Sketch maps are an important spatial representation used in many geospatial-reasoning tasks. This article describes techniques we have developed that enable software to perform humanlike reasoning about sketch maps. We illustrate the utility of these techniques in the context of nuSketch Battlespace, a research system that has been successfully used in a variety of experiments. After an overview of the nuSketch approach and nuSketch Battlespace, we outline the representations of glyphs and sketches and the nuSketch spatial reasoning architecture. We describe the use of qualitative topology and Voronoi diagrams to construct spatial representations, and explain how these facilities are combined with analogical reasoning to provide a simple form of enemy intent hypothesis generation.

In a complex, dynamic multiagent setting, coherent team actions are often jeopardized by conflicts in agents' beliefs, plans, and actions. Despite the considerable progress in teamwork research, the challenge of intrateam conflict resolution has remained largely unaddressed. In these applications, agents must act together despite the uncertainties of their complex dynamic environment. Considerable progress has indeed been made in teamwork research. For example, recent advances in teamwork models (Tambe 1997; Jennings 1995), which explicitly outline agents' commitments and responsibilities in teamwork, have significantly improved flexibility in teamwork coordination and communication.

Disaster rescue is one of the most serious social issues that involves very large numbers of heterogeneous agents in the hostile environment. The intention of the RoboCup Rescue project is to promote research and development in this socially significant domain at various levels, involving multiagent teamwork coordination, physical agents for search and rescue, information infrastructures, personal digital assistants, a standard simulator and decision-support systems, evaluation benchmarks for rescue strategies, and robotic systems that are all integrated into a comprehensive system in the future. For this effort, which was built on the success of the RoboCup Soccer project, we will provide forums of technical discussions and competitive evaluations for researchers and practitioners. Although the rescue domain is intuitively appealing as a large-scale multiagent and intelligent system domain, analysis has not yet revealed its domain characteristics. The first research evaluation meeting will be held at RoboCup-2001, in conjunction with the Seventeenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-2001), as part of the RoboCup Rescue Simulation League and RoboCup/AAAI Rescue Robot Competition.

AUTOMATIC PROBLEM SOLVING' For intelligent computers to be able to interact with the real world, they must be able to aggregate individual actions into sequences to achieve desired goals. During the last decade, a number of techniques have been developed for improving the efficiency of these strategies. The bulk of this paper consists of a description of the problem-solving strategies and a catalogue of tactics for improving their efficiency.This is followed by an attempt to'This is a slight revision of a paper presented at the Sixth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Tokyo, Japan, August 20-24, 1979 The original vetsion was prepared while the author was with SRI International, Menlo park, California, suppotted by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency under constract N00039-79-C-0118 with the Naval Electronic Systems Command The general function of an automatic problem solving system, then, is to construct a sequence of actions that transforms one world model into another. There are three basic capabilities that a problem solving system must have. These are: 1. Management of State Description Models The information will not all be explicitly encoded, however, so a deductive engine of some sort must be provided to allow needed information to be extracted from a model.

The long-term future of space exploration at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is dependent on the full exploitation of autonomous and adaptive systems, but mission managers are worried about the reliability of these more intelligent systems. The main focus of the workshop was to address these worries; hence, we invited NASA engineers working on autonomous and adaptive systems and researchers interested in the verification and validation of software systems. The dual purpose of the meeting was to (1) make NASA engineers aware of the verification and validation techniques they could be using and (2) make the verification and validation community aware of the complexity of the systems NASA is developing. The workshop was held 5 to 7 December 2000 at the Asilomar Conference Center in Pacific Grove, California. Mission managers are, however, worried about the reliability of these more intelligent systems. The main focus of the workshop was to address these worries; ...

Now completing its first year, the High-Performance Knowledge Bases Project promotes technology for developing very large, flexible, and reusable knowledge bases. The project is supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and includes more than 15 contractors in universities, research laboratories, and companies. Programs lack knowledge about the world sufficient to understand and adjust to new situations as people do. Consequently, programs have been poor at interpreting and reasoning about novel and changing events, such as international crises and battlefield situations. These problems are more open ended than chess.

This article is an edited transcript of a lecture given at IJCAI-99, Stockholm, Sweden, on 4 August 1999. The article summarizes concepts, principles, and tools that were found useful in applications involving causal modeling. The principles are based on structural-model semantics in which functional (or counterfactual) relationships representing autonomous physical processes are the fundamental building blocks. The article presents the conceptual basis of this semantics, illustrates its application in simple problems, and discusses its ramifications to computational and cognitive problems concerning causation. It is not an easy topic to speak about, but it is a fun topic to speak about.

I would like to add my support to Lawrence Hunter's proposal to modify the review process for the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (NCAI). For some time now, I, too, have been disappointed with the majority of papers presented at NCAI-not with the quality of the papers but with the conservative style. I would leave a paper session thinking that AI is progressing but at a painstakingly slow pace! Someone, somewhere must be doing some really innovative research, but why isn't he or she presenting this work at the premier AI conference? Allowing controversial papers but maintaining the quality criteria is a needed improvement for NCAI and AI in general.

The following letter was addressed to Daniel Bobrow, editor of Artificial Intelligence Many of us felt that the issue raised is a very important one for the AAAI and deserved wide exposure It is printed here, along with Bobrow's reply, for your interest. The intervening three centuries have proven Oldenburg's invention to be a priceless vehicle for the dissemination of knowledge. It is, therefore, ironic indeed that artificial intelligence, a field whose very essence is knowledge, has developed a literature that is extraordinarily difficult and inefficient to use. Effective use of the literature of AI is frustrated by two fundamental deficiencies: (a) there is no central index to the field's published works, and (b) not only are far too many original works not published in journals, but a shockingly high percentage of these are "published" in sources that may be generously described as inaccessible. As an example of a field that does not have these problems, consider medicine.

The workshops on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics have broadened the flow of information between the two fields and encouraged interdisciplinary work. The workshop is in English and includes one day of tutorials and three days of focussed poster sessions, presentations and panels. The presentations are scheduled in the mornings and evenings, leaving the afternoons free for discussions in more relaxed environments. The workshop will be held at the Pier 66 Resort and Marina - a 22 acre fullfeatured resort located on the intracoastal waterway. Secondly, the class soon realizes that sexual differences are much reduced from Turing's time-women know about sports and men often can answer cooking questions.