This article is a report of the Eighth Ireland Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science (AICS-97), which was run in conjunction with the Irish Machine Vision and Image Processing Conference (IMVIP-97), held at the University of Ulster, Magee College in Derry / Londonderry, Northern Ireland, on 10 to 13 September 1997.

ISIS: An Explicit Model of Teamwork at RobotCup-97

This article gives an overview of two recent events on the validation and verification of knowledge-based systems: (1) the 1997 European Symposium on the Verification and Validation of Knowledge-Based Systems (EUROVAV-97) and (2) the Four-teenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence Workshop on the Verification and Validation of Knowledge- Based Systems. To give an integrated view of current research issues in this field, we organized this article along thematic lines, unifying the reports of the two separate meetings. Our report focuses on the trends that we think will be important in the near future in this field.

In July 1997, the Sixth Annual Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) Mobile Robot Competition and Exhibition was held. The competition consisted of four new events: (1) Find Life on Mars; (2) Find the Remote; (3) Home Vacuum; and (4) Hors d'Oeuvres, Anyone? The robot exhibition was the largest in AAAI history. This article presents the history, motivation, and contributions for the event.

Robotic soccer is a challenging research domain that involves multiple agents that need to collaborate in an adversarial environment to achieve specific objectives. In this article, we describe CMUNITED, the team of small robotic agents that we developed to enter the RoboCup-97 competition. We designed and built the robotic agents, devised the appropriate vision algorithm, and developed and implemented algorithms for strategic collaboration between the robots in an uncertain and dynamic environment. The article then focuses on the agent behaviors, ranging from low-level individual behaviors to coordinated, strategic team behaviors.

A wide variety of robotics research was demonstrated at the 1997 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Mobile Robot Exhibition. Twenty-one robotic teams participated, making it the largest exhibition ever. This article describes the robotics research presented by the participating teams.

RoboCup-97, The First Robot World Cup Soccer Games and Conferences, was held at the Fifteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. The world champions are CMUNITED (Carnegie Mellon University) for the small-size league, DREAMTEAM (University of Southern California) and TRACKIES (Osaka University, Japan) for the middle-size league, and AT-HUMBOLDT (Humboldt University) for the simulation league. The Scientific Challenge Award was given to Sean Luke (University of Maryland) for his genetic programming- based simulation team LUKE, and the Engineering Challenge Awards were given to UTTORI UNITED (Utsunomiya University, Toyo University, and Riken, Japan) and RMIT (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Australia) for designing novel omnidirectional driving mechanisms. RoboCup-98, the Second Robot World Cup Soccer, was held in conjunction with the Third International Conference on Multiagent Systems in Paris, France, in July 1998.

Robot soccer competition provides an excellent opportunity for integrated robotics research. All these tasks demand robots that are autonomous (sensing, thinking, and acting as independent creatures), efficient (functioning under time and resource constraints), cooperative (collaborating with each other to accomplish tasks that are beyond an individual's capabilities), and intelligent (reasoning and planning actions and perhaps learning from experience). Furthermore, all these capabilities must be integrated into a single and complete system, which raises a set of challenges that are new to individual research disciplines. At RoboCup-97, held as part of the Fifteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, these integrated robots performed well, and our DREAMTEAM won the world championship in the middle-size robot league.

Modeling various aspects of language-syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and discourse, among others -- by the use of constrained formal-computational systems, just adequate for such modeling, has proved to be an effective research strategy, leading to deep understanding of these aspects, with implications for both machine processing and human processing. This approach enables one to distinguish between the universal and stipulative constraints. This is in contrast to an approach where we start with the most powerful formal-computational system and then model the phenomena by making all constraints stipulative in a sense. The use of constrained systems for modeling leads to some novel ways of describing locality of structures and brings out the relationship between the complexity of description of primitives and local computations over them.