pedagogical agents, nicknamed guidebots, interact with learners to help keep learning activities on track. At CARTE, we have been developing guidebots that help learners acquire a variety of problem-solving skills in virtual worlds, in multimedia environments, and on the web. We are also developing technologies for creating interactive pedagogical dramas populated with guidebots and other autonomous animated characters.

Recent years have witnessed significant progress in intelligent user interfaces. Emerging from the intersection of AI and human-computer interaction, research on intelligent user interfaces is experiencing a renaissance, both in the overall level of activity and in raw research achievements. Because intelligent user interfaces are designed to facilitate problem-solving activities where reasoning is shared between users and the machine, they are currently transitioning from the laboratory to applications in the workplace, home, and classroom.