Healthcare professionals …. please help fuel the research. I know you have a lot to share about these new developments (artificial intelligence) and hence will request your comments. A few years back, I served as a board member of a newly formed accountable care entity. This multi-hospital, multi-county accountable care entity spent significant time and effort to develop a risk stratification and care coordination model. The goal was that the model will not only provide efficient and effective care but will also be based upon evidence based medicine.

In this article, we give an overview of the answer set programming paradigm, explain its strengths, and illustrate its main features in terms of examples and an application problem. In this article, we give an overview of the answer set programming paradigm, explain its strengths, and illustrate its main features in terms of examples and an application problem.

The Workshop Program of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence's Thirtieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-16) was held at the beginning of the conference, February 12-13, 2016. Workshop participants met and discussed issues with a selected focus -- providing an informal setting for active exchange among researchers, developers and users on topics of current interest. To foster interaction and exchange of ideas, the workshops were kept small, with 25-65 participants. Attendance was sometimes limited to active participants only, but most workshops also allowed general registration by other interested individuals.

ASP has been applied fruitfully to a wide range of areas in AI and in other fields, both in academia and in industry, thanks to the expressive representation languages of ASP and the continuous improvement of ASP solvers. We present some of these ASP applications, in particular, in knowledge representation and reasoning, robotics, bioinformatics and computational biology as well as some industrial applications. We discuss the challenges addressed by ASP in these applications and emphasize the strengths of ASP as a useful AI paradigm.

Answer set programming is a declarative programming paradigm based on the answer set semantics of logic programs. This introductory article provides the mathematical background for the discussion of answer set programming in other contributions to this special issue.

This article reports on the first international Competition of Distributed and Multiagent Planners (CoDMAP). The competition focused on cooperative domain-independent planners compatible with a minimal multiagent extension of the classical planning model. The motivations for the competition were manifold: to standardize the problem description language with a common set of benchmarks, to promote development of multiagent planners both inside and outside of the multiagent research community, and to serve as a prototype for future multiagent planning competitions. The article provides an overview of cooperative multiagent planning, describes a novel variant of standardized input language for encoding mutliagent planning problems and summarizes the key points of organization, competing planners and results of the competition.

This column provides an encounter with the Artificial Intelligence research community in the state of Israel. The first section introduces this community and its special attributes. The second section provides overview on some recent research projects done in Israel.

Google is better catering to marketers who might not have the budget for enterprise-class data handling tools or the resources to manage the mountains of data they collect. The move points to how personalization has evolved from being a nice-to-have to a must-have for digital marketers of all sizes. Google Optimize's free platform could be a huge boon to startups and fledgling initiatives, as any marketer who doesn't -- or can't -- take advantage of analytics to turn raw consumer data into useful campaign information is essentially handicapping their entire program. The new Session Quality Score underscores how machine learning is quickly becoming a standard digital marketing technique. "As today's businesses are shifting to compete on customer experience and personalized marketing, we want to give all businesses the tools and access to compete -- and ultimately, drive better online consumer experiences," wrote Babak Pahlavan, senior director of product management and analytics solutions and measurement at Google, in the blog post.

It knew enough about medical diagnoses and literature to beat "Jeopardy!" Now, an IBMcomputer platform called Watson is taking on something really tough: teaching third-grade math. For the past two years, the IBM Foundation has worked with teachers and their union, the American Federation of Teachers, to build Teacher Advisor, a program that uses artificial-intelligence technology to answer questions from educators and help them build personalized lesson plans. By the end of the year, it will be available free to third-grade math teachers across the country and will add subject areas and grade levels over time. "The idea was to build a personal adviser, so a teacher would be able to find the best lesson and then customize the lesson based upon their classroom needs," said Stanley S. Litow, president of the IBM Foundation. "By loading a massive amount of content, of teaching strategies, lesson plans, you'd actually make Watson the teacher coach," Mr. Litow said.

In some use cases, it is impossible for humans to replicate the performance of artificial intelligence. But businesses will need a lot of data for AI systems to be effective. Maybe you've seen an artificial intelligence (AI) system like Watson at work on "Jeopardy!" or have heard of its successes in medical diagnoses or other fields. Maybe you've only heard about other similar systems working through incredibly complex and large sets of data to produce results that even non-experts can understand, through visualizations or natural language. Either way, AI systems are impressing many on their march toward becoming essential business processes.