One of the world's most valuable start-ups got that way by using artificial intelligence to satisfy Chinese internet users' voracious appetite for news and entertainment. Every day, its smartphone app feeds 120 million people personalized streams of buzzy news stories, videos of dogs frolicking in snow, GIFs of traffic mishaps and listicles such as "The World's Ugliest Celebrities." Now the company is discovering the risks involved, under China's censorship regime, in giving the people exactly what they want. The makers of the popular news app Jinri Toutiao unveiled moves this week to allay rising concerns from the authorities. Last week, the Beijing bureau of China's top internet regulator accused Toutiao of "spreading pornographic and vulgar information" and "causing a negative impact on public opinion online," and it ordered that updates to several popular sections of the app be halted for 24 hours.

US government body Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) and NASA have teamed up to build robotic technology that can refuel and repair friendly satellites. "Service stations in orbit" -- the name given to these robotic satellites -- would not only refuel satellites but also drastically improve their longevity and lifespan. According to a report in Futurism, the robots could fix minor maintenance issues, keeping up with current orbiters as they age and sustain damage. The agencies also hope to keep the orbit clear of debris called space pollution which is caused by broken satellites abandoned in the space. In 2015, there were about 25,000 human-made objects larger than a human fist and roughly half a million larger than a dime orbiting Earth.

American authorities have decided that Alibaba's digital payment firm, Ant Financial, won't be allowed to acquire the cash transfer company Moneygram. Ant Financial, which was one of our 50 Smartest Companies in 2017, is a Chinese tech company that handles mountains of data generated by its mobile payment business and other banking services. It was created in 2014 by e-commerce giant Alibaba to operate Alipay, a dominant mobile payment platform in China with 520 million users, and uses tools like computer vision and natural-language processing to reimagine financial services (see "Meet the Chinese Finance Giant That's Secretly an AI Company.") In 2017, Ant Financial tried to expand its international footprint, by buying U.S. money transfer company MoneyGram in a $1.2 billion deal. But on Tuesday, the two companies said that the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States rejected their proposals to merge.

With the exception of plan repair, important topics related to the use of plans (robust execution, reactivity, monitoring, evaluation) have received significantly less consideration. In realistic domains, however, plan generation is only a small component of the overall package. In particular, plans must be updated in response to new information and requirements in a timely fashion to ensure that they remain viable and relevant. Plan execution involves more than blind adherence to previously generated plans. Rather, run-time decisions are made to adapt, initiate, or abandon plans and activities in response to current considerations within the operating environment.

DSIPE supports a human planner. Although their requirements overlap for this mission, they each have independent goals (other missions to be performed or supported), capabilities, and resources. We extended SIPE-2's internal plan representation Throughout the planning process, each planning system monitors the local cell's planning activity for constraints and subgoals that might be relevant to other planning cells and notifies the cells of this information. For example, the naval planning cell might notify the Marine Corps planner that a particular landing area will be swept of mines by a specified time. Currently, the only constraints that are monitored in this way are the postconditions.

The integration of AI and vision has been a longterm goal of both disciplines for more than three decades. This special issue illustrates some recent work on bridging the gap. Back then, the issue was anticipated relatively easily, and a full integration of the two fields was expected within a decade. Processing of images is known to result in noisy segmentation, and in general, data might not be consistent in space or time, making AI methods appealing. In early AI, the handling of noisy, partially inconsistent data was, at best, a major challenge.

Implementation of the case-based reasoner in rules and objects using a commercial knowledge-based system shell is described. Although some refinements remain, the performance of the case-based reasoner has met its design goals. The chemical industry is heavily regulated. Every hazardous chemical product must have a set of shipping descriptions that conform to strict regulations issued by the Department of Transportation (DOT), the International Maritime Organization (IMO), and the International Air Transport Association (IATA). Shipping descriptions provide a concise characterization of the hazards a chemical can present during transportation (figure 1). Failing to comply with transport regulations can result in penalties ranging from delayed shipments to heavy fines or even incarceration of corporate officials. In addition, each chemical product has a material safety data sheet (MSDS) that conforms to Occupational Safety and Health (OSHA) and American National Standards Institute (ANSI) standards. Unlike shipping descriptions, MSDSs are lengthy documents of 8 to 10 pages that provide a detailed description of the health hazards a product can pose in the workplace (figure 2). They also contain information on procedures for storing, handling, and disposing of a chemical. Inadequately prepared MSDSs can lead to substantial product-liability lawsuits against the company if the product is involved in an industrial accident. The ultimate goal of these regulations is to ensure proper communication of health and safety information for the protection of the public. Air Products is committed to the initiative of the Chemical Manufacturers Association (CMA) known as Responsible Care. This initiative focuses on the safe manufacturing, distribution, use, recycling, and disposal of chemicals. Proper communication through accurate shipping descriptions and full disclosure of hazard information in the MSDS plays a key role in fulfilling obligations under Responsible Care. Maintaining shipping descriptions and MSDSs requires a major effort. Most corporate systems are intensely manual.

Of special note was Deep Blue, the IBM computer system that beat then-reigning world chess champion Garry Kasparov. Then there was the boom and bust of expert systems companies, the times when AI was the most popular computer science major, and the 1985 AAAI conference that had over 5,500 attendees. This was followed by what is commonly referred to as the "AI Winter." "This was not a prolonged phenomenon," observed Brachman. Indeed, in the current Presidential budget for fiscal year 2006, the Cognitive Computing Systems line item is $200 million, and the proposed 2007 budget is $240 million.

John Mc-Carthy, then an assistant mathematics professor at Dartmouth, organized the conference and coined the name "artificial intelligence" in his conference proposal. This summer AAAI celebrates the first 50 years of AI; and continues to foster the fertile fields of AI at the National AI conference (AAAI-06) and Innovative Applications of AI conference (IAAI-06) in Boston. The computer age was just dawning in 1956. MIT researchers that year built the TX-0, the first general-purpose, programmable computer with transistors. IBM shipped the first magnetic disk storage, the 305 RAMAC, composed of 50 magnetically coated metal platters with 5 million bytes of data.

"I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience. I know no way of judging of the future but by the past." AI researchers seek to understand the nature of intelligence and human thought. They examine a range of human cognitive behavior, including memory, learning, planning, and problem solving and look for principles that play general descriptive and explanatory roles. The second agenda for AI research is technological.