We Papers submitted to the II track should For a complete list of deadlines, program are delighted to announce this permanent highlight synergistic effects of integrating information, and to check for change as we expand the venue components from distinct areas further updates, please visit the AAAIfor the conference throughout the of AI to achieve intelligent behavior.

Imagine an Internet-scale knowledge system where people and intelligent agents can collaborate on solving complex problems in business, engineering, science, medicine, and other endeavors. Its resources include semantically tagged websites, wikis, and blogs, as well as social networks, vertical search engines, and a vast array of web services from business processes to AI planners and domain models. Research prototypes of decentralized knowledge systems have been demonstrated for years, but now, thanks to the web and Moore's law, they appear ready for prime time. This article introduces the architectural concepts for incrementally growing an Internet-scale knowledge system and illustrates them with scenarios drawn from e-commerce, e-science, and e-life.

What Do We Know About Knowledge? Cover: AI@50--We Are Golden, by James Gary, New York, New York. Please contact AAAI for such permission. Electronic submissions should be submitted using the web-based submissions form. Submissions information is available at aimagazine.org.

Current developments in molecular electronics, motors and chemical sensors could enable constructing large numbers of devices able to sense, compute and act in micron-scale environments. Such microscopic machines, of sizes comparable to bacteria, could simultaneously monitor entire populations of cells individually in vivo. This paper reviews plausible capabilities for microscopic robots and the physical constraints due to operation in fluids at low Reynolds number, diffusion-limited sensing and thermal noise from Brownian motion. Simple distributed controls are then presented in the context of prototypical biomedical tasks, which require control decisions on millisecond time scales. The resulting behaviors illustrate trade-offs among speed, accuracy and resource use. A specific example is monitoring for patterns of chemicals in a flowing fluid released at chemically distinctive sites. Information collected from a large number of such devices allows estimating properties of cell-sized chemical sources in a macroscopic volume. The microscopic devices moving with the fluid flow in small blood vessels can detect chemicals released by tissues in response to localized injury or infection. We find the devices can readily discriminate a single cell-sized chemical source from the background chemical concentration, providing high-resolution sensing in both time and space. By contrast, such a source would be difficult to distinguish from background when diluted throughout the blood volume as obtained with a blood sample.

The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, in cooperation with Stanford University's Computer Science Department, was pleased to present its 2006 Spring Symposium Series held March 27-29, 2006, at Stanford University, California.

The Fourteenth Annual AAAI Mobile Robot Competition and Exhibition was held at the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in July 2005. This year marked a change in the venue format from a conference hall to a hotel, which changed how the robot event was run. As a result, the robots were much more visible to the attendees of the AAAI conference than in previous years. This article describes the events that were held at the conference, including the Scavenger Hunt, Open Interaction, Robot Challenge, and Robot Exhibition.

An end-to-end system was created at Genworth Financial to automate the underwriting of long-term care (LTC) and life insurance applications. Relying heavily on artificial intelligence techniques, the system has been in production since December 2002 and in 2004 completely automates the underwriting of 19 percent of the LTC applications. Finally, a natural language parser is used to improve the coverage of the underwriting system.

The Electrical Systems Division at the NASA Kennedy Space Center has developed and deployed an agent-based tool to monitor the space shuttle's ground processing telemetry stream. The agent provides autonomous monitoring of the telemetry stream and automatically alerts system engineers when predefined criteria have been met. Sandia National Labs' Java Expert System Shell is employed as the rule engine. This article discusses the rule-based telemetry agent used for space shuttle ground processing and explains the problem domain, development of the agent software, benefits of AI technology, and deployment and sustaining engineering of the product.

The first international conference on human-robot interaction (HRI2006) was held in Salt Lake City, Utah, on March 2-4, 2006. The conference included posters and paper presentations, with topics including metrics and testbeds, natural and affective interaction, cognitive robotics, interfaces, robot teams, usability, and learning. Approximately 150 researchers and practitioners attended the conference, and many more contributed to the conference as authors or reviewers. HRI2007 will be held in Washington, D.C., in March 2007.

This article describes the ExpertCop tutorial system, a simulator of crime in an urban region. In ExpertCop, the students (police officers) configure and allocate an available police force according to a selected geographic region and then interact with the simulation. The student interprets the results with the help of an intelligent tutor, the pedagogical agent, observing how crime behaves in the presence of the allocated preventive policing. The pedagogical agent implements interaction strategies between the student and the geosimulator, designed to make simulated phenomena better understood.