The Seventeenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-01) was held in Seattle, Washington, from 6 to 10 August 2001. It was a stimulating blend of invited speakers, special events, 29 workshops, 20 tutorials, 3 robot competitions, 4 days of technical paper presentations, innovative applications, awards, and more. For the 1,509 attendees of the technical conference, and the additional 1,171 who came to see the exhibits, it was a time for catching up with old colleagues and meeting new. Besides tackling the heady research and engineering agenda that is AI, attendees still know how to have fun. The opening reception was held at the Boeing Museum of Flight, and the conference banquet took place at beautiful Blake Island's Tillicum Village and included a hearty salmon feast.

AAAI is pleased to announce the continuation of its three special awards in 2002, and is currently seeking nominations for the 2002 AAAI Classic Paper Award, the AAAI Distinguished Service Award, and the AAAI Effective Expository Writing Award. The 2002 AAAI Classic Paper Award will be given to the author of the most influential paper(s) from the Third National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, held in 1983 in Washington, DC. The 2002 AAAI Distinguished Service Award will recognize one individual for extraordinary service to the AI community. Finally, the AAAI Effective Expository Writing Award will honor the author(s) of a high quality, effective piece of writing, accessible to the general public or to a broad AI audience (not just a subarea), written within the last two years. The contribution should be based on sound science, interesting ideas or systematic review, with nontrivial content, but the award is primarily for the exposition.

AAAI is delighted to announce the launch of a fantastic new benefit for its regular members. In cooperation with Elsevier Science Publishers, AAAI is offering its regular members an opportunity to enjoy unlimited access to the online version of the AI Journal. 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 can 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.

AAAI is pleased to announce the continued expansion of its awards program in 2000. The first AAAI Effective Expository Writing Award will be presented at the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, to be held July 31-August 3 in Austin, Texas. This award joins the two special awards established last year, the AAAI Classic Paper Award and the AAAI Distinguished Service Award. The AAAI Effective Expository Writing Award honors the author(s) of a high-quality, effective piece of writing, accessible to the general public or to a broad AI audience (not just a subarea), written within the last two years. The contribution should be based on sound science, interesting ideas, or systematic review, with nontrivial content, but the award is primarily for the exposition--the author need not be the one who has done the research.

AAAI President David L. Waltz presented the two new AAAI awards recently at AAAI-99 in Orlando, Florida. Each award winner received a certificate and a check for $2500. The AAAI Distinguished Service Award recognizes one individual each year for extraordinary service to the AI community. The AAAI Awards Committee is pleased to announce that the first recipient of this award was Barbara J. Grosz, Gordon McKay professor of computer science at Harvard University and a past president of AAAI. Grosz was honored for her contributions to the field of AI through sustained service in a multitude of academic, professional society, and government leadership roles at the local, national, and international levels, through which she has had a major effect on the field and on those working in it.

AAAI is pleased to announce the establishment of two new awards, to be presented annually at the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (except in years when the International Joint Conference for Artificial Intelligence is held in North America). This award will honor the author(s) of paper(s) deemed most influential, chosen from a specific conference year. The 1999 award will be given to the most influential paper(s) from the First National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, held in 1980 at Stanford University, Stanford, California.

AAAI membership is required for eligibility. For further information regarding the Student Volunteer Program, please contact AAAI at volunteer@aaai.org The deadline for volunteer applications is May 31, 1999. Please mark your calendars now for AAAI-99, which will be held July 18-22 in Orlando, Florida at the Omni Rosen Hotel. The Sixteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence will continue the 1998 experiment of collocation with at least two conferences, the Eleventh Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence and the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO-99).

Registration information for the Fifteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-98) will be available in late March by writing to ncai@aaai.org Copies of the AAAI-98 registration brochure are being mailed to all AAAI members. Please note that the deadline for early registrations is May 27, 1998. The conference will be held July 26-30, 1998, at the beautiful new Monona Terrace Convention Center, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, in Madison, Wisconsin. The conference will feature 16 tutorials, 18 workshops, the Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence, the Hall of Champions, the Mobile Robot Competition and Exhibition, the Robot Building Laboratory, and the Doctoral Consortium. New additions in 1998 will be the Integrated Systems Track of the technical program and the Intelligent Systems Demonstrations Program. Please check the AAAI web site for all the details and deadlines for these programs as well as announcements about other new features.

The Fourteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-97) and the Ninth Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-97) will be held in Providence, Rhode Island, from July 27-31, 1997. The Third International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD-97) will be held in Newport Beach, California from August 14-17, 1997 immediately following the American Statistical Association annual meeting in Anaheim. Information about these conferences is available by writing to AAAI at info@aaai.org Registration materials for AAAI-97, IAAI-97, and KDD-97 are now available from the AAAI office. Copies of the AAAI-97 and the KDD-97 registration brochures are being mailed to all AAAI members.

RoboCup, World Cup Robot Soccer, is a task for a team of multiple, fastmoving robots in a dynamic environment. The first RoboCup Competition will be held as part of the special program at IJCAI-97 in Nagoya, Japan, 23 to 29 August. There will be two tracks: one for physical robots and a second for software simulations. The Robo-Cup task offers opportunities for research on both the hardware and software aspects of multiagent systems. More information can be found at the RoboCup web site, http://www.robocup.org/RoboCup.