The Twenty-First National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-06) will be held July 16-20, 2006, at the Seaport Hotel and World Trade Center in Boston Massachusetts. The Eighteenth Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence will be collocated with AAAI-06, and will be held July 18-20. The special track on AI and the Web invites technical papers on the use of AI techniques, systems, and concepts involving the Web. The program chairs are especially interested in receiving papers in two active research areas: (1) using text and language analysis to interpret and understand natural language text found on the web and (2) developing and exploiting semantic web languages and systems that explicitly encode knowledge using languages such as RDF and OWL. Papers submitted to this track should report on theoretical or empirical studies that highlight the role of integration of multiple components in achieving intelligent behavior.

Tom Mitchell, AAAI past president and Awards Committee chair, and Ron Brachman, AAAI president, presented the AAAI awards in July at AAAI-05 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Award winners received a certificate and a check for $1,000. He formerly held the position of associate professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Washington Seattle, and between academic jobs held a variety of industry positions at Harlequin Software, Amazon.com, and other companies. He earned a Ph.D. degree from Yale University, and an M.B.A. degree from the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. Drew McDermott has done work in several areas of artificial intelligence. One of his perennial interests is in planning algorithms, which calculate structures of actions for autonomous agents of various sorts. He did seminal work in the area of hierarchical planning in the 1970s. In the last decade, his focus has switched to regressionbased techniques for classical planning, especially methods ...

Tom Mitchell, AAAI Past President and Awards Committee Chair, and Ron Brachman, AAAI President, presented the AAAI Awards recently at AAAI-04 in San Jose, California. The award winners received a certificate and a check for $1,000. The 2004 AAAI Classic Paper Award was given to the author of the most influential paper from the Fourth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, held in 1984 in Austin, Texas. The Awards Committee selected Hector J. Levesque, of the University of Toronto, to receive this award for his paper, "A Logic of Implicit and Explicit Belief." Levesque was honored for his seminal contributions to the formalization of knowledge and belief.

We are delighted to announce the continuation of the cooperative effort with AI Journal, giving unlimited access to the online version of the Artificial Intelligence Journal to all regular AAAI members. AAAI regular members can view and browse tables of contents, view articles published in recent issues of AI Journal, and utilize the current features available through Elsevier's electronic journal service. They may also view, print and/or download excerpts of reasonable quantity, provided that the use of such excerpts is personal and does not amount to or result in commercial distribution. Complete details were mailed to all regular members in good standing in January. If you have forgotten your membership number or need instructions, please write to us at membership04@aaai.org.

The 2004 Fellows Selection Committee is currently accepting nominations for AAAI Fellow. The AAAI Fellows program is designed to recognize people who have made significant, sustained contributions to the field of artificial intelligence over at least a ten-year period. All regular members in good standing are encouraged to consider nominating a candidate. Two references must accompany nominations. The nominator or one of the references must be an AAAI Fellow who is a current member of AAAI.

The deadline for volunteer applications is April 15, 2004. The Nineteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence will be held July 25-29, 2004 at the San Jose Convention Center in San Jose, California. The Sixteenth Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-04) will be collocated with AAAI-04. Other programs include the Intelligent Systems Demos, the Mobile Robot Competition, the Tutorial Forum, the Workshop Program, the Student Abstract and Poster Program, and the AAAI/SIGART Doctoral Consortium. AAAI-04 and IAAI-04 Calls for Technical Papers, Workshop Proposals, Tutorial Forum Proposals, Student Programs, Intelligent Systems Demonstrations, and other related programs have been mailed to all AAAI members.

AAAI is delighted to announce the continuation of its cooperative effort with AI Journal, giving unlimited access to the online version of the Artificial Intelligence Journal to all regular AAAI members. AAAI regular members can view and browse tables of contents, view articles published in recent issues of AI Journal, and utilize the current features available through Elsevier's electronic journal service. They may also view, print, and/or download excerpts of reasonable quantity, provided that the use of such excerpts is personal and does not amount to, or result in, commercial distribution. Participation in this experimental program is included in your normal AAAI membership dues. If you are a current regular member and have not received your reader key and instructions for accessing the online AI Journal, please contact membership03@aaai.org for more information.

The 2003 Fellows Selection Committee is currently accepting nominations for AAAI Fellow. The AAAI Fellows program is designed to recognize people who have made significant, sustained contributions to the field of artificial intelligence over at least a ten-year period. All regular members in good standing are encouraged to consider nominating a candidate. Two references must accompany nominations. The nominator or one of the references must be a AAAI Fellow who is a current member of AAAI.

Bruce Buchanan, AAAI Past President and Awards Committee Chair, presented the AAAI Awards recently at AAAI-02 in Edmonton, Canada. Each award winner received a certificate and a check for $2,500. The 2002 AAAI Classic Paper Award was given to the author of the most influential paper from the Third National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, held in 1983 in Washington, DC. The Awards Committee selected John Canny of the University of California, Berkeley, to receive this award for his paper, "A Variational Approach to Edge Detection." Canny was honored for his creation of the widely used Canny Edge Detector, and his seminal contributions in the areas of John Canny robotics and machine perception.

The AAAI Press - Distributed by The MIT Press Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 5 Cambridge Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02142 To order, call toll free: (800) 356-0343 or (617) 625-8569. AAAI is delighted to announce the continuation of its cooperative effort with AI Journal, giving unlimited access to the online version of the Artificial Intelligence Journal to all regular AAAI members. AAAI regular members can view and browse tables of contents, view articles published in recent issues of AI Journal, and use the current features available through Elsevier's electronic journal service. They may also view, print and/or download excerpts of reasonable quantity, provided that the use of such excerpts is personal and does not amount to or result in commercial distribution. Participation in this experimental program is included in your normal AAAI membership dues.