A recent trend in intelligent machines and manufacturing has been toward reconfigurable manufacturing systems, which move away from the idea of a fixed factory line executing an unchanging set of operations, and toward the goal of an adaptable factory structure. With this capability, machines can reconfigure while running, enable or disable capabilities in real time, and respond quickly to changes in the system or the environment (including faults). We propose an approach to achieving on-line reconfigurability based on a high level of system modularity supported by integrated, model-based planning and control software. We describe the implementation of this design in a prototype highly modular, parallel printing system.

This special issue of AI Magazine presents articles on some of the most interesting projects at the intersection of AI and Education. Included are articles on integrated systems such as virtual humans, an intellgent textbook a game-based learning environment as well as technology focused components such as student models and data mining. The issue concludes with an article summarizing the contemporary and emerging challenges at the intersection of AI and education.

Traditionally focused on good old-fashioned AI and robotics, the Spanish AI community holds a vigorous computational intelligence substrate. Neuromorphic, evolutionary, or fuzzylike systems have been developed by many research groups in the Spanish computer sciences. It is no surprise, then, that these naturegrounded efforts start to emerge, enriching the AI catalogue of research projects and publications and, eventually, leading to new directions of basic or applied research. In this article, we review the contribution of Melomics in computational creativity.

This paper provides a broad overview of the situation in Parallel SAT Solving. A set of challenges to researchers is presented which, we believe, must be met to ensure the practical applicability of Parallel SAT Solvers in the future. All these challenges are described informally, but put into perspective with related research results, and a (subjective) grading of difficulty for each of them is provided.

This special issue of the AI Magazine is devoted to some exemplar works of AI on mobile devices. It includes four works that range from mobile activity recognition and air quality detection to machine translation and image compression.

Pattern-Based Constraint Satisfaction and Logic Puzzles develops a pure logic, pattern-based perspective of solving the finite Constraint Satisfaction Problem (CSP), with emphasis on finding the "simplest" solution. Different ways of reasoning with the constraints are formalised by various families of "resolution rules", each of them carrying its own notion of simplicity. A large part of the book illustrates the power of the approach by applying it to various popular logic puzzles. It provides a unified view of how to model and solve them, even though they involve very different types of constraints: obvious symmetric ones in Sudoku, non-symmetric but transitive ones (inequalities) in Futoshiki, topological and geometric ones in Map colouring, Numbrix and Hidato, and even much more complex non-binary arithmetic ones in Kakuro (or Cross Sums). It also shows that the most familiar techniques for these puzzles can indeed be understood as mere application-specific presentations of the general rules. Sudoku is used as the main example throughout the book, making it also an advanced level sequel to "The Hidden Logic of Sudoku" (another book by the same author), with: many examples of relationships among different rules and of exceptional situations; comparisons of the resolution potential of various families of rules; detailed statistics of puzzles hardness; analysis of extreme instances.

Interactive narrative is a form of digital interactive experience in which users create or influence a dramatic storyline through their actions. The goal of an interactive narrative system is to immerse the user in a virtual world such that he or she believes that they are an integral part of an unfolding story and that their actions can significantly alter the direction and/or outcome of the story.In this article we review the ways in which artificial intelligence can be brought to bear on the creation of interactive narrative systems. We lay out the landscape of about 20 years of interactive narrative research and explore the successes as well as open research questions pertaining to the novel use of computational narrative intelligence in the pursuit of entertainment, education, and training.

The RoboCup Rescue Robot and Simulation competitions have been held since 2000. The experience gained during these competitions has increased the maturity level of the field, which allowed deploying robots after real disasters (for example, Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster). This article provides an overview of these competitions and highlights the state of the art and the lessons learned.

The Eighth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE) was held October 8-12, 2012, at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. The conference included a research and industry track as well as a demonstration program. The conference featured 16 technical papers, 16 posters, and one demonstration, along with invited speakers, the StarCraft Ai competition, a newly-introduced Doctoral Consortium, and 5 workshops.

Deployed Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence 2012 Abstract This issue of AI Magazine features expanded versions of articles that discuss deployed applications from the 2012 AAAI Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-12). This issue of AI Magazine features expanded versions of articles that discuss deployed applications from the 2012 AAAI Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-12).