The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) held its 1994 Spring Symposium Series on 19-23 March at Stanford University, Stanford, California. This article contains summaries of 10 of the 11 symposia that were conducted: Applications of Computer Vision in Medical Image Processing; AI in Medicine: Interpreting Clinical Data; Believable Agents; Computational Organization Design; Decision-Theoretic Planning; Detecting and Resolving Errors in Manufacturing Systems; Goal-Driven Learning; Intelligent Multimedia, Multimodal Systems; Software Agents; and Toward Physical Interaction and Manipulation. Papers of most of the symposia are available as technical reports from AAAI.

The Fourth International Workshop on Nonmonotonic Reasoning brought together active researchers in nonmonotonic reasoning to discuss current research, results, and problems of both theoretical and practical natures. There was lively discussion on a number of issues, including future research directions for the field.

The field of knowledge engineering has been one of the most visible successes of AI to date. Knowledge acquisition is the main bottleneck in the knowledge engineer's work. The benchmark centers on the knowledge engineering viewpoint, covering some of the characteristics the knowledge engineer wants to find in a machine-learning tool. The proposed model has been applied to a set of machine-learning tools, comparing expected and obtained results.

The Fifth International Conference on Genetic Algorithms was held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 17-21 July 1993. Approximately 350 participants attended the multitrack conference, which covered a wide range of topics, including genetic operators, mathematical analysis of genetic algorithms, parallel genetic algorithms, classifier systems, and genetic programming. This article highlights the major themes of the conference by discussing a few papers in detail.

Recent general AI conferences show a decline in both the number and the quality of vision papers, but there is tremendous growth in, and specialization of, computer vision conferences. Hence, one might conclude that computer vision is parting or has parted company with AI. This article proposes that the divorce of computer vision and AI suggested here is actually an open marriage: Although computer vision is developing through its own research agenda, there are many shared areas of interest, and many of the key goals, assumptions, and characteristics of computer vision are also clearly found in AI.

Representatives of universities and businesses were chosen by the Japan Technology Evaluation Center to investigate the state of the technology in Japan relative to the United States. The panel's report focused on applications, tools, and research and development in universities and industry and on major national projects.

The Seventh International Workshop on Qualitative Reasoning about Physical Systems was held on 16-19 May 1993. The bulk of the 50 attendees work in the AI area, but several engineers and cognitive psychologists also attended. The two topics attracting special attention were automated modeling and the design task. This article briefly describes some of the presentations and discussions held during the workshop.

Southwest Research Institute and the U.S. Air Force Materiel Command designed and developed an automated system for the preparation of deficiency report analysis information reports (DRAIRs). A DRAIR provides Air Force engineers with an analysis of an aircraft item's performance history, including maintenance, supply, and cost. A DRAIR also recommends improvements for a deficient materiel or aircraft part. The successful design, development, and deployment of the DRAIR ADVISER system by applying a combination of knowledge-based system and database management techniques are the subject of this article.

The Objects and Artificial Intelligence Workshop was held on 25 August 1991 in conjunction with the 1991 International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. The workshop brought together researchers in AI and object-oriented programming to exchange ideas and investigate possible avenues of cooperation between AI and object-oriented programming. The workshop dealt with both the theoretical and the practical aspects of this cooperation.

The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence held its 1993 Fall Symposium Series on October 22-24 in Raleigh, North Carolina. This article contains summaries of the six symposia that were conducted: Automated Deduction in Nonstandard Logics; Games: Planning and Learning; Human-Computer Collaboration: Reconciling Theory, Synthesizing Practice; Instantiating Intelligent Agents; and Machine Learning and Computer Vision: What, Why, and How?