In 2008, the AAAI Robotics organizers eschewed the previous format of a Robot Competition, choosing instead to focus on groundbreaking work representing two areas of robotics: creativity and mobility and manipulation (detailed in a separate article). Both workshops were held on July 14, and the Robotics Exhibition included participants from both categories. The Robotics and Creativity Workshop was made possible through the support of the National Science Foundation's CreativeIT program and Microsoft Research. Developments in mechanical control and complex motion planning have enabled robots to become almost commonplace in situations requiring precise but menial, tedious, and repetitive tasks. Recent robotics research has targeted the mechanical and computational challenges inherent in performing a much broader range of tasks autonomously.

The titles of the seven symposia were (1) Adaptive Agents in Cultural Contexts, (2) AI in Eldercare: New Solutions to Old Problems, (3) Automated Scientific Discovery, (4) Biologically Inspired Cognitive Architectures, (5) Education Informatics: Steps toward the International Internet Classroom, (6) Multimedia Information Extraction, and (7) Naturally Inspired AI. The goal of the Adaptive Agents in Cultural Contexts symposium was to investigate agents and environments for behavior in social and cultural contexts and for realistic adaptation of such agents to changing situations. These fields are vast, variegated, informed by disparate theoretical and technical disciplines, and interrelated. This symposium was intended to examine the intersection of findings from the field, theory, and applications in such areas as autonomous agent models and simulations for research, international commercial enterprise, nongovernmental organizations, and military, as well as commercial, games. The symposium began with an invited talk given by psychologist Helen Klein of Wright State University, who addressed the dimensions of culturally specific cognition and surveyed behavioral phenomena across cultures.

More than 40,000 learners worldwide have used TLCTS courses. TLCTS utilizes artificial intelligence technologies during the authoring process and at run time to process learner speech, engage in dialogue, and evaluate and assess learner performance. This paper describes the architecture of TLCTS and the artificial intelligence technologies that it employs and presents results from multiple evaluation studies that demonstrate the benefits of learning foreign language and culture using this approach. It includes interactive lessons that focus on particular communicative skills and interactive games that apply those skills. Heavy emphasis is placed on spoken communication: learners must learn to speak the foreign language to complete the lessons and play the games.

If a school does not meet assessment goals for two consecutive years, by law the district must offer stu dents the opportunity to transfer to a school that is meet ing its goals. Making a choice with such potential impact on a child's future is clearly monumental, yet astonishingly few parents take advantage of the opportunity. Our research has shown that a significant part of the problem arises from issues in information access and information overload, par ticularly for low socioeconomic status families. Thus we have developed an online, content-based recommender sys tem, called SmartChoice. It provides parents with school rec ommendations for individual students based on parents' pref erences and students' needs, interests, abilities, and talents.

Sponsored by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence and ACM SIGART Collocated with AAAI-10 AAAI and ACM/SIGART invite students to apply for the Fifteenth AAAI/SIGART Doctoral Consortium. The Doctoral Consortium (DC) provides an opportunity for a group of Ph.D. students to discuss and explore their research interests and career objectives with a panel of established researchers in artificial intelligence. The consortium has the following objectives: (1) to provide a setting for mutual feedback on participants' current research and guidance on future research directions; (2) develop a supportive community of scholars and a spirit of collaborative research; (3) support a new generation of researchers with information and advice on academic, research, industrial, and nontraditional career paths; and (4) contribute to the conference goals through interaction with other researchers and participation in conference events. The Doctoral Consortium will be held as a workshop on July 11-12, 2010, immediately before the start of the main AAAI conference. Student participants in the Doctoral Consortium will receive complimentary conference registration and a fixed allowance for travel/housing.

International Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society Conference (FLAIRS-23) was held May 19-21, 2010, at the Shores Resort and Spa in Daytona Beach Shores, Florida, USA. The conference featured an exciting lineup of invited speakers, a general conference track on artificial intelligence research, and numerous special tracks. The conference chair was David Wilson from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. The program cochairs were R. Charles Murray from Carnegie Learning and Hans W. Guesgen from Massey University in New Zealand. The special tracks coordinator was Philip McCarthy from the University of Memphis.

