The Eighteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-2002) Robot Challenge is part of an annual series of robot challenges and competitions. It is intended to promote the development of robot systems that interact intelligently with humans in natural environments. The Challenge task calls for a robot to attend the AAAI conference, which includes registering for the conference and giving a talk about itself. In this article, we review the task requirements, introduce the robots that participated at AAAI-2002 and describe the strengths and weaknesses of their performance.

The AAAI-2002 Robot Exhibition offered robotics researchers a venue for live demonstrations of their current projects. Researchers ranging from undergraduates working on their own to large multilab groups demonstrated robots that performed tasks ranging from improvisational comedy to urban search and rescue. This article describes their entries.

The AAAI-2002 Fall Symposium Series was held Friday through Sunday, 15 to 17 November 2002 at the Sea Crest Conference Center in North Falmouth, Massachusetts. The five symposia in the 2002 Fall Symposia Series were (1) Chance Discovery: The Discovery and Management of Chance Events; (2) Etiquette for Human-Computer Work; (3) Human-Robot Interaction; (4) Intent Inference for Users, Teams, and Adversaries; and (5) Personalized Agents. The highlights of each symposium were presented at a special plenary session. Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) technical reports of most of the symposia will be made available to AAAI members.

The Fifth International Symposium on Abstraction, Reformulation, and Approximation (SARA-2002) was held from 2 to 4 August 2002 in Kananaskis, Alberta, Canada. This interdisciplinary conference brought together researchers from around the world to present recent progress on, and exchange ideas about, how abstraction, reformulation, and approximation techniques can be used in areas such as automatic programming, constraint satisfaction, design, diagnosis, machine learning, search, planning, reasoning, game playing, scheduling, and theorem proving.

The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) presented the AAAI-02 Workshop Program on Sunday and Monday, 28-29 July 2002 at the Shaw Convention Center in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. The AAAI-02 workshop program included 18 workshops covering a wide range of topics in AI. The workshops were Agent-Based Technologies for B2B Electronic-Commerce; Automation as a Caregiver: The Role of Intelligent Technology in Elder Care; Autonomy, Delegation, and Control: From Interagent to Groups; Coalition Formation in Dynamic Multiagent Environments; Cognitive Robotics; Game-Theoretic and Decision-Theoretic Agents; Intelligent Service Integration; Intelligent Situation-Aware Media and Presentations; Meaning Negotiation; Multiagent Modeling and Simulation of Economic Systems; Ontologies and the Semantic Web; Planning with and for Multiagent Systems; Preferences in AI and CP: Symbolic Approaches; Probabilistic Approaches in Search; Real-Time Decision Support and Diagnosis Systems; Semantic Web Meets Language Resources; and Spatial and Temporal Reasoning.

The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, in cooperation with Stanford University's Department of Computer Science, presented the 2002 Spring Symposium Series, held Monday through Wednesday, 25 to 27 March 2002, at Stanford University. The nine symposia were entitled (1) Acquiring (and Using) Linguistic (and World) Knowledge for Information Access; (2) Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Entertainment; (3) Collaborative Learning Agents; (4) Information Refinement and Revision for Decision Making: Modeling for Diagnostics, Prognostics, and Prediction; (5) Intelligent Distributed and Embedded Systems; (6) Logic-Based Program Synthesis: State of the Art and Future Trends; (7) Mining Answers from Texts and Knowledge Bases; (8) Safe Learning Agents; and (9) Sketch Understanding.

The Fourteenth Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence Conference (IAAI-2002) was held from 28 July to 1 August in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, in conjunction with the Seventeenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-2002). As in past years, papers were solicited in two categories: (1) deployed applications and (2) emerging applications and technologies. Deployed application papers describe systems that have been in use for at least several months by individuals or organizations other than their developers, have measurable benefits, and incorporate AI technologies. Emerging applications are technologies and systems that are close to deployment and clearly show an innovative implementation of AI technologies.

The Fifteenth Annual International Conference of the Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society (FLAIRS) was held in Pensacola Beach, Florida, 14 to 16 May 2002. Spanning a broad spectrum of AI research, the conference was composed of a general track and 14 themed special tracks. Conference highlights included invited talks by James Allen, Randall Beer, Jeff Bradshaw, Bill Clancey, Clark Glymour, and Pat Hayes. Two parallel workshops on causality and categorization and studies of expert knowledge and skill followed the conference.

The staff scheduling problem is a critical problem in the call center (or, more generally, customer contact center) industry. This article describes DIRECTOR, a staff scheduling system for contact centers. DIRECTOR is a constraint-based system that uses AI search techniques to generate schedules that satisfy and optimize a wide range of constraints and service-quality metrics. DIRECTOR has successfully been deployed at more than 800 contact centers, with significant measurable benefits, some of which are documented in case studies included in this article.

Delivering effective customer service over the internet requires attention to many aspects of knowledge management if it is to be both satisfying for customers and economical for the company or other organization. In RightNow ESERVICE CENTER, such management is built into the architecture and supported by automatically gathering metainformation about the documents held in the core knowledge base. A variety of AI techniques are used to facilitate the construction, maintenance, and navigation of the knowledge base. Customers using ESERVICE CENTER report dramatic decreases in support costs and increases in customer satisfaction because of the ease of use provided by the self-learning features of the knowledge base.