The Workshop on Logic-Based Artificial Intelligence (LBAI) was held in Washington, D.C., on 13 to 15 June 1999. The workshop was organized by Jack Minker and John McCarthy. Its purpose was to bring together researchers who use logic as a fundamental tool in AI to permit them to review accomplishments, assess future directions, and share their research in LBAI.

Some application domains highlight the importance of distributed continual planning concepts; coordinating teams of unmanned ground vehicles in dynamic environments is an example of such a domain. In this article, I illustrate the ideas in, and promises of, distributed continual planning by showing how acquiring and distributing operator intent among multiple semiautonomous vehicles supports ongoing, cooperative mission elaboration and revision.

There's More to Life Than Making Plans: Plan Management in Dynamic, Multiagent Environments

On 30 October 1998, Mihaela Sabin and I ran the Constraint Problem Reformulation Workshop in conjunction with the Fourth International Conference on the Principles and Practices of Constraint Programming held in Pisa, Italy. The goals of the workshop were to discuss the nature of constraint problem reformulation and the benefits and difficulties in reformulating constraint problems and to summarize and understand the recent work in this area.

AI has embraced medical applications from its inception, and some of the earliest work in successful application of AI technology occurred in medical contexts. Medicine in the twenty-first century will be very different than medicine in the late twentieth century. Fortunately, the technical challenges to AI that emerge are similar, and the prospects for success are high.

Twenty-six people participated, and 16 papers were presented. The first day was devoted to paper presentations and discussions. The second (half) day, a joint session was held with two other workshops: (1) Building, Maintaining, and Using Organizational Memories and (2) Intelligent Information Integration. The reason for the joint session was that in all three workshops, ontologies play a prominent role, and the goal was to bring together researchers working on related issues in different communities.

The Seventh International Workshop on Nonmonotonic Reasoning was held in Trento, Italy, on 30 May to 1 June 1998 in conjunction with the Sixth International Conference on the Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR-98). The workshop was sponsored by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, Compulog, Associazione Italiana per l'Intelligenza Artificiale, and the Prolog Development Center.

This article gives an overview of two recent events on the validation and verification of knowledge-based systems: (1) the 1997 European Symposium on the Verification and Validation of Knowledge-Based Systems (EUROVAV-97) and (2) the Four-teenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence Workshop on the Verification and Validation of Knowledge- Based Systems. To give an integrated view of current research issues in this field, we organized this article along thematic lines, unifying the reports of the two separate meetings. Our report focuses on the trends that we think will be important in the near future in this field.

In July 1997, the Sixth Annual Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) Mobile Robot Competition and Exhibition was held. The competition consisted of four new events: (1) Find Life on Mars; (2) Find the Remote; (3) Home Vacuum; and (4) Hors d'Oeuvres, Anyone? The robot exhibition was the largest in AAAI history. This article presents the history, motivation, and contributions for the event.

The Find-the-Remote event was considered the most challenging of the events in the 1997 AAAI Mobile Robot Competition and Exhibition. It required a broad range of both hardware and software capabilities. I discuss the rules and rationale for the event as well as the results.