The chapters in this book examine the state of today's agent technology and point the way toward the exciting developments of the next millennium. Contributors include Donald A. Norman, Nicholas Negroponte, Brenda Laurel, Thomas Erickson, Ben Shneiderman, Thomas W. Malone, Pattie Maes, David C. Smith, Gene Ball, Guy A. Boy, Doug Riecken, Yoav Shoham, Tim Finin, Michael R. Genesereth, Craig A. Knoblock, Philip R. Cohen, Hector J. Levesque, and James E. White, among others. Held at San Francisco's W Hotel, the conference included work from researchers and practitioners who are developing novel user interface and interaction paradigms that incorporate advanced reasoning and modeling techniques. In the past few years, user interfaces have faced increasingly challenging tasks, larger numbers of users with a wide range of computer skills, and the widespread use of new platforms such as mobile devices. These trends have led to a need for advanced techniques for communication and collaboration, personalization and adaptation of behavior, agent-based assistance, integrated multimodal interfaces, and a variety of intelligent front ends for complex environments and tasks.

Alan Turing's decades-old question still influences artificial intelligence because of the simple test he proposed in his article in Mind. In this article, AI Magazine collects presentations about the first round of the classic Turing Test of machine intelligence, held November 8, 1991 at The Computer Museum, Boston. Robert Epstein, Director Emeritus, Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies, and an adjunct professor of psychology, Boston University, University of Massachusetts (Amherst), and University of California (San Diego) summarizes some of the difficult issues during the planning of this first real-time competition, and describes the event. Presented in tandem with Dr. Epstein's article is the actual transcript of session that won the Loebner Prize Competition--Joseph Weintraub's computer program PC Therapist. In 1985 an old friend, Hugh Loebner, told me excitedly that the Turing Test should be made into an annual contest.

The RoboCupJunior division of RoboCup is now entering its third year of international participation and is growing rapidly in size and popularity. This article first outlines the history of the junior league since it was first demonstrated in Paris at RoboCup-1998 and describes how it has evolved into the international sensation it is today. Although the popularity of the event is self-evident, we are working to identify and quantify the educational benefits of the initiative. The remainder of the article focuses on describing our efforts to encapsulate these qualities, highlighting results from a pilot study conducted at RoboCupJunior-2000 and presenting new data from a subsequent study of RoboCupJunior-2001. In 1998, Lund and Pagliarini demonstrated the idea of a children's league for RoboCup, using robots constructed and programmed with the Lego Mindstorms kit that could play soccer (Land and Pagliarini 1998).

The Fifth International Conference on Genetic Algorithms was held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 17-21 July 1993. Approximately 350 participants attended the multitrack conference, which covered a wide range of topics, including genetic operators, mathematical analysis of genetic algorithms, parallel genetic algorithms, classifier systems, and genetic programming. This article highlights the major themes of the conference by discussing a few papers in detail. The conference was organized by Stephanie Forrest (University of New Mexico, conference cochair and editor of the proceedings), David Goldberg (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, conference cochair and local arrangements chair), and J. David Schaffer (Philips Laboratories, New York, conference cochair). Of the 240 papers submitted to the conference, 82 were accepted for oral presentation, and 37 were accepted for poster presentation.

My mom doesn't believe in the impossible. A Chinese immigrant and physics teacher, she arrived in the US with big dreams and limited English. During her first six months in the country, she would visit English-speaking friends to help her write checks--and when she got tired of that, she enrolled in an English class from 7 to 9 a.m. Today, she owns two thriving businesses with my dad. Cai Gao (@heycai_) is a fullstack software engineer at One Door, where she develops cloud-based merchandising software.

The Second International Workshop on User Modeling was held March 30-April 1, 1990 in Honolulu, Hawaii. The general chairperson was Dr. Wolfgang Wahlster of the University of Saarbrucken; the program and local arrangements chairperson was Dr. David Chin of the University of Hawaii at Manoa. The workshop was sponsored by AAAI and the University of Hawaii, with AAAI providing eight travel stipends for students. An excellent response to the call for papers and participants resulted in 46 high quality submissions, of which 24 were selected for presentation and discussion led by invited commentators. Whereas the first user modeling workshop, held in Maria Laach, West Germany in 1986, focused on user modeling in natural language dialogue systems, the 1990 workshop covered a broader range of topics, including user modeling in tutoring systems and psychological foundations of user modeling.

The American Association for Artificial Intelligence, in cooperation with Stanford University's Department of Computer Science, presented the 2004 Spring Symposium Series, Monday through Wednesday, March 22-24, at Stanford University. The titles of the eight symposia were (1) Accessible Hands-on Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Education; (2) Architectures for Modeling Emotion: Cross-Disciplinary Foundations; (3) Bridging the Multiagent and Multirobotic Research Gap; (4) Exploring Attitude and Affect in Text: Theories and Applications; (5) Interaction between Humans and Autonomous Systems over Extended Operation; (6) Knowledge Representation and Ontologies for Autonomous Systems; (7) Language Learning: An Interdisciplinary Perspective; and (8) Semantic Web Services. Each symposium had limited attendance. Most symposia chairs elected to create AAAI technical reports of their symposium, which are available as paperbound reports or (for AAAI members) are downloadable on the AAAI members-only Web site. This report includes summaries of the eight symposia, written by the symposia chairs.

The Eighth Annual Mobile Robot Competition and Exhibition was held as part of the Sixteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Orlando, Florida, 18 to 22 July. The goals of these robot events are to foster the sharing of research and technology, allow research groups to showcase their achievements, encourage students to enter robotics and AI fields at both the undergraduate and graduate level, and increase awareness of the field. The 1999 events included two robot contests; a new, long-term robot challenge; an exhibition; and a National Botball Championship for high school teams sponsored by the KISS Institute. Each of these events is described in detail in this article. The contests require entrants to tackle a set of established tasks in a competitive environment.

Learning how to create, test, and revise models is a central skill in scientific reasoning. We argue that qualitative modeling provides an appropriate level of representation for helping middle-school students learn to become modelers. We describe Vmodel, a system we have created that uses visual representations and that enables middle-school students to create qualitative models. Software coaches use simple analyses of model structure plus qualitative simulation to provide feedback and explanations. This system has been used in several studies in Chicago public school classrooms, using curricula developed in collaboration with teachers.

This article provides a historical background on the origins of AAAI, recounting some of the issues discussed and requirements to be fulfilled by the new society. It provides a personal reminiscence of some of the persons who founded the association, including Raj Reddy, Donald Walker, and Woody Bledsoe, and also recounts some of my experiences as secretarytreasurer and later president of AAAI. In 1979 he was the general chair for IJCAI-79, and I was the program chair, so we were already working closely together and thinking about organization. We were not alone in being frustrated by the phoenix-like nature of IJCAI--springing to life before every biannual conference, then dying, with little continuity. Also, it was obvious that volunteers from academe and industry had numerous distractions and other obligations besides IJCAI, so important deadlines could easily be missed.