By user-driven modeling for end users and near-optimal knowledge-driven scheduling acquired from human experts, races can produce parking schedules for about 400 daily flights in approximately 20 seconds; human experts normally take 4 to 5 hours to do the same. Scheduling results in the form of Gantt charts produced by races are also accepted by the domain experts. After daily scheduling is completed, the messages for aircraft change, and delay messages are reflected and updated into the schedule according to the knowledge of the domain experts. By analyzing the knowledge model of the domain expert, the reactive scheduling steps are effectively represented as the rules, and the scenarios of the graphic user interfaces are designed.

Induction extracts knowledge in the form of, say, rules or decision trees from existing data, and deduction applies induction results to interpret new data. It starts with existing database technology and performs both induction and deduction. The integration of database technology, induction (from machine learning), and deduction (from knowledge-based sys-tems) plays a key role in the construction of ILDB systems, as does the design of efficient induction and deduction algorithms. This article presents a system structure for ILDB systems and discusses practical issues for ILDB applications, such as instance selection and structured induction.

The Eighth Annual Mobile Robot Competition and Exhibition was held as part of the Sixteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Orlando, Florida, 18 to 22 July. The goals of these robot events are to foster the sharing of research and technology, allow research groups to showcase their achievements, encourage students to enter robotics and AI fields at both the undergraduate and graduate level, and increase awareness of the field. The 1999 events included two robot contests; a new, long-term robot challenge; an exhibition; and a National Botball Championship for high school teams sponsored by the KISS Institute. Each of these events is described in detail in this article.

With the growing importance of multiagent team-work, tools that can help humans analyze, evaluate, and understand team behaviors are also becoming increasingly important. ISAAC'S novelty stems from a key design constraint that arises in team analysis: Multiple types of models of team behavior are necessary to analyze different granularities of team events, including agent actions, interactions, and global performance. Additionally, ISAAC uses multiple presentation techniques that can aid human understanding of the analyses. This article presents ISAAC'S general conceptual framework and its application in the RoboCup soccer domain, where ISAAC was awarded the RoboCup Scientific Challenge Award.

RoboCup is an initiative designed to promote the full integration of AI and robotics research.

This robot consists of a moving mechanism, motion-control hardware, software, and a wireless communication system. The motion mechanism consists of a drive unit, a steer unit, and a castor wheel. Motion control is carried out by a special control board that uses two microcontrollers to carry out the software system decisions and transfers them to the robot mechanics. The software system performs real-time object recognition at the rate of 16 frames a second.

As the English striker Gary Lineker famously said, "Football is a very simple game. We take the giant set of log data produced by the simulator tournaments from 1997 to 1999 and feed it to a data-munching program that produces statistics on important game features. Plus, because the data muncher can work in real time, we can also release it as a proxy server for RoboCup. This proxy server gives all RoboCup developers instant access to statistics while a game is in progress and is a promising step toward an important goal: understanding RoboCup.

The Cornell RoboCup Project was created to teach systems engineering concepts and practices to students to prepare them for designing, integrating, and maintaining highly complex systems. Another objective of the project is to explore the interplay between AI, dynamics, and control theory. This article describes the Cornell RoboCup team, which won the RoboCup-99 small-league championship in Stockholm, Sweden.

I report on my experience over the past few years in introducing automated, model-based diagnostic technologies into industrial settings. In partic-ular, I discuss the competition that this technology has been receiving from handcrafted, rule-based diagnostic systems that has set some high standards that must be met by model-based systems before they can be viewed as viable alternatives. My goal in this article is to provide a perspective on this competition and discuss a diagnostic tool, called DTOOL/CNETS, that I have been developing over the years as I tried to address the major challenges posed by rule-based systems. In particular, I discuss three major features of the developed tool that were either adopted, designed, or innovated to address these challenges: (1) its compositional modeling approach, (2) its structure-based computational approach, and (3) its ability to synthesize embeddable diagnostic systems for a variety of software and hardware platforms.

The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, in cooperation, with Stanford University's Department of Com-puter Science, presented the 1999 Spring Symposium Series on 22 to 24 March 1999 at Stanford University. The titles of the seven symposia were (1) Agents with Adjustable Autonomy, (2) Artificial Intelligence and Computer Games, (3) Artificial Intelligence in Equipment Maintenance Service and Support, (4) Hybrid Systems and AI: Modeling, Analysis, and Control of Discrete Continuous Systems, (5) Intelligent Agents in Cyberspace, (6) Predictive Toxicology of Chemicals: Experiences and Impact of AI Tools, and (7) Search Techniques for Problem Solving under Uncertainty and Incomplete Information.