Column Where Lech Does Tech. "Leading Poland to democracy brought Lech Walesa a Nobel Peace Prize and international acclaim, but he admits to a few regrets. One is that he was so busy throughout the 1980s and '90s that he'did not have the time to follow developments in technology closely.' But he is catching up. The first corporate board Walesa, 58, has agreed to join is that of NuTech Solutions, a closely held company founded three years ago in Charlotte, N.C., by a pair of Polish immigrants.

This book looks at some of the results of this synergy among AI, cognitive science, and education. Examples include virtual students whose misconceptions force students to reflect on their own knowledge, intelligent tutoring systems, and speech recognition technology that helps students learn to read. Some of the systems described are already used in classrooms and have been evaluated; a few are still laboratory efforts. The book also addresses cultural and political issues involved in the deployment of new educational technologies. ISBN 0-0-262-56141-7 To order call 800-405-1619.

Fast Retailing Co., the parent company of major retailer Uniqlo, has put out the welcome mat for Japan's small number of recognized refugees, offering job opportunities for some who might dream of careers in fashion or sales. Even so, for most refugees, language barriers and other issues remain hurdles as they try to establish their lives in Japan, often far from home. Refugees sometimes get jobs in factories, including auto manufacturers, and in the construction and nursing industries, but most are employed in washing and cleaning jobs, according to data from the Tokyo-based Refugee Assistance Headquarters (RHQ), which helps legally recognized refugees find jobs. "They work at places where work can be done without speaking Japanese," said Hiroaki Ito, an official at RHQ. As of March 2016, RHQ, which also provides Japanese language and basic lifestyle education to refugees in the initial months after they arrive in Japan, had helped 396 refugees get work in Japan. Until 2016, Fast Retailing was the only high-profile company in the country employing refugees in Japan and abroad.

"[T]he emergence of the robotics industry ... is developing in much the same way that the computer business did 30 years ago. Think of the manufacturing robots currently used on automobile assembly lines as the equivalent of yesterday's mainframes.... [S]ome of the world's best minds are trying to solve the toughest problems of robotics, such as visual recognition, navigation and machine learning. I can envision a future in which robotic devices will become a nearly ubiquitous part of our day-to-day lives. I believe that technologies such as distributed computing, voice and visual recognition, and wireless broadband connectivity will open the door to a new generation of autonomous devices that enable computers to perform tasks in the physical world on our behalf. We may be on the verge of a new era, when the PC will get up off the desktop and allow us to see, hear, touch and manipulate objects in places where we are not physically present."

Scientists Look at Promise, Peril of Technology. "Scientists meeting in Los Angeles say technology offers the hope of a better world, but presents hazards if mishandled.... [T]he University of Southern California and the journal'Science' convened a panel of scientific innovators to look at the promise and the perils of technology.--There'You've got to ask, do we now have the scientific literacy in the public to be able to have informed dialogues about what these issues are really going to mean to civilization, to mankind itself,' he said. 'If we don't have the right kind of scientific literacy, all scientific debate becomes ideological.' The panelists say promoting scientific literacy is a challenge but a necessary goal, as new technologies change our society.... Raymond Kurzweil is a researcher in the field of artificial intelligence....

Although AI and HCI explore computing and intelligent behavior and the fields have seen some crossover, until recently there was not very much. This article outlines a history of the fields that identifies some of the forces that kept the fields at arm's length. AI was generally marked by a very ambitious, long-term vision requiring expensive systems, although the term was rarely envisioned as being as long as it proved to be, whereas HCI focused more on innovation and improvement of widely used hardware within a short time scale. These differences led to different priorities, methods, and assessment approaches. A consequence was competition for resources, with HCI flourishing in AI winters and moving more slowly when AI was in favor.

This article describes a challenging, real-world planning problem within the context of a NASA mission called LADEE (Lunar Atmospheric and Dust Environment Explorer). I present the approach taken to reduce the complexity of the activity-planning task in order to perform it effectively under the time pressures imposed by the mission requirements. One key aspect of this approach is the design of the activityplanning process based on principles of problem decomposition and planning abstraction levels. The second key aspect is the mixed-initiative system developed for this task, called LASS (LADEE Activity Scheduling System).

This summer's AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-08) and its sister Conference on Innovative Applications of AI (IAAI-08) continued their long tradition of being a focal point of AI. This year's conferences were held in Chicago at the Hyatt Regency McCormick Place, July 13-17, 2008. The multidimensional conference offerings included nine invited talks, 251 technical papers, 22 innovative applications of AI papers, three competitions (poker, AI video, and general game playing), three special tracks (AI and the web, integrated intelligence, and physically grounded AI), 15 tutorials, 15 workshops, and 11 intelligent system demonstrations, as well as a number of awards, a doctoral consortium, student poster session and programs, and a vendor exhibit. This translated into a plethora of choices for the 921 conference attendees. An additional 175 people exclusively attended the tutorials, workshops, or exhibit.

The RoboCup Rescue Physical Agent League Competition was held in the summer of 2001 in conjunction with the AAAI Mobile Robot Competition Urban Search and Rescue event, eerily preceding the September 11 World Trade Center (WTC) disaster. Four teams responded to the WTC disaster through the auspices of the Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue (CRASAR), directed by John Blitch. The four teams were Foster-Miller and iRobot (both robot manufacturers from the Boston area), the United States Navy's Space Warfare Center (SPAWAR) group from San Diego, and the University of South Florida (USF). Blitch, through his position as program manager for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Tactical Mobile Robots Program, was a supporter of the competition; he also served as a member of the rules committee and a judge. USF participated by chairing the rules committee, judging, assisting with the logistics, providing commentary, and demonstrating tethered and wireless robots whenever entrants had to skip around during the competition.

The AAAI/RoboCup Robot Rescue event is designed to push researchers to design robotic systems for urban search and rescue. The rules were written to approximate a real rescue situation in a simulated environment constructed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. The year 2001 was the first year that the rescue event was part of RoboCup, and the second year that the event was held as part of the AAAI Robot Competition. The joint rules committee from RoboCup and AAAI brought two communities together to develop the rules and scoring method. There were four registered teams in the competition: (1) Sharif University, (2) Swarthmore College, (3) Utah State University, and (4) the University of Edinburgh.