The workshop focused on the state-of-the-art DDM algorithms, systems, and application-related issues. Approximately 40 participants attended the workshop. The workshop had 13 presentations, including 3 invited talks. The workshop began with a visionary invited talk on the possible role of mobile agents in DDM by George Cybenko of Dartmouth University. His talk described some of the existing mobile agent-based systems and pointed out the strengths of distributed data analysis using mobile agents.

The Trading Agent Competition (TAC) has now become an annual fixture since its inception in 2000. The competition was conceived with the objective of studying automated trading strategies by focusing the research community on the development of competing solutions to a common trading scenario. The success of past TAC events has motivated broadening the scope of the competition beyond the context of the travel agent scenario used thus far. For the fourth edition of this competition, TAC-03, to be held in August 2003, the authors have created a novel supply-chain trading game with the aim of investigating automated agents in the context of dynamic supply-chain management. In today's global economy, effective supply-chain management is vital to the competitiveness of manufacturing enterprises because it directly impacts their ability to meet changing market demands in a timely and cost-effective manner.

RoboCup is an international initiative with the main goals of fostering research and education in artificial intelligence and robotics, as well as of promoting science and technology to world citizens. The idea behind RoboCup is to provide a standard problem for which a wide range of technologies can be integrated and examined, as well as being used for project-oriented education, and to organize annual events open to the general public, at which different solutions to the problem are compared. The eighth annual RoboCup--RoboCup 2004--was held in Lisbon, Portugal, from 27 June to 5 July. In this article, a general description of RoboCup 2004 is presented, including summaries concerning teams, participants, distribution into leagues, main research advances, as well as detailed descriptions for each league. As a result of this goal, from 1997 through 2000 robotic soccer matches composed the main part of the RoboCup events.

RoboCup is no longer just the Soccer World Cup for autonomous robots but has evolved to become a coordinated initiative encompassing four different robotics events: (1) Soccer, (2) Rescue, (3) Junior (focused on education), and (4) a Scientific Symposium. RoboCup-2003 took place from 2 to 11 July 2003 in Padua (Italy); it was colocated with other scientific events in the field of AI and robotics. In this article, in addition to reporting on the results of the games, we highlight the robotics and AI technologies exploited by the teams in the different leagues and describe the most meaningful scientific contributions. As the charter of the International RoboCup Federation states, "RoboCup is an international research and education initiative. It is an attempt to foster AI and intelligent robotics research by providing a standard problem where a wide range of technologies can be integrated and examined [...]."

The chapters in this book examine the state of today's agent technology and point the way toward the exciting developments of the next millennium. Contributors include Donald A. Norman, Nicholas Negroponte, Brenda Laurel, Thomas Erickson, Ben Shneiderman, Thomas W. Malone, Pattie Maes, David C. Smith, Gene Ball, Guy A. Boy, Doug Riecken, Yoav Shoham, Tim Finin, Michael R. Genesereth, Craig A. Knoblock, Philip R. Cohen, Hector J. Levesque, and James E. White, among others. Held at San Francisco's W Hotel, the conference included work from researchers and practitioners who are developing novel user interface and interaction paradigms that incorporate advanced reasoning and modeling techniques. In the past few years, user interfaces have faced increasingly challenging tasks, larger numbers of users with a wide range of computer skills, and the widespread use of new platforms such as mobile devices. These trends have led to a need for advanced techniques for communication and collaboration, personalization and adaptation of behavior, agent-based assistance, integrated multimodal interfaces, and a variety of intelligent front ends for complex environments and tasks.

The Fourth International Workshop on Artificial Intelligence in Economics and Management was held in Tel-Aviv, Israel, from 8 to 10 January 1996. This article discusses the main themes presented at the workshop, including the need for multiple methods in any system designed to solve real-world problems, the differences in the effectiveness of AI versus classic analytic techniques, and the use of AI techniques to customize products. The main themes that emerged during the workshop were (1) the need to use multiple methods in any system designed to solve major realworld problems, (2) a continuing interest in comparing the effectiveness of AI solutions with classic analytic techniques, and (3) a growing use of AI techniques to customize products to suit individual consumers. As a matter of course, almost every presentation at the workshop touched on AI techniques in one way or another. However, a group of papers at the workshop had AI techniques as their main focus.

AAAI presented the AAAI-04 workshop program on July 25-26, 2004 in San Jose, California. This program included twelve workshops covering a wide range of topics in artificial intelligence. The titles of the workshops were as follows: (1) Adaptive Text Extraction and Mining; (2) Agent Organizations: Theory and Practice; (3) Anchoring Symbols to Sensor Data; (4) Challenges in Game AI; (5) Fielding Applications of Artificial Intelligence; (6) Forming and Maintaining Coalitions in Adaptive Multiagent Systems; (7) Intelligent Agent Architectures: Combining the Strengths of Software Engineering and Cognitive Systems; (8) Learning and Planning in Markov Processes--Advances and Challenges; (9) Semantic Web Personalization; (10) Sensor Networks; (11) Spatial and Temporal Reasoning; and (12) Supervisory Control of Learning and Adaptive Systems. Participation at these workshops was by invitation from the workshop organizers. The titles of the workshops were as follows: (1) Adaptive Text Extraction and Mining; (2) Agent Organizations: Theory and Practice; (3) Anchoring Symbols to Sensor Data; (4) Challenges in Game AI; (5) Fielding Applications of Artificial Intelligence; (6) Forming and Maintaining Coalitions in Adaptive Multiagent Systems; (7) Intelligent Agent Architectures: Combining the Strengths of Software Engineering and Cognitive Systems; (8) Learning and Planning in Markov Processes--Advances and Challenges; (9) Semantic Web Personalization; (10) Sensor Networks; (11) Spatial and Temporal Reasoning; and (12) Supervisory Control of Learning and Adaptive Systems.

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.