The 2005 Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems Conference (AAMAS 2005) was held July 25-29, 2005, at the University of Utrecht, the Netherlands. This report reviews the activities of that conference, including the workshop and tutorial programs, the main conference and poster tracks, the industry paper track, the demonstration track and sponsor demonstration sessions, the invited talks, exhibition, doctoral mentoring program, as well the sponsorship and scholarships activities.

Robotics is a remarkable domain that may be successfully employed in the classroom both to motivate students to tackle hard AI topics and to provide students experience applying AI representations and algorithms to real-world problems. We show how the robot obstacle-detection problem can motivate learning neural networks and Bayesian networks. We also show how the robot-localization problem can motivate learning how to build complete solutions based on particle filtering. We believe that expanding handson active learning to additional AI classrooms provides value both to the students and to the future of the field itself.

Artificial Intelligence: The Next Twenty-Five Years Abstract Through this collection of programmatic statements from key figures in the field, we chart the progress of AI and survey current and future directions for AI research and the AI community. Through this collection of programmatic statements from key figures in the field, we chart the progress of AI and survey current and future directions for AI research and the AI community.

The Twentieth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence was held July 9-13, 2005, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The conference, which marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), received 803 submissions to the technical program. All papers were double-blind reviewed, and 150 papers were accepted for oral presentation, while 79 papers were accepted for poster presentation. The keynote address was delivered by Marvin Minsky.

The AAAI-05 workshops were held on Saturday and Sunday, July 9-10, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The thirteen workshops were Contexts and Ontologies: Theory, Practice and Applications, Educational Data Mining, Exploring Planning and Scheduling for Web Services, Grid and Autonomic Computing, Human Comprehensible Machine Learning, Inference for Textual Question Answering, Integrating Planning into Scheduling, Learning in Computer Vision, Link Analysis, Mobile Robot Workshop, Modular Construction of Humanlike Intelligence, Multiagent Learning, Question Answering in Restricted Domains, and Spoken Language Understanding.

In 1983, I gave the AAAI president's address titled "Artificial Intelligence Prepares for 2001." An article, based on that talk, was published soon after in "AI Magazine. In this article, I retract or modify some of the points made in that piece and reaffirm others. Specifically, I now acknowledge the many important facets of AI research beyond high-level reasoning but maintain my view about the importance of integrated AI systems, such as mobile robots.

The emerging Semantic Web focuses on bringing knowledge representationlike capabilities to Web applications in a Web-friendly way. The ability to put knowledge on the Web, share it, and reuse it through standard Web mechanisms provides new and interesting challenges to artificial intelligence. In this paper, I explore the similarities and differences between the Semantic Web and traditional AI knowledge representation systems, and see if I can validate the analogy "The Semantic Web is to KR as the Web is to hypertext."

I claim that achieving real human-level artificial intelligence would necessarily imply that most of the tasks that humans perform for pay could be automated. Rather than work toward this goal of automation by building special-purpose systems, I argue for the development of general-purpose, educable systems that can learn and be taught to perform any of the thousands of jobs that humans can perform. Joining others who have made similar proposals, I advocate beginning with a system that has minimal, although extensive, built-in capabilities. These would have to include the ability to improve through learning along with many other abilities.

In this brief history, the beginnings of artificial intelligence are traced to philosophy, fiction, and imagination. Early inventions in electronics, engineering, and many other disciplines have influenced AI. Some early milestones include work in problems solving which included basic work in learning, knowledge representation, and inference as well as demonstration programs in language understanding, translation, theorem proving, associative memory, and knowledge-based systems. The article ends with a brief examination of influential organizations and current issues facing the field.

We are pleased to publish this special selection of articles from the Sixteenth Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-04), which occurred July 27-29, 2004 in San Jose, California. IAAI is the premier venue for learning about AI's impact through deployed applications and emerging AI technologies. The emerging applications track features technologies that are rapidly maturing to the point of application. The other three articles, which are from the emerging technology track, were selected because they are particularly innovative and show great potential for deployment.