The titles of the seven symposia were Artificial Intelligence for Development; Cognitive Shape Processing; Educational Robotics and Beyond: Design and Evaluation; Embedded Reasoning: Intelligence in Embedded Systems; Intelligent Information Privacy Management; It's All in the Timing: Representing and Reasoning about Time in Interactive Behavior; and Linked Data Meets Artificial Intelligence. The Symposium on Artificial Intelligence for Development was organized to explore opportunities for using machine learning, inference, planning, and perception to enhance the quality of lives of disadvantaged populations. Over the last several years, a community of researchers with interest in applying computing and communication technologies in developing regions has come together under the label Information and Communication Technology for Development (ICT-D). However, ICT-D efforts to date have rarely focused on opportunities to harness machine learning, reasoning, and perception to create intelligent systems, services, models, and analyses. Beyond exploring research projects and directions, we hoped that bringing together a critical mass of researchers who share an interest in applying AI to development challenges would serve to help launch a new vibrant subfield of ICT-D on artificial intelligence for development (AID).

The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence was pleased to present the 2010 Fall Symposium Series, held Thursday through Saturday, November 11-13, at the Westin Arlington Gateway in Arlington, Virginia. The titles of the eight symposia are as follows: (1) Cognitive and Metacognitive Educational Systems; (2) Commonsense Knowledge; (3) Complex Adaptive Systems: Resilience, Robustness, and Evolvability; (4) Computational Models of Narrative; (5) Dialog with Robots; (6) Manifold Learning and Its Applications; (7) Proactive Assistant Agents; and (8) Quantum Informatics for Cognitive, Social, and Semantic Processes. The highlights of each symposium are presented in this report. The Cognitive and Metacognitive Educational Systems (MCES) AAAI symposium, held in November 2010, was the second edition of this successful AAAI symposium. The idea for the symposium stemmed from several theoretical, conceptual, empirical, and applied considerations about the role of metacognition and self-regulation when learning with computer-based learning environments (CBLEs). A related goal was the design and implementation issues associated with metacognitive educational systems. MCES implemented as CBLEs are designed to interact with users and support their learning and decision-making processes. A critical component of good decision making is self-regulation. The primary aim of this symposium was to continue the discussion started in 2009 on some of the previous considerations and to enhance the discussions with some new ones: What are the theoretical foundations and how are they articulated in CBLEs? Is it possible to develop a unified framework for all metacognitive educational systems? What are the necessary characteristics of these systems to support metacognition? To what extent does the educational system itself have to exhibit metacognitive behaviors, and how are these behaviors organized and enacted to support learning? What are the main aspects of metacognition, self-regulation skills, emotions, and motivations that influence the learning process? What does it mean to be metacognitive, and how can one learn to be metacognitive? Can MCES actually foster learners to be self-regulating agents? How can an MCES be autonomous and increase its knowledge to match the learners' evolving skills and knowledge?

It uses statistical language-classification technology for mapping from a user's text input to system responses. NPCEditor provides a user-friendly editor for creating effective virtual humans quickly. It has been deployed as a part of various virtual human systems in several applications. Imagine talking to a computer system that looks and acts almost human -- it converses, understands, can rea son, and can exhibit emotion. As an example, recall such computer characters created by Hollywood moviemakers as the librarian in Time Machine, the holographic professor in I Robot, and of course, the holodeck characters in numer ous Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes.

In this article we give a summary of three components of the exhibition: the Small-Scale Manipulation Challenge: Robotic Chess; the Learning by Demonstration Challenge; and the Education Track. We also describe the participating teams, highlight the research questions they tackled, and briefly describe the systems they demonstrated. The program has a long tradition of demonstrating innovative research at the intersection of robotics and artificial intelligence. In both the workshop and exhibition portions of the event, we strive to have the robotics program be a venue that pushes the science of embodied AI forward. Over the past few years, a central point of the event has been the discussion of common robot platforms and software, with the primary goal of focusing the research community's energy toward common "challenge" tasks.