It is a northern European city of 100,000, almost on the border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. The local press (The Derry Journal north Derry coast, with beautiful meetings enjoyed themselves and & Belfast Telegraph) and radio (BBC beaches at Benone and Castlenock expressed their congratulations on Northern Ireland) ran a number of and then through Coleraine to the the program and organization. Also, articles leading up to and during the seaside resorts of Portstewart and for the first time, AICS attracted a conference. All plenary invited speaker Portrush. A few kilometers further large number of delegates and papers talks and the panel session went out along the north Antrim coast, we from abroad, including many from on streaming video and audio, stored arrive at the Giants' Causeway and the United Kingdom, Europe, and Sauce!); Gweedore, home of the Clannad and live with the possibility of phonein for Pattern Recognition (IAPR), the They did lie in the areas of evidential reasoning, AICS-97, the Annual Conference of a supreme job.

In July 1997, the Sixth Annual Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) Mobile Robot Competition and Exhibition was held. The competition consisted of four new events: (1) Find Life on Mars; (2) Find the Remote; (3) Home Vacuum; and (4) Hors d'Oeuvres, Anyone? The robot exhibition was the largest in AAAI history. This article presents the history, motivation, and contributions for the event.

Details about program does not provide any scholarship information, please contact AAAI at these programs will also be mailed to funds, and is designed for local fss@aaai.org

The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence held its 1997 Fall Symposia Series on 7 to 9 November in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This article contains summaries of the six symposia that were conducted: (1) Communicative Action in Humans and Machines, (2) Context in Knowledge Representation and Natural Language, (3) Intelligent Tutoring System Authoring Tools, (4) Model-Directed Autonomous Systems, (5) Reasoning with Diagrammatic Representations II, and (6) Socially Intelligent Agents.

Invited participants must 445 Burgess Drive, Menlo Park, CA register by September 9, and the final Registration materials for the Fifteenth 94025; by fax to 650-321-4457; or by registration deadline is September 23.

The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence held its 1997 Fall Symposia Series on 7 to 9 November in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This article contains summaries of the six symposia that were conducted: (1) Communicative Action in Humans and Machines, (2) Context in Knowledge Representation and Natural Language, (3) Intelligent Tutoring System Authoring Tools, (4) Model-Directed Autonomous Systems, (5) Reasoning with Diagrammatic Representations II, and (6) Socially Intelligent Agents.

Humans are social creatures. Much of our intelligence derives from our ability to manipulate our environment through collaborative endeavors. Most extant computer programs and interfaces do little to take advantage of such manifestly human talents and interests, leaving broad avenues of human-computer communication unexplored. Although it is still considered controversial, there are many who believe the harnessing of social communication to be rich in possibilities for modern software. In this article, we look at a number of autonomous agent systems that embody their intelligence at least partially through the projection of a believable, engaging, synthetic persona. Among other topics, we touch briefly on samples of research that explore synthetic personality, representations of emotion, societies of fanciful and playful characters, intelligent and engaging automated tutors, and users projected as avatars into virtual worlds.

However, all eligible students are Intelligence (AAAI-98) will be Third Annual Genetic Programming encouraged to apply. After the conference, available in late March by writing to Conference (GP-98), July 22-25 an expense report will be required ncai@aaai.org Please note that the deadline Eleventh Annual Conference on scholarships@aaai.org or at 445 Burgess for early registrations is May 27, 1998. Computational Learning Theory Drive, Menlo Park, CA 94025, The conference will be held July (COLT '98), July 24-26 (theory.lcs.mit. All student scholarship recipients Monona Terrace Convention Center, Fifteenth International Conference will be required to participate in the designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, in on Machine Learning (ICML '98), July Student Volunteer Program to support Madison, Wisconsin.

This article, derived from the 1996 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Presidential Address, explores the notion of intelligence from a variety of perspectives and finds that it "are" many things. It has, for example, been interpreted in a variety of ways even within our own field, ranging from the logical view (intelligence as part of mathematical logic) to the psychological view (intelligence as an empirical phenomenon of the natural world) to a variety of others. One goal of this article is to go back to basics, reviewing the things that we, individually and collectively, have taken as given, in part because we have taken multiple different and sometimes inconsistent things for granted. I believe it will prove useful to expose the tacit assumptions, models, and metaphors that we carry around as a way of understanding both what we're about and why we sometimes seem to be at odds with one another. Intelligence are also many things in the sense that is a product of evolution. Our physical bodies are in many ways overdetermined, unnecessarily complex, and inefficiently designed, that is, the predictable product of the blind search that is evolution. What's manifestly true of our anatomy is also likely true of our cognitive architecture. Natural intelligence is unlikely to be limited by principles of parsimony and is likely to be overdetermined, unnecessarily complex, and inefficiently designed. In this sense, intelligence are many things because is composed of the many elements that have been thrown together over evolutionary timescales. I suggest that in the face of that, searching for minimalism and elegance may be a diversion, for it simply may not be there. Somewhat more crudely put: The human mind is a 400,000-year-old legacy application -- and you expected to find structured programming? I end with a number of speculations, suggesting that there are some niches in the design space of intelligences that are currently underexplored. One example is the view that thinking is in part visual, and hence it might prove useful to develop representations and reasoning mechanisms that reason with diagrams (not just about them) and that take seriously their visual nature. I speculate as well that thinking may be a form of reliving, that re-acting out what we have experienced is one powerful way to think about and solve problems in the world. In this view, thinking is not simply the decontextualized manipulation of abstract symbols, powerful though that may be. Instead, some significant part of our thinking may be the reuse or simulation of our experiences in the environment. In keeping with this, I suggest that it may prove useful to marry the concreteness of reasoning in a model with the power that arises from reasoning abstractly.

The format of the conference will include paper presentations, invited speakers, panel discussions, workshops, and planning and scheduling competitions.