The Robot World Cup Soccer Games and Conferences (RoboCup) are a series of competitions and events designed to promote the full integration of AI and robotics research. Following the first RoboCup, held in Nagoya, Japan, in 1997, RoboCup-98 was held in Paris from 2-9 July, overlapping with the real World Cup soccer competition. RoboCup-98 included competitions in three leagues: (1) the simulation league, (2) the real robot small-size league, and (3) the real robot middle-size league. Champion teams were cmunited-98 in both the simulation and the real robot small-size leagues and cs-freiburg (Freiburg, Germany) in the real robot middle-size league.

The AAAI-99 Workshop Program (a part of the sixteenth national conference on artificial intelligence) was held in Orlando, Florida. Each workshop was limited to approximately 25 to 50 participants. Participation was by invitation from the workshop organizers. The workshops were Agent-Based Systems in the Business Context, Agents' Conflicts, Artificial Intelligence for Distributed Information Networking, Artificial Intelligence for Electronic Commerce, Computation with Neural Systems Workshop, Configuration, Data Mining with Evolutionary Algorithms: Research Directions (Jointly sponsored by GECCO-99), Environmental Decision Support Systems and Artificial Intelligence, Exploring Synergies of Knowledge Management and Case-Based Reasoning, Intelligent Information Systems, Intelligent Software Engineering, Machine Learning for Information Extraction, Mixed-Initiative Intelligence, Negotiation: Settling Conflicts and Identifying Opportunities, Ontology Management, and Reasoning in Context for AI Applications.

Three systems that generate real-time natural language commentary on the RoboCup simulation league are presented, and their similarities, differences, and directions for the future discussed. Although they emphasize different aspects of the commentary problem, all three systems take simulator data as input and generate appropriate, expressive, spoken commentary in real time.

Sony has provided a robot platform for research and development in physical agents, namely, fully autonomous legged robots. In this article, we describe our work using Sony's legged robots to participate at the RoboCup-98 legged robot demonstration and competition. Robotic soccer represents a challenging environment for research in systems with multiple robots that need to achieve concrete objectives, particularly in the presence of an adversary. We introduce the RoboCup context and briefly present Sony's legged robot.

The robot exhibition had a very successful 1998. The exhibition also included a published video proceedings for the first time. From a mechanical point of view, indoor wheeled robots were, as usual, the most common form of robot, but the exhibit also featured several outdoor wheeled robots, several legged robots, two humanoids, a snake, and a plant. From a software perspective, the exhibit featured general-purpose robot-control software, vision, teleoperation, language learning, teamwork and expression of emotion.

The three competitions -- (1) AAAI Mobile Robot, (2) AUVS Unmanned Ground Robotics, and (3) IJCAI RoboCup -- were used in different years for an introductory undergraduate robotics course, an advanced graduate robotics course, and an undergraduate practicum course. Based on these experiences, a strategy is presented for incorporating competitions into courses in such a way as to foster intellectual maturation as well as learn lessons in organizing courses and fielding teams. The article also provides a classification of the major robot competitions and discusses the relative merits of each for educational projects, including the expected course level of computer science students, equipment needed, and costs.

The Workshop on Intelligent Information Integration (III), organized in conjunction with the Sixteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, was held on 31 July 1999 in Stockholm, Sweden. Approximately 40 people participated, and nearly 20 papers were presented. This packed workshop schedule resulted from a large number of submissions that made it difficult to reserve discussion time without rejecting an unproportionately large number of papers. Participants included scientists and practitioners from industry and academia.

Planning and executing the resulting plans in a dynamic environment implies a continual approach in which planning and execution are interleaved, uncertainty in the current and projected world state is recognized and handled appropriately, and replanning can be performed when the situation changes or planned actions fail. Furthermore, complex planning and execution problems may require multiple computational agents and human planners to collaborate on a solution. In this article, we describe a new paradigm for planning in complex, dynamic environments, which we term distributed, continual planning (DCP). We give a historical overview of research leading to the current state of the art in DCP and describe research in distributed and continual planning.

In a complex, dynamic multiagent setting, coherent team actions are often jeopardized by conflicts in agents' beliefs, plans, and actions. CONSA focuses on exploiting the benefits of argumentation in a team setting. Thus, CONSA casts conflict resolution as a team problem, so that the recent advances in teamwork can be brought to bear during conflict resolution to improve argumentation flexibility. Furthermore, because teamwork conflicts sometimes involve past teamwork, teamwork models can be exploited to provide agents with reusable argumentation knowledge.