There are however, a variety of different approaches that claim to capture the true nature of this concept. One reason for this diversity lies in the fact that abductive reasoning occurs in a multitude of contexts. It concerns cases that cover the simplest selection of already existing hypotheses to the generation of new concepts in science. It also concerns cases where the observation is puzzling because it is novel versus cases in which the surprise concerns an anomalous observation. For example, if we wake up, and the lawn is wet, we might explain this observation by assuming that it must have rained or that the sprinklers have been on.

Agent modeling--the ability to model and reason other agents' knowledge, beliefs, goals, and actions--is central to intelligent interaction. The Workshop on Agent Modeling, held as part of the Thirteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, was organized to bring together researchers working in these areas to assess the state of the art and discuss the common issues in representation and reasoning with models of agents. Agent modeling--the ability to model and reason about other agents' knowledge, beliefs, goals, and actions--is central to intelligent interaction, and it is being investigated in a variety of research areas, including distributed AI and multiagent systems, plan recognition, natural language discourse, intelligent tutoring, and user interfaces, as well as in related areas, such as game theory and cognitive science and psychology. The Workshop on Agent Modeling, held as part of the Thirteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, was organized to bring together researchers working in these areas to assess the state of the art and discuss the common issues in representation and reasoning with models of agents. The workshop succeeded in drawing together researchers from a surprising variety of backgrounds and diverse concerns about agent modeling.

We hope you are planning to join us for AAAI-10, and collocated events IAAI-10 and EAAI-10, in Atlanta, Georgia, July 11-15, 2010. The AAAI-10 technical program will kick off with the opening reception in the Westin Peachtree Plaza on the evening of Monday, July 12, followed by the presentation of the annual AI Video Competition Awards. On Tuesday morning, July 12, the program chairs will welcome attendees, and conference and AAAI awards will be presented. The awards ceremony will be followed by the AAAI-10 keynote address, to be delivered by Leslie Pack Kaelbling (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) entitled "Intelligent Interaction with the Real World." AAAI-10 has an outstanding program of invited presentations, featuring Carla P. Gomes (Cornell University), Barry O'Sullivan (University College Cork), David C. Parkes (Harvard University), and Michael Thielscher (The University of New South Wales).

The annual business meeting of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence will be held at 12:45 PM, Monday, July 14, 2008 in the Hyatt Regency McCormick Place in Chicago, Illinois. We hope you are planning to join us for AAAI-08 and IAAI-08 in Chicago, Illinois, July 13-17, 2008. The AAAI-08 program will feature Eric Horvitz's AAAI presidential address, as well as five outstanding invited talks. The invited speakers include Alexei A. Efros (Carnegie Mellon University) whose talk is titled From Images to Scenes: Using Lots of Data to Infer Geometric, Photometric and Semantic Scene Properties from a Single Image; David Haussler (University of California, Santa Cruz) who will present a talk called 100 Million Years of Evolutionary History of the Human Genome; Lillian Lee (Cornell University), speaking about Sense and Sensibility: Sentiment Analysis, Opinion Mining, and the Computational Treatment of Subjective Language; Mark Newman (University of Michigan), with a presentation titled Making Sense of Complex Networks; and Stuart Russell (University of California, Berkeley) speaking about What Is To Be Done? IAAI-08 invited speakers include Kenneth M. Ford (Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, IHMC), who will present the Robert S. Engelmore Memorial Award Lecture on Toward Cognitive Prostheses; Seth Copen Goldstein (Carnegie Mellon University), whose talk is titled Realizing Claytronics: A Challenge for AI; and Chris Urmson (Carnegie Mellon University), speaking about Boss, the Urban Challenge, and the Promise of Autonomous Driving.

AAAI-08 Is Coming to the Windy City! Save the date--July 13-17, 2008! Please mark your calendars now for the Twenty-Third AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-08) and the Twentieth Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence Conference (IAAI-08)! The conferences will be held July 13-17, at the Hyatt Regency Mc-Cormick Place in Chicago, Illinois. AAAI-08 program cochairs are Dieter Fox (University of Washington and Carla Gomes (Cornell University); the IAAI-08 conference chair is Mehmet Goker, PricewaterhouseCoopers, LLP.

Ron Brachman, AAAI Past President and Awards Committee Chair, and Alan Mackworth, AAAI President, presented the AAAI Awards in July at AAAI-06 in Boston, Massachusetts. Award winners received a certificate and a check for $1,000. For more information about nominations for AAAI 2007 Awards, please contact Carol Hamilton at hamilton@aaai.org or 650-328-3123. The 2006 AAAI Classic Paper Award was given to the authors of the most influential papers from the Sixth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, held in 1987 in Seattle, Washington. A joint award was presented this year to Philip E. Agre and David Chapman for "Pengi: An Implementation of a Theory of Activity" and to Michael P. Georgeff and Amy L. Lansky for "Reactive Reasoning and Planning."

The Twenty-First National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-06) and the Eighteenth Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-06) will be held in Boston, Massachusetts at the Seaport Hotel and World Trade Center, July 16-20, 2006. AAAI-06 will mark the launch of activities celebrating AI's fiftieth anniversary. Please join us for this landmark event! AAAI is pleased to announce the launch of the First Annual Artificial Intelligence for Interactive Digital Entertainment Conference. The conference will be held June 1-3, 2005 at the Marriott Hotel in Marina del Rey, California.

The 2004 Fellows Selection Committee is currently accepting nominations for AAAI Fellow. The AAAI Fellows program is designed to recognize people who have made significant, sustained contributions to the field of artificial intelligence over at least a ten-year period. All regular members in good standing are encouraged to consider nominating a candidate. Two references must accompany nominations. The nominator or one of the references must be an AAAI Fellow who is a current member of AAAI.

Many of you have been receiving the AI Alert newsletter, which highlights selected features from the "AI in the News" section of the AAAI Pathfinder/AI Topics web pages. If you are a member of AAAI and would like to begin receiving this newsletter, along with other AAAI announcements, please subscribe to our AAAI membership list server by sending email to majordomo@aaai.org Be sure to visit the AI Topics web site at www.aaai.org/AITopics/aitopics.html The deadline for nominations is November 1, 2003. The 2004 Spring Symposium Series will be held March 22-24, 2004 at Stanford University.

The Seventeenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-01) was held in Seattle, Washington, from 6 to 10 August 2001. It was a stimulating blend of invited speakers, special events, 29 workshops, 20 tutorials, 3 robot competitions, 4 days of technical paper presentations, innovative applications, awards, and more. For the 1,509 attendees of the technical conference, and the additional 1,171 who came to see the exhibits, it was a time for catching up with old colleagues and meeting new. Besides tackling the heady research and engineering agenda that is AI, attendees still know how to have fun. The opening reception was held at the Boeing Museum of Flight, and the conference banquet took place at beautiful Blake Island's Tillicum Village and included a hearty salmon feast.