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. It is impossible for a travel agent to keep track of all the offered tour packages. Electronic-commerce applications might present the best possible tour package for a specific customer request. Traditional database-driven applications, as used by most of the tour operators, are not sufficient enough to implement a sales process with consultation on the World Wide Web. 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. A case retrieval net, as an internal data structure, proved to be efficient in handling the large amount of data. 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 KDD conference series is the primary venue for presenting and publishing the highest quality advances in the field.

The AAAI-99 Workshop Program (a part of the sixteenth national conference on artificial intelligence) was held in Orlando, Florida. Each workshop was limited to approximately 25 to 50 participants. Participation was by invitation from the workshop organizers. The workshops were Agent-Based Systems in the Business Context, Agents' Conflicts, Artificial Intelligence for Distributed Information Networking, Artificial Intelligence for Electronic Commerce, Computation with Neural Systems Workshop, Configuration, Data Mining with Evolutionary Algorithms: Research Directions (Jointly sponsored by GECCO-99), Environmental Decision Support Systems and Artificial Intelligence, Exploring Synergies of Knowledge Management and Case-Based Reasoning, Intelligent Information Systems, Intelligent Software Engineering, Machine Learning for Information Extraction, Mixed-Initiative Intelligence, Negotiation: Settling Conflicts and Identifying Opportunities, Ontology Management, and Reasoning in Context for AI Applications.

The Fifteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-98) was held in Madison, Wisconsin, on 26-30 July. The following four workshops were held in conjunction with the conference: (1) Case-Based Reasoning Integrations, (2) Learning for Text Categorization, (3) Predicting the Future: AI Approaches to Time-Series Problems, and (4) Software Tools for Developing Agents.

The immense growth of the web has caused the amount of text available online to skyrocket. The AAAI-98 Workshop on Learning for Text Categorization brought together researchers from many of respective areas. A to share their different experiences four workshops were held in conjunction final panel on the synergistic effects of in tackling similar problems. Specifically, several researchers made tasks, no previous workshop soning system, what the significance the point that making use of linguistic attempted to characterize CBR integration of these synergies is, how they can be structure, as well as using stylistic and issues. This nontextual features of documents, can Workshop highlights included panel and the other discussion periods improve categorization performance.

Our subject has been compared to Mozart. His both in the popular media and its corrupting moral influence on society, proofs are ingenious, cleverly argued, among the cultured intelligentsia. Lanier's home page: While many of these attacks are cited "... machine decision making is widely, most of them are ridiculous running our household finances to anyone with an appropriate technical to a scary degree. Our demonstrated - Sir John Eccles for the "Mysterious willingness to accommodate machines Loom Theory." AI…lets strategists Thus, the Simon Newcomb award imagine less gruesome warfare this year goes to Jaron Lanier. He is an essayist whose views can be found in such magazines All of this ill-informed pseudo-political as Harpers and Wired; he is also, ranting is remarkably silly, but according to his web page, "available none of it can really be said to constitute for public speaking." He is widely regarded an argument. The first part of the argument is clearly inspired by Searle's magnificent reductio, though performed in a very different style. Recall that Searle's those numbers are a computer Obviously one is supposed to think argument amounts to the claim program. Lanier then makes the move that any sufficiently complex physical through all the possible computers which wins him this year's Award: system--the atoms in a wall, say that could exist … until you "You say the rainstorm is not --has within it a pattern which could find one that treats the raindrop really doing computation--it is be the encoding of a given piece of patterns as a program exactly just sitting there as a passive program--and software--a word-processor, for instance--and equivalent to your brain." Perhaps there's something "Yes, it can be done..." [Since the Now the raindrops are reduce to nonsense, that a program There's a technical slip here: the doing the computing."

CHEMREG is a large knowledge-based system used by Air Products and Chemicals, Inc., to support compliance with regulatory requirements for communicating health and safety information in the shipping and handling of chemical products. This article concentrates on one of the knowledge bases in this system: the case-based reasoner. The case-based reasoner addresses the issue of how proper communication of public health and safety information can be ensured while rapid and cost-effective product evaluation is allowed in the absence of actual hazard testing of the product. CHEMREG generates estimates of hazard data for new products from similar products using an existing relational database as a case library.

CHEMREG is a large knowledge-based system used by Air Products and Chemicals, Inc., to support compliance with regulatory requirements for communicating health and safety information in the shipping and handling of chemical products. This article concentrates on one of the knowledge bases in this system: the case-based reasoner. The case-based reasoner addresses the issue of how proper communication of public health and safety information can be ensured while rapid and cost-effective product evaluation is allowed in the absence of actual hazard testing of the product. CHEMREG generates estimates of hazard data for new products from similar products using an existing relational database as a case library. Implementation of the case-based reasoner in rules and objects using a commercial knowledge-based system shell is described. Although some refinements remain, the performance of the case-based reasoner has met its design goals.

New areas such as knowledge management and multimedia also appeared in the emerging applications track.

Reuters is a worldwide company focused on supplying financial and news information to its more than 40,000 subscribers around the world. To enhance the quality and consistency of its customer- support organization, Reuters embarked on a global knowledge development and reuse project. The resulting system is in operational use in North America, Europe, and Asia. The system supports 38 Reuter products worldwide. This article presents a case study of Reuter experience in putting a global knowledge organization in place, building knowledge bases at multiple distributed sites, deploying these knowledge bases in multiple sites around the world, and maintaining and enhancing knowledge bases within a global organizational framework. This project is the first to address issues in multicountry knowledge development and maintenance and multicountry knowledge deployment. These issues are critical for global companies to understand, address, and resolve to effectively gain the benefits of global knowledge systems.