Immediately preceding the 1993 National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (NCAI) in Washington D.C., a new conference series on the application of AI to molecular biology was inaugurated in neighboring Bethesda, Maryland. The First International Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB-93), held 6-9 July 1993 at the Lister Hill Center of the National Library of Medicine (NLM), attracted over 200 computer scientists and biologists from 13 countries.

The Second Annual Robotics Competition and Exhibition was held in July 1993 in conjunction with the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence. This article reports some of my experiences in helping to design and run the contest and some reflections, drawn from post mortem abstracts written by the competitors, on the relation of the contest to current research efforts in mobile robotics.

The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence sponsored a number of workshops in conjunction with the Eleventh National Conference on Artificial Intelligence held 11-15 July 1993 in Washington, D.C. This article contains reports of four of the workshops that were conducted: AI Models for System Engineering, Case-Based Reasoning, Reasoning about Function, and Validation and Verification of Knowledge Based Systems.

Benchmarks, test beds, and controlled experimentation are becoming more common. We discuss these issues as they relate to research on agent design. We survey existing test beds for agents and argue for appropriate caution in their use. We end with a debate on the proper role of experimental methodology in the design and validation of planning agents.

For over a decade now, AI techniques have been applied to some of the hardest problems faced by business today, often with stellar results and a tenfold-plus return on investment. One of the major problems faced by businesses in the 1990s is how to produce environmentally friendly products and stay profitable. A pioneering consortium at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is using AI, combined with operations research, environmental science, public policy, and other disciplines, to build tools for green engineering. Green engineering is an approach to product development that balances environmental compatibility against economic profitability.

Celite corporation and Andersen Consulting have developed an advanced approach to traditional software development called the application software factory (ASF)." The approach is an integration of technology and total quality "management" techniques that includes the use of an expert system to guide module design and perform "module programming." The expert system component is called the knowledge-based design assistant and its inclusion in the ASF methodology" has significantly reduced module development time, training time, and module and communication errors.

A robot-building lab and contest was held at the Eleventh National Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Teams of three worked day and night for 72 hours to build tabletop autonomous robots of legos, a small microcontroller board, and sensors. The robots then competed head to head in two events. This article contains my personal recollections of the lab and contest.

In AI, psychology, and education, a growing body of research supports the view that learning is a goal-directed process. Psychological experiments show that people with varying goals process information differently, studies in education show that goals have a strong effect on what students learn, and functional arguments in machine learning support the necessity of goal-based focusing of learner effort. At the Fourteenth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, a symposium brought together researchers in AI, psychology, and education to discuss goal-driven learning. This article presents the fundamental points illuminated at the symposium, placing them in the context of open questions and current research directions in goal-driven learning.

In his recent papers, entitled Intelligence without Representation and Intelligence without Reason, Brooks argues for mobile robots as the foundation of AI research. The article proposes real-world software environments, such as operating systems or databases, as a complementary substrate for intelligent-agent research and considers the relative advantages of software environments as test beds for AI. Brooks's mobile robots tug AI toward a bottom-up focus in which the mechanics of perception and mobility mingle inextricably with or even supersede core AI research. In contrast, the softbots (software robots) I advocate facilitate the study of classical AI problems in real-world (albeit, software) domains.

The second annual Robot Competition and Exhibition sponsored by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence was held in Washington D.C. on 13-15 July 1993 in conjunction with the Eleventh National Conference on Artificial Intelligence. This article describes the robots that placed first and second in each event and compares their strategies and their resulting successes and difficulties.