Summer 2001 marked the tenth AAAI Mobile Robot Competition and Exhibition. A decade of contests and exhibitions have inspired innovation and research in AI robotics. Here we look back at the origins of the contest and how it evolved. We also reflect on how the contest has served as an arena for important debates in the AI and robotics communities. The article closes with a speculative look forward to the next decade of AAAI robot competitions.

The Eighth Annual Mobile Robot Competition and Exhibition was held as part of the Sixteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Orlando, Florida, 18 to 22 July. The goals of these robot events are to foster the sharing of research and technology, allow research groups to showcase their achievements, encourage students to enter robotics and AI fields at both the undergraduate and graduate level, and increase awareness of the field. The 1999 events included two robot contests; a new, long-term robot challenge; an exhibition; and a National Botball Championship for high school teams sponsored by the KISS Institute. Each of these events is described in detail in this article. The contests require entrants to tackle a set of established tasks in a competitive environment.

This article describes requirements for synthetic adversaries for urban combat training and a prototype application, MOUTBots. MOUTBots use a commercial computer game to define, implement, and test basic behavior representation requirements and the Soar architecture as the engine for knowledge representation and execution. The article describes how these components aided the development of the prototype and presents an initial evaluation against competence, taskability, fidelity, variability, transparency, and efficiency requirements. Urban combat is characterized by building-to-building, room-to-room fighting. Frequent training is an essential element in reducing casualties.

This article provides a personal perspective, in three stories, on the origins of AAAI. In the first story, I explain the reasons justifying AAAI's existence. In the second story, I recount some of the controvery over the name artificial intelligence, and explain why it was chosen as the new society's moniker. In the third story, I note that AI has not suffered from the applied versus research scism that has affected other societies. Finally, in the fourth story, I mention some of the early issues of finance.

Regtech startups are saving firms billions in regulatory fines and displacing manual risk and compliance with cutting-edge technology. Over 143 million Americans will be at risk of financial fraud for years following the Equifax cybersecurity breach, while an estimated 3 million Wells Fargo customers unknowingly had their digital identity stolen to open fraudulent trading accounts. It's been nearly a decade since the financial crisis exposed how a weak risk management framework and lack of governance can almost permanently debilitate even one of the strongest capital markets. Yet despite a massive regulatory overhaul following the crisis, recent incidents show just how vulnerable the industry still is when it comes to hackers, fraud, and mismanagement. Looking at the top breaches since the financial crisis highlights some of the impacts that major gaps in regulation have on consumers.

In this article, we show how 4D/RCS incorporates and integrates multiple types of disparate knowledge representation techniques into a common, unifying architecture. The 4D/RCS architecture is based on the supposition that different knowledge representation techniques offer different advantages, and 4D/RCS is designed in such a way as to combine the strengths of all of these techniques into a common unifying architecture in order to exploit the advantages of each. In the context of applying the architecture to the control of autonomous vehicles, we describe the procedural and declarative types of knowledge that have been developed and applied and the value that each brings to achieving the ultimate goal of autonomous navigation. We also look at symbolic versus iconic knowledge representation and show how 4D/RCS accommodates both of these types of representations and uses the strengths of each to strive towards achieving human-level intelligence in autonomous systems. Neuroanatomy has described the structure and function of the basic computational element of the brain--the neuron--and produced extensive maps of the computational modules and interconnecting data flow pathways making up the anatomy of the brain. Behavioral psychology provides information about stimulus-response behavior and instrumental conditioning. Cognitive psychology is exploring how the brain represents knowledge; how it perceives objects, events, situations, and relationships; how it analyzes the past and plans for the future; and how it selects and controls behavior that satisfies desires and achieves goals Over the last five decades, the invention of the electronic computer has brought rapid advances in computational power, making it feasible to launch serious attempts at building intelligent systems. Artificial intelligence and robotics have produced significant results in planning, problem solving, rule-based reasoning, image analysis, and speech understanding. Autonomous vehicle research has produced advances in real-time sensory processing, world modeling, navigation, path planning, and obstacle avoidance. Research in industrial automation and process control has produced hierarchical control systems, distributed databases, and models for representing processes and products. Modern control theory has developed precise understanding of stability, adaptability, and controllability under various conditions of uncertainty and noise. Progress is rapid in each of the above fields, and there exists an enormous and rapidly growing body of literature in all of these areas.

The search for planets beyond our solar system will be taken up by the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, a new NASA spacecraft scheduled to launch in the first half of the year that will focus on finding exoplanets around bright stars and those close to Earth. Its predecessor -- NASA's Kepler missions -- discovered more than 2,500 confirmed exoplanets, including two recently spotted with artificial intelligence. Researchers plan to use machine learning to scour more data from Kepler in search of planets that may have been overlooked. Last year, a small number of young patients were treated for cancer with gene-edited cells, and the first gene editing was done directly in the body of a patient with the metabolic disease Hunter's syndrome. "Every single study will look at what they did and will [try to] follow suit," says Fyodor Urnov, associate director of Altius Institute of Biomedical Sciences.

Reports The first annual workshop on the role of AI in ambient intelligence was held in Riva de Garda, Italy, on August 29, 2006. The workshop was colocated with the European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI 2006). It provided an opportunity for researchers in a variety of AI subfields together with representatives of commercial interests to explore ambient intelligence technology and applications. Ambient intelligence is an AIbased paradigm with a high potential to affect daily life in the near future. The broad idea is to enrich a space (such as a room, house, building, bus station, or a critical area in a hospital) with sensors tied to intelligent software, so that the people using the space can benefit from a responsive, even wise environment.

This article reports on the activities, papers, speakers, and workshops of the Seventh International Conference on Case-Based Reasoning, held 13-16 August in Belfast, Northern Ireland. CCBR 2007, the Seventh International Conference on Case-Based Reasoning, was held in the joyful city of Belfast, Northern Ireland, UK. Our host in Belfast was David Patterson from the University of Ulster. The 2007 program attempted to open the field's frontiers by inviting speakers from neighboring areas and insiders who could expand the vision of the attending case-based reasoning (CBR) researchers and practitioners. An introspective talk, given by David W. Aha (Naval Research Lab, USA) kicked off the event, making attendees question how case-based reasoning is perceived by the outside world and the balance between theoretical foundations and applied research. His talk, "Addressing Perceptions of Case-Based Reasoning," set the tone for discussions throughout the conference.

The eighteenth annual International Workshop on Principles of Diagnosis was held in Nashville, Tennessee, May 29-31, 2007. Papers presented at the workshop covered a variety of theories, principles, and computational techniques for diagnosis, monitoring, testing, reconfiguration, fault-adaptive control, and repair of complex systems. Before deployment they are subjected to strict testing and validation. Although these procedures reduce the likelihood of initial system failures, degradation and faults in system components still occur because of wear and tear from sustained operations. Industry sources, service agencies, and the military report that down time, due to maintenance and repairs of equipment, is still a significant cost of daily operations.