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.

If you are an undergraduate or graduate student enrolled in a degree program at any college or university and would like to assist the staff members during AAAI-91 in Anaheim, California (14-19 July 1991), please contact Paul O'Rorke or Michael Pazzani at the address given here. In exchange for assisting AAAI staff members during your volunteer shift, you will receive a complimentary AAAI-9 1 conference registration, the AAAI-91 conference proceedings, and a special AAAI-91 T-shirt. Our 1991 volunteer coordinators, Paul O'Rorke and Michael Pazzani, can be reached by mail at AAAI, 445 Burgess Drive, Menlo Park, CA 94025 or by email at ncai@ics.uci.edu. All inquiries should include your name, address, telephone, adviser's name, and email address. Abstracts of Ph.D. dissertations submittted for publication in AI Magazine should be limited to 1500 words.

Recent thinking has it that AI, 25 years ago a unified field with a shared vision of creating intelligent machines, has devolved into a loosely connected set of distinct specialty areas with little communication or mutual interest between them. To the extent that this is true, it certainly appears to lessen the value of a centralized AI organization like AAAI and of traditional grand-scale AI conferences. But, I argue, the consequences are actually far worse: because of the very nature of intelligence, the centrifugal force on the field could thwart the very mission that drives it by leaving no place for the study of the interaction and synergy of the many coupled components that individually in isolation are not intelligent but, when working together, yield intelligent behavior. To raise awareness of the need to reintegrate AI, I contemplate the role of systems integration and the value and challenge of architecture.

Botball is a national program in which teams of middle and high school students design, build, and program small autonomous mobile robots to compete in a highly charged interactive (but nondestructive) tournament. Botball students learn to program in c, construct feedback and control loops, create electromechanical systems, and integrate it all together while they work on a team. Botball takes place in regional tournaments across the country and culminates in a National Botball Tournament traditionally hosted by the American Association for Artificial Intelligence at its annual conference. This program puts reusable equipment into schools and, at the Botball Teacher Workshops, trains teachers in robotics and the integration of robotics into their curriculum. Botball appeals to a wide variety of students and brings out the best in each, challenging them to solve realworld problems in a dynamic environment at their own level.

The Twenty-Ninth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-15) was held in January 2015 in Austin, Texas (USA) The conference program was cochaired by Sven Koenig and Blai Bonet. This report contains reflective summaries of the main conference, the robotics program, the AI and robotics workshop, the Virtual Agent Exhibition, the What's Hot track, the Competition Panel, the senior member track, student and outreach activities, the student abstract and poster program, the doctoral consortium, the women's mentoring event, and the demonstrations program. AAAI-15 received 1991 submissions -- 40 percent more than AAAI-14, which held the previous record. The 974 program committee members and 89 senior program committee members selected 539 papers that were presented either as 15-minute talks or posters (in three large poster sessions) that included 2-minute advertisements in the talk sessions. AAAI-15 needed to be extended by one day to accommodate this many presentations.

Several factors have led to the increase in interest in this field, which is heavily influenced by techniques from speech processing. One major factor is the recent availability of large online text collections. Another is a disillusionment with traditional AIbased approaches to parsing and natural language processing (NLP). Charniak is recognized as a distinguished contributor to what he calls traditional AI NLP, which is why it is all the more significant that in the Preface, when speaking of his recent transition to the statistical approach, he writes … few, if any, consider the traditional study of language from an artificial-intelligence point of view a "hot" area of research. A great deal of work is still done on specific NLP problems, from grammatical issues to stylistic considerations, but for me at least it is increasingly hard to believe that it will shed light on broader problems, since it has steadfastly refused to do so in the past.