This symposium reexamined the view (proposed by Austin and developed by Searle and others) of communication as action rather than transmission of information. Such a view has become popular as a characterization of language use, and it plays a central role in the dialogue-management components of many systems that communicate with human users or other agents. An abstract level of representation such as speech acts is also useful as a media-independent characterization of the function of communication. Current work that was presented and discussed at the symposium included both extensions to classical speech-act theory as well as attempts at standardization of speech-act labels. The extensions included accounts of dialogue phenomena other than classical illocutionary acts, such as turn taking, feedback, problem solving, and persuasion as well as the importance of social phenomena such as rights, roles, and obligations.

Several successful researchers discussed what they believed made them successful, and provided advice on how to play the funding game. The American Association for Artificial Intelligence presented its 2004 Fall Symposium Series Friday through Sunday, October 22-24 at the Hyatt Regency Crystal City in Arlington, Virginia, adjacent to Washington, DC. The symposium series was preceded by a one-day AI funding seminar. The topics of the eight symposia in the 2004 Fall Symposia Series were: (1) Achieving Human-Level Intelligence through Integrated Systems and Research; (2) Artificial Multiagent Learning; (3) Compositional Connectionism in Cognitive Science; (4) Dialogue Systems for Health Communications; (5) The Intersection of Cognitive Science and Robotics: From Interfaces to Intelligence; (6) Making Pen-Based Interaction Intelligent and Natural; (7) Real-Life Reinforcement Learning; and (8) Style and Meaning in Language, Art, Music, and Design. The symposium series was preceded on Thursday, October 21 by a one-day AI funding seminar, which was open to all registered attendees.

The American Association for Artificial Intelligence, in cooperation with Stanford University's Department of Computer Science, presented the 2004 Spring Symposium Series, Monday through Wednesday, March 22-24, at Stanford University. The titles of the eight symposia were (1) Accessible Hands-on Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Education; (2) Architectures for Modeling Emotion: Cross-Disciplinary Foundations; (3) Bridging the Multiagent and Multirobotic Research Gap; (4) Exploring Attitude and Affect in Text: Theories and Applications; (5) Interaction between Humans and Autonomous Systems over Extended Operation; (6) Knowledge Representation and Ontologies for Autonomous Systems; (7) Language Learning: An Interdisciplinary Perspective; and (8) Semantic Web Services. Each symposium had limited attendance. Most symposia chairs elected to create AAAI technical reports of their symposium, which are available as paperbound reports or (for AAAI members) are downloadable on the AAAI members-only Web site. This report includes summaries of the eight symposia, written by the symposia chairs.

The American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) held its 1998 Fall Symposium Series on 23 to 25 October at the Omni Rosen Hotel in Orlando, Florida. This article contains summaries of seven of the symposia that were conducted: (1) Cognitive Robotics; (2) Distributed, Continual Planning; (3) Emotional and Intelligent: The Tangled Knot of Cognition; (4) Integrated Planning for Autonomous Agent Architectures; (5) Planning with Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes; (6) Reasoning with Visual and Diagrammatic Representations; and (7) Robotics and Biology: Developing Connections. Research in cognitive robotics is concerned with the theory and implementation of robots that reason, act, and perceive in changing incompletely known, unpredictable environments. Such robots must have higherlevel cognitive functions that involve, for example, reasoning about goals, actions, the cognitive states of other agents, and time as well as when to perceive and what to look for.

The symposium entitled Acquiring (and Using) Linguistic (and World) Knowledge for Information Access gathered 20 some researchers and practitioners from corporations, research institutes, and academic institutions from far corners of the world. The subtitle was "Theory for systems; application for theories," and the aim was to find common ground between those who work on defining The American Association for Artificial Intelligence, in cooperation with Stanford University's Department of Computer Science, presented the 2002 Spring Symposium Series, held Monday through Wednesday, 25 to 27 March 2002, at Stanford University. The nine symposia were entitled (1) Acquiring (and Using) Linguistic (and World) Knowledge for Information Access; (2) Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Entertainment; (3) Collaborative Learning Agents; (4) Information Refinement and Revision for Decision Making: Modeling for Diagnostics, Prognostics, and Prediction; (5) Intelligent Distributed and Embedded Systems; (6) Logic-Based Program Synthesis: State of the Art and Future Trends; (7) Mining Answers from Texts and Knowledge Bases; (8) Safe Learning Agents; and (9) Sketch Understanding. The presentations ranged from new theories for computational modeling of brain information processing and applications of various types of multivariate statistical models to text categorization to name identification across documents and ontologybased search systems. The discussion centered on representational issues.

This article describes requirements for synthetic adversaries for urban combat training and a prototype application, MOUTBots. MOUTBots use a commercial computer game to define, implement, and test basic behavior representation requirements and the Soar architecture as the engine for knowledge representation and execution. The article describes how these components aided the development of the prototype and presents an initial evaluation against competence, taskability, fidelity, variability, transparency, and efficiency requirements. Urban combat is characterized by building-to-building, room-to-room fighting. Frequent training is an essential element in reducing casualties.

In recent years, we have witnessed the success of autonomous agents applying machine-learning techniques across a wide range of applications. However, agents applying the same machine-learning techniques in online applications have not been so successful. Even agent-based hybrid recommender systems that combine information filtering techniques with collaborative filtering techniques have been applied with considerable success only to simple consumer goods such as movies, books, clothing, and food. Yet complex, adaptive autonomous agent systems that can handle complex goods such as real estate, vacation plans, insurance, mutual funds, and mortgages have emerged. To a large extent, the reinforcement learning methods developed to aid agents in learning have been more successfully deployed in offline applications.

AI and AAAI are coevolving. As AI matures, its focus is shifting from inward-looking to outwardlooking. Some of the new concerns of the field are social awareness, networking, cross-disciplinarity, globalization, and open access. AAAI must reflect and support those concerns. AI is now a mature discipline.

The 2005 Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems Conference (AAMAS 2005) was held July 25-29, 2005, at the University of Utrecht, the Netherlands. This report reviews the activities of that conference, including the workshop and tutorial programs, the main conference and poster tracks, the industry paper track, the demonstration track and sponsor demonstration sessions, the invited talks, exhibition, doctoral mentoring program, as well the sponsorship and scholarships activities. The Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS) conference series is the main conference venue for research in this area. It was initiated in 2002 as a merger of three conferences: the International Conference on Autonomous Agents, the International Conference on Multiagent Systems, and the International Workshop on Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages. It aims to provide a highprofile and high-quality forum for research in the theory and practice of autonomous agents and multiagent systems.

The Second International Conference on Informatics in Control, Automation, and Robotics (ICINCO 2005) was held in Barcelona on September 14-17, 2005, organized by INSTICC in cooperation with the Universitat Politécnica de Catalunya. This conference was built on the success achieved in its first edition, in 2004, and aims at representing a major forum to debate technical advances presented by researchers and developers, both from academia and industry, working in the conference areas. Informatics applications are pervasive in many areas of control, automation, and robotics, and it seems necessary to emphasize and explore this interdisciplinary potential. This conference was built on the success achieved in its first edition, in 2004, and aims at representing a major forum to debate technical advances presented by researchers and developers, both from academia and industry, working in the conference areas. Informatics applications are pervasive in many areas of control, automation, and robotics, and it seems necessary to emphasize and explore this interdisciplinary potential.