The winning papers were selected by the program cochairs with the help of some members of the Senior Program Committee. Alan Mackworth, AAAI President, and Ron Brachman, AAAI Past President and Awards Committee Chair, presented the AAAI awards in July at AAAI-07 in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Award winners received a certificate and a check for $1,000. The 2007 AAAI Classic Paper Award was given to the authors of the most influential paper from the Seventh National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, held in 1988 in St. Paul, Minnesota. The award was presented to Peter Cheeseman, Matthew Self, Jim Kelly, Will Taylor, and Don Freeman for "Bayesian Classification."

Mark your calendars now for AAAI-07, which will be the second AAAI conference to be held in Canada. You will note a slight name change in the conference to account for this trend! We are delighted to announce this permanent change as we expand the venue for the conference throughout the whole of North America. The Twenty-Second AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-07) will be held July 22-26, 2007, at the Hyatt Regency Vancouver in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, in cooperation with the Canadian Society for the Computational Studies of Intelligence (CSCSI/CSEIO) and the University of British Columbia. The Nineteenth Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence will be collocated with AAAI-07, and will be held July 24-26 (for details see the links at www.aaai.org/Conferences/).

We hope you are planning to join us for AAAI-06 and IAAI-06 in Boston Massachusetts, July 16-20, 2006. The response has been overwhelming, as AAAI celebrates 50 years of AI in the United States. A host of new programs will be showcased at the conference, including special tracks on AI and the Web and Integrated Intelligent Capabilities, Senior Member Papers, Nectar Papers, Member Abstracts and Posters, and a Poker Competition. A record 361 papers and abstracts will be presented at AAAI-06 and IAAI-06, and eight outstanding invited talks will be presented by Tim Berners-Lee, Bruce Buchanan, Sebastian Thrun, Pedro Domingos, Neil Jacobstein, Ken Koedinger, Karen Myers, and Dan Roth. For more details about the conference, please see Sara Hedberg's article elsewhere in this issue.

The Twenty-Second National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-07) and the Nineteenth Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-07) will be held in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada at the Hyatt Regency Vancouver, July 22-26, 2007. Please plan to join us for our second conference in Canada! The Twenty-First National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-06) and the Eighteenth Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-06) will be held in Boston, Massachusetts at the Seaport Hotel and World Trade Center, July 16-20, 2006. The AAAI-06 keynote address will be given by Tim Berners-Lee, Director of the World Wide Web Consortium, on Tuesday, July 18. Other invited speakers include Pedro Domingos (University of Washington), Ken Koedinger (Carnegie Mellon University), Karen Myers (SRI International), and Dan Roth (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign).

The Twenty-First National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-06) will be held July 16-20, 2006, at the Seaport Hotel and World Trade Center in Boston Massachusetts. The Eighteenth Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence will be collocated with AAAI-06, and will be held July 18-20. The special track on AI and the Web invites technical papers on the use of AI techniques, systems, and concepts involving the Web. The program chairs are especially interested in receiving papers in two active research areas: (1) using text and language analysis to interpret and understand natural language text found on the web and (2) developing and exploiting semantic web languages and systems that explicitly encode knowledge using languages such as RDF and OWL. Papers submitted to this track should report on theoretical or empirical studies that highlight the role of integration of multiple components in achieving intelligent behavior.

Tom Mitchell, AAAI Past President and Awards Committee Chair, and Ron Brachman, AAAI President, presented the AAAI Awards recently at AAAI-04 in San Jose, California. The award winners received a certificate and a check for $1,000. The 2004 AAAI Classic Paper Award was given to the author of the most influential paper from the Fourth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, held in 1984 in Austin, Texas. The Awards Committee selected Hector J. Levesque, of the University of Toronto, to receive this award for his paper, "A Logic of Implicit and Explicit Belief." Levesque was honored for his seminal contributions to the formalization of knowledge and belief.

We are delighted to announce the continuation of the cooperative effort with AI Journal, giving unlimited access to the online version of the Artificial Intelligence Journal to all regular AAAI members. AAAI regular members can view and browse tables of contents, view articles published in recent issues of AI Journal, and utilize the current features available through Elsevier's electronic journal service. They may also view, print and/or download excerpts of reasonable quantity, provided that the use of such excerpts is personal and does not amount to or result in commercial distribution. Complete details were mailed to all regular members in good standing in January. If you have forgotten your membership number or need instructions, please write to us at membership04@aaai.org.

The 2003 Fellows Selection Committee is currently accepting nominations for AAAI Fellow. The AAAI Fellows program is designed to recognize people who have made significant, sustained contributions to the field of artificial intelligence over at least a ten-year period. All regular members in good standing are encouraged to consider nominating a candidate. Two references must accompany nominations. The nominator or one of the references must be a AAAI Fellow who is a current member of AAAI.

In the half century since the birth of the field of AI, there has been tremendous progress in the host of endeavors that constitute the field. There is no better place to hear many of the best minds in the field discuss their current work than the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) (www.ijcai-01.org), Attendees to this year's conference will likely have a difficult time choosing among the rich set of offerings available let alone find time to explore the beauty of Seattle, the "Emerald City." Four invited speakers will address the conference. Philip Cohen, now with the Oregon Graduate Institute and a AAAI fellow, will present "Multimodal Interaction," a discussion of natural communication modalities, including spoken language and pen-based gesture in addition to the usual graphic user interface technologies.

AAAI is pleased to announce the continued expansion of its awards program in 2000. The first AAAI Effective Expository Writing Award will be presented at the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, to be held July 31-August 3 in Austin, Texas. This award joins the two special awards established last year, the AAAI Classic Paper Award and the AAAI Distinguished Service Award. The AAAI Effective Expository Writing Award honors the author(s) of a high-quality, effective piece of writing, accessible to the general public or to a broad AI audience (not just a subarea), written within the last two years. The contribution should be based on sound science, interesting ideas, or systematic review, with nontrivial content, but the award is primarily for the exposition--the author need not be the one who has done the research.