This honor was announced at the recent AAAI-16 Conference in Phoenix. Senior Member status is designed to recognize AAAI members who have achieved significant accomplishments within the field of artificial intelligence. To be eligible for nomination for Senior Member, candidates must be consecutive members of AAAI for at least five years and have been active in the professional arena for at least ten years. Tom Dietterich, AAAI President, Manuela Veloso, AAAI Past President and Awards Committee Chair, and Rao Kambhampati, AAAI President-Elect, presented the AAAI Awards in February at AAAI-16 in Phoenix. The 2016 AAAI Classic Paper Award was given to the authors of the two papers deemed most influential from the Fifteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, held in 1998 in Madison, Wisconsin, USA.

Each year a small number of fellows are recognized for their unusual distinction in the profession and for their sustained contributions to the field for a decade or more. An official dinner and ceremony was held in their honor during AAAI-15 in Austin, Texas. The honorees for 2015 were as follows. Rama Chellappa (University of Maryland) For significant contributions to Markov random fields, 3D recovery from single and mutiple images and image/video-based recognition Marco Dorigo (Université Libre de Bruxelles) For seminal contributions to the foundations of swarm intelligence, including ant colony optimization and swarm robotics Holger H. Hoos (University of British Columbia) For significant contributions to the field of automated reasoning and the development of widely used methods for algorithm selection and configuration Adele E. Howe (Colorado State University) For significant contributions to the theory, practice and evaluation of automated planning, scheduling and other AI technologies, as well as service to the AI community Thorsten Joachims (Cornell University) For significant contributions to the theory and practice of machine learning and information retrieval AAAI announced its new class of AAAI Senior Members at the recent AAAI-15 Conference in Austin. Senior Member status is designed to recognize AAAI members who have achieved significant accomplishments within the field of artificial intelligence.

Check Out the New AAAI Member Site! AAAI is pleased to announce the launch of the new AAAI member site. By now you should have received email and login information for the new AAAI member site. Using this site, you can renew your membership in AAAI and update your contact information directly. In addition, you will be directly connected with other members of the largest worldwide AI community via the AAAI online directory and other social media features. Direct links are available for new AI Magazine features, such as the online and app versions.

AAAI is delighted to announce that the IBM Watson Team has been selected as the winner of the 2013 AAAI Feigenbaum Prize. Jennifer Chu-Carroll of IBM accepted the award during AAAI-13 on behalf of the entire team for their successful Jeopardy challenge in 2010. The team was specifically honored for demonstrating that a synthesis of AI techniques, including symbolic knowledge representation, natural language understanding, and statistical machine learning, can achieve human-level performance in real-time factual questionanswering. The Feigenbaum Prize is awarded biennially to recognize and encourage outstanding artificial intelligence research advances that are made by using experimental methods of computer science. The associated cash prize of $10,000 is provided by the Feigenbaum Nii Foundation. The 2013 AAAI Classic Paper Award was given to the authors of the most influential papers from the Twelfth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, held in 1994 in Seattle, Washington.

AAAI announced its new class of AAAI Senior Members at the recent AAAI-12 Conference in Toronto. Senior Member status is designed to recognize AAAI members who have achieved significant accomplishments within the field of artificial intelligence. To be eligible for nomination for Senior Member, candidates must be consecutive members of AAAI for at least five years and have been active in the professional arena for at least ten years. Manuela Veloso, incoming AAAI President, and Eric Horvitz, AAAI Past President and Awards Committee Chair, presented the AAAI Awards in August at AAAI-12 in Toronto. The 2012 AAAI Distinguished Service Award recognizes one individual for extraordinary service to the AI community.

A series of special events celebrating the Alan M. Turing Centenary, including the 2012 Inaugural AAAI Turing Lecture by Christos Papadimitriou (University of California, Berkeley) and a special performance of "Hello Hi There" will be featured at AAAI-12 in Toronto. The Twenty-Sixth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-12) and the Twenty-Fourth Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-12) will be held in Toronto, Canada at the Sheraton Centre Hotel, July 22-23, 2012. The AAAI technical program will consist of the main technical track and four special tracks on AI and the Web, Cognitive Robotics (new!), Computational Sustainability and AI, and Robotics (new!), as well as a Best Paper Track, highlighting significant AI results presented at our sister conferences in the past two years. The program will also feature the keynote Presidential Address "Revisiting the Dream," by Henry Kautz, a joint IAAI / AAAI invited talk by Tom Gruber, and other invited talks by Regina Barzilay (CSAIL, Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Ross King (Aberystwyth University), Josh Tenenbaum (Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT), Sebastian Thrun (Google / Stanford University), and Luis von Ahn (Carnegie Mellon University). The third iteration of the AAAI Symposium on Educational Advances on AI will be collocated with AAAI (details follow), and the AAAI program will also include 12 half-day tutorials, 10 workshops, the AAAI Robotics Program, AAAI Poker Competition, the Video Competition, Student Abstract Posters, the AAAI/SIGART Doctoral Consortium, and more!

Eric Horvitz, AAAI president, and Alan Mackworth, AAAI past president and Awards Committee chair, presented the AAAI Awards in July at AAAI-08 in Chicago. The 2008 AAAI Classic Paper Award was given to the authors of the most influential paper from the Eighth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, held in 1990 in Boston, Massachusetts. The award was presented to Steven Minton, Mark D. Johnston, Andrew B. Philips, and Philip Laird for "Solving Large-Scale Constraint Satisfaction and Scheduling Problems Using a Heuristic Repair Method." This paper was honored for its seminal contribution to stochastic local search for constraint satisfaction and its broad influence on local search algorithms and applications in artificial intelligence. In addition, Pattie Maes and Rodney A. Brooks received honorable mention for "Learning to Coordinate Behaviors" and their pioneering work on machine learning applied to the field of robotics, and on advancing the field of behavioral robotics.

The Twenty-Third AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-08) will be held July 13-17, 2008, at the Hyatt Regency McCormick Place in Chicago, Illinois. The Twentieth Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-08) will be collocated with AAAI-08, and will be held July 15-17 (see www.aaai.org The program cochairs for 2008, Dieter Fox (University of Washington) and Carla Gomes (Cornell University) will continue the innovations introduced during the past two years of the conference, and have added a few new touches. Included in these will be a new special track on Physically Grounded AI and the opportunity for all technical paper authors to submit supplementary materials during the review process. An overview of the special tracks is included below.

AAAI-08 Is Coming to the Windy City! Save the date--July 13-17, 2008! Please mark your calendars now for the Twenty-Third AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-08) and the Twentieth Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence Conference (IAAI-08)! The conferences will be held July 13-17, at the Hyatt Regency Mc-Cormick Place in Chicago, Illinois. AAAI-08 program cochairs are Dieter Fox (University of Washington and Carla Gomes (Cornell University); the IAAI-08 conference chair is Mehmet Goker, PricewaterhouseCoopers, LLP.

Researchers from all areas of AI are encouraged to submit proposals to demonstrate their systems. Submissions will be evaluated on the basis of their innovation, relevance, scientific contribution, presentation, and usability, as well as potential logistical constraints. For complete information about the program and how to submit, please see aaai.org/Conferences/ AAAI-08 Is Coming to the Windy City! Save the date--July 13-17, 2008!