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.

This article describes the virtual humans developed as part of the Mission Rehearsal Exercise project, a virtual reality-based training system.

The American Association for Artificial Intelligence was pleased to present the AAAI 2006 Fall Symposium Series, held Friday through Sunday, October 13-15, at the Hyatt Regency Crystal City in Washington, DC. The titles were (1) Aurally Informed Performance: Integrating Machine Listening and Auditory Presentation in Robotic Systems; (2) Capturing and Using Patterns for Evidence Detection; (3) Developmental Systems; (4) Integrating Reasoning into Everyday Applications; (5) Interaction and Emergent Phenomena in Societies of Agents; (6) Semantic Web for Collaborative Knowledge Acquisition; and (7) Spacecraft Autonomy: Using AI to Expand Human Space Exploration. This symposium brought together a number of researchers who are concerned with performance issues that robots face that depend, in some way, on sound. Many commercially marketed robotic platforms, as well as others that are moving from the laboratory into specialized public settings, already have rudimentary speech communication interfaces, and some are even being engineered for specific types of auditory tasks. In general, though, the ability of robots to monitor the auditory scene before them and to execute interactive behaviors informed by the interpretation or production of sound information remains far behind the broad and mostly transparent skills of human beings.

Another popular event at the DC was the student-mentor dinner, held