Interestingly, the advantage for more effective access to traditional applications of agent of modeling others is diminished global and corporate information modeling, which requires an agent to when the volatility of the domain is repositories. These repositories are model the problem-solving processes low. Thus, the models of other agents increasingly multimedia, including of the interacting human to provide are more useful in variable domains, text, audio, graphics, imagery, and video. Now attention has turned appropriate feedback. Ole Mengshoel when they are a particularly valuable guide to predict what the other rational toward the problem of processing and D. C. Wilkins's (both of University agents are going to do. and managing multiple and heterogeneous of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) media in a principled manner, presentation focused on recognizing

Many AI researchers are today striving to build agent teams for complex, dynamic multi-agent domains, with intended applications in arenas such as education, training, entertainment, information integration, and collective robotics. Unfortunately, uncertainties in these complex, dynamic domains obstruct coherent teamwork. In particular, team members often encounter differing, incomplete, and possibly inconsistent views of their environment. Furthermore, team members can unexpectedly fail in fulfilling responsibilities or discover unexpected opportunities. Highly flexible coordination and communication is key in addressing such uncertainties. Simply fitting individual agents with precomputed coordination plans will not do, for their inflexibility can cause severe failures in teamwork, and their domain-specificity hinders reusability. Our central hypothesis is that the key to such flexibility and reusability is providing agents with general models of teamwork. Agents exploit such models to autonomously reason about coordination and communication, providing requisite flexibility. Furthermore, the models enable reuse across domains, both saving implementation effort and enforcing consistency. This article presents one general, implemented model of teamwork, called STEAM. The basic building block of teamwork in STEAM is joint intentions (Cohen & Levesque, 1991b); teamwork in STEAM is based on agents' building up a (partial) hierarchy of joint intentions (this hierarchy is seen to parallel Grosz & Kraus's partial SharedPlans, 1996). Furthermore, in STEAM, team members monitor the team's and individual members' performance, reorganizing the team as necessary. Finally, decision-theoretic communication selectivity in STEAM ensures reduction in communication overheads of teamwork, with appropriate sensitivity to the environmental conditions. This article describes STEAM's application in three different complex domains, and presents detailed empirical results.

I view the World Wide Web as an information food chain. The maze of pages and hyperlinks that comprise the Web are at the very bottom of the chain. The WEBCRAWLERs and ALTAVISTAs of the world are information herbivores; they graze on Web pages and regurgitate them as searchable indices. Today, most Web users feed near the bottom of the information food chain, but the time is ripe to move up. Since 1991, we have been building information carnivores, which intelligently hunt and feast on herbivores in UNIX, on the Internet, and on the Web. Information carnivores will become increasingly critical as the Web continues to grow and as more naive users are exposed to its chaotic jumble.

The YODA Robot Project at the University of Southern California/Information Sciences Institute consists of a group of young researchers who share a passion for autonomous systems that can bootstrap its knowledge from real environments by exploration, experimentation, learning, and discovery. Our participation in the Fifth Annual AAAI Mobile Robot Competition and Exhibition, held as part of the Thirteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, served as the first milestone in advancing us toward this goal. YODA's software architecture is a hierarchy of abstraction layers, ranging from a set of behaviors at the bottom layer to a dynamic, mission-oriented planner at the top. This abstraction architecture has proven robust in dynamic and noisy environments, as shown by YODA's performance at the robot competition.

Indoor mobile robots are becoming reliable enough in navigation tasks to consider working with teams of robots. Using SRI International's open-agent architecture (OAA) and SAPHIRA robot-control system, we configured three physical robots and a set of software agents on the internet to plan and act in coordination. Users communicate with the robots using a variety of multimodal input: pen, voice, and keyboard. The robust capabilities of the OAA and SAPHIRA enabled us to design and implement a winning team in the six weeks before the Fifth Annual AAAI Mobile Robot Competition and Exhibition.

Y. Reich (Tel-Aviv University) proposed The paper by M. Benaroch (Syracuse University) suggested the use of knowledge-based tools for mass customization of service products; it dealt in general Grundstein (Framatome, France) reported than the other methods. At the macroeconomic and J. Zahavi (both of Tel-Aviv University) level, Deinichenko et al. presented found that genetic algorithms an expert system that utilizes performed even better than a fuzzy knowledge to analyze economic on Artificial Intelligence linear programming model on their Thus, their conclusion was Academy of Sciences) and T. Szapiro (AIEM4) was held in Tel-Aviv, that AI techniques might provide (Warsaw School of Economics) noted Israel, from 8 to 10 January 1996, better results than rigid analytic the lack of models appropriate to the with participants from 13 countries. Service to customers in the financial for discerning patterns in the economic As a matter of course, almost every area was another focus of the and demographic data of developing presentation at the workshop workshop. Lange et al. described a economies. The paper by touched on AI techniques in one way system for customizing investment Edmonds and S. Moss (Manchester or another.

We would have two robots searching for the rooms and professors and one remaining Lab, we have a long history of behind in the director's office and tell him/ Our current research focuses on realtime well before the competition. They run the Thirteenth National Conference on Artificial SRI's The agent robot has seven sonar sensors, a fast-track technology, called the open-agent architecture vision system from Newton Labs, and a (OAA), was developed at SRI as a way of portable computer on top with a radio ethernet accessing many different types of information for communication to a base station available in computers at different locations. (figure 1). The fast-track system is an interesting device: It consists of a small color video camera and a low-power processor. PC on top to communicate with the other robots and talk to the director.

Although RoboCup's primary objective is a Although RoboCup's final target is a world For the Although it is obvious that building a robot robot (physical robot and software agent) to to play a soccer game is an immense challenge, play a soccer game reasonably well, a wide readers might wonder why we propose range of technologies need to be integrated, RoboCup. It is our intention to use RoboCup and numbers of technical breakthroughs as a vehicle to revitalize AI research by offering must be accomplished. When the accomplishment intelligent robotics, and sensor fusion. of such a goal has significant social The first RoboCup, RoboCup-97, will be held impact, it is considered a grand-challenge during the Fifteenth International Joint Conference project (Kitano et al. 1993). Building a robot on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-97) in to play a soccer game itself does not generate Nagoya, Japan, as part of IJCAI-97's special significant social and economic impact, but Accessibility Complete Incomplete and architectures can be evaluated. Computer Sensor Readings Symbolic Nonsymbolic chess is a typical example of the standard Control Central Distributed problem. Various search algorithms were evaluated and developed using this domain. With the recent accomplishment by the Deep Blue team, which beat Kasparov, a human grand Table 1. A major reason for the success of computer chess as a standard problem is that the evaluation of the accomplishment will certainly be considered the progress was clearly defined.

The YODA Robot Project at the University of Southern California/Information Sciences Institute consists of a group of young researchers who share a passion for autonomous systems that can bootstrap its knowledge from real environments by exploration, experimentation, learning, and discovery. Our goal is to create a mobile agent that can autonomously learn from its environment based on its own actions, percepts, and mis-sions. Our participation in the Fifth Annual AAAI Mobile Robot Competition and Exhibition, held as part of the Thirteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, served as the first milestone in advancing us toward this goal. YODA's software architecture is a hierarchy of abstraction layers, ranging from a set of behaviors at the bottom layer to a dynamic, mission-oriented planner at the top. The planner uses a map of the environment to determine a sequence of goals to be accomplished by the robot and delegates the detailed executions to the set of behaviors at the lower layer. This abstraction architecture has proven robust in dynamic and noisy environments, as shown by YODA's performance at the robot competition.

This article was reprinted with permission from "ACM Computing Surveys: 28(4): December 1996, 653-670. original is available from ACM.