The intention of the RoboCup Rescue project is to promote research and development in this socially significant domain at various levels, involving multiagent teamwork coordination, physical agents for search and rescue, information infrastructures, personal digital assistants, a standard simulator and decision-support systems, evaluation benchmarks for rescue strategies, and robotic systems that are all integrated into a comprehensive system in the future. Although the rescue domain is intuitively appealing as a large-scale multiagent and intelligent system domain, analysis has not yet revealed its domain characteristics. The first research evaluation meeting will be held at RoboCup-2001, in conjunction with the Seventeenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-2001), as part of the RoboCup Rescue Simulation League and RoboCup/AAAI Rescue Robot Competition. In this article, we present a detailed analysis of the task domain and elucidate characteristics necessary for multiagent and intelligent systems for this domain.

Language processing has a large practical potential in intelligent interfaces if we take into account multiple modalities of communication. In particular, the integration of natural language processing and hypermedia allows each modality to overcome the constraints of the other, resulting in a novel class of integrated environments for complex exploration and information access. A great opportunity arises for intelligent interfaces and language technology of this kind to play an important role for individual-oriented cultural tourism. A recent project concentrated on the combination of two forms of navigation taking place at the same time -- one in information space, the other in physical space.

The events of the Ninth AAAI Robot Competition and Exhibition, held 30 July to 3 August 2000, included the popular Hors d'Oeuvres Anyone? and Challenge events as well as a new event, Urban Search and Rescue. Here, I describe these events as well as the exhibition and the concluding workshop.

This article describes a methodology for programming robots known as probabilistic robotics. The probabilistic paradigm pays tribute to the inherent uncertainty in robot perception, relying on explicit representations of uncertainty when determining what to do. This article surveys some of the progress in the field, using in-depth examples to illustrate some of the nuts and bolts of the basic approach. My central conjecture is that the probabilistic approach to robotics scales better to complex real-world applications than approaches that ignore a robot's uncertainty.

The stand-allocation system (SAS) is an AI application developed for the Hong Kong International Airport (HKIA) at Chek Lap Kok. The system ensures a high standard of quality in customer service, airport safety, and use of stand resources. This article describes our experience in developing an AI system using standard off-the-shelf software components. SAS is an example of how development methodologies used to construct modern AI applications have become fully inline with mainstream practices.

The Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence Conference was held 18-22 July 1999 in Orlando, Florida. Ramasamy Uthurusamy was the Program Chair and Barbara Hayes-Roth was the Program Co-Chair. Although all the IAAI-99 papers and talks were certainly interesting and important, we present in this special issue of AI Magazine only a select subset because of page and other limitations. We include two invited talks and four applications as a snapshot of IAAI-99.

In this article, we present a last-minute travel application as part of a complete virtual travel agency. Each year, a significant amount of tour packages are sold as last minute tours in Germany. The last-minute travel application presented here uses case-based reasoning to bridge this gap and simulate the sales assistance of a human travel agent. Important for the acceptance by customers is also the integration into the virtual travel agency and the interconnections to other parts of this system, such as background information or the online car rental application.

The Fifth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence Planning and Scheduling (AIPS 2000) was held on 14-17 April 2000 at Breckenridge, Colorado; it was colocated with the Seventh International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR2000). This conference brought together researchers working in all aspects of problems in planning, scheduling, planning and learning, and plan execution for dealing with complex problems.

In spreadsheets, numeric data are represented as exact numbers and their mutual relations as functions, whose values (output) are computed from given argument values (input). However, in the real world, data are often inexact and uncertain in many ways, and the relationships, that is, constraints, between input and output are far more complicated. This article shows that interval constraint solving, an emerging AI-based technology, provides a more versatile and useful foundation for spreadsheets. The idea has been successfully integrated with Microsoft excel as the add-in interval solver that seamlessly upgrades the arithmetic core of excel into interval constraint solving.

I was asked to give a visionary talk about the future applications of Artificial Intelligence technology; but I should warn you that I'm actually not very good as a visionary. Most of my predictions about what will happen in the industry don't come true even though they ought to. So I'm not going to tell you what the future holds; what I will do is to point out some of the technological trends that are at work. Finally, I'll discuss how the development of practical applications ought to interact with the scientific enterprise of trying to understand intelligence, in particular, human intelligence.