There is a great dispute among researchers about the roles, characteristics, and specifications of what are called agents, intelligent agents, and adaptive agents. Most research in the field focuses on methodologies for solving specific problems (for example, communications, cooperation, architectures), and little work has been accomplished to highlight and distinguish the field of intelligent agents. As a result, more and more research is cataloged as research on intelligent agents. The Workshop on Intelligent Adaptive Agents, presented as part of the Thirteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, addressed these issues as well as many others that are presented in this article.

We have selected 10 specific projects for this study, including general ontologies, domain-specific ones, and one knowledge representation system. The comparison framework includes general characteristics, such as the purpose of an ontology, its coverage (general or domain specific), its size, and the formalism used. Characteristics that describe the content of an ontology include taxonomic organization, types of concept covered, top-level divisions, internal structure of concepts, representation of part-whole relations, and the presence and nature of additional axioms. By identifying the similarities and differences among existing ontologies, we clarify the range of alternatives in creating a standard framework for ontology design.

The Workshop on Agent Modeling, held as part of the Thirteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, was organized to bring together researchers working in these areas to assess the state of the art and discuss the common issues in representation and reasoning with models of agents.

Search engines are among the most successful applications on the web today. So many search engines have been created that it is difficult for users to know where they are, how to use them, and what topics they best address. Metasearch engines reduce the user burden by dispatching queries to multiple search engines in parallel. The SAVVYSEARCH metasearch engine is designed to efficiently query other search engines by carefully selecting those search engines likely to return useful results and responding to fluctuating load demands on the web.

This article describes FAQ FINDER, a natural language question-answering system that uses files of frequently asked questions as its knowledge base. Unlike AI question-answering systems that focus on the generation of new answers, FAQ FINDER retrieves existing ones found in frequently asked question files. Unlike information-retrieval approaches that rely on a purely lexical metric of similarity between query and document, FAQ FINDER uses a semantic knowledge base (WORDNET) to improve its ability to match question and answer. We include results from an evaluation of the system's performance and show that a combination of semantic and statistical techniques works better than any single approach.

Robotics Team 1 from Kansas State University was the team that perfectly completed the Office Navigation event in the shortest time at the fifth Annual AAAI Mobile Robot Competition and Exhibition, held as part of the Thirteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence. The team, consisting of Michael Novak and Darrel Fossett, developed its code in an undergraduate software-engineering course. Its C code used multiple threads to provide separate autonomous agents to solve the meeting scheduling task, control the sonar sensors, and control the actual robot motion. The team's robot software was nicknamed SLICK WILLIE for the way it gracefully moved through doorways and around obstacles.

This article describes JEEVES, one of the winning entries in the 1996 Annual AAAI Mobile Robot Competition and Exhibition, held as part of the Thirteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence. The model, a geometric map constructed from sensory data gathered while the robot performed its task, enabled JEEVES to sweep the arena efficiently. This article argues that JEEVES's success depended crucially on the existence of the model. It also argues that models are generally useful in mobile robotics -- even in tasks as simple as the one faced in this competition.

This article is the content of an invited talk given by the authors at the Thirteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-96). The piece begins with a short history of the competition, then discusses the technical challenges and the political and cultural issues associated with bringing it off every year. We also cover the science and engineering involved with the robot tasks and the educational and commercial aspects of the competition. We finish with a discussion of the community formed by the organizers, participants, and the conference attendees.

This article discusses the use of fast (60 frames per second) object tracking using the COGNACHROME VISION SYSTEM, produced by Newton Research Labs. The authors embedded the vision system in a small robot base to tie for first place in the Clean Up the Tennis Court event at the 1996 Annual AAAI Mobile Robot Competition and Exhibition, held as part of the Thirteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Of particular interest is that the authors' entry was the only robot capable of using a gripper to capture and pick up the motorized, randomly moving squiggle ball. Other examples of robotic systems using fast vision tracking are also presented, such as a robot arm capable of catching thrown objects and the soccer-playing robot team that won the 1996 Micro Robot World Cup Soccer Tournament in Taejon, Korea.

The workshop entitled "Gaps and Bridges: New Directions in Planning and Natural Language Generation" was held on 12 August 1996 in Budapest, Hungary. This article describes the four sessions of the workshop and summarizes the important themes that were revealed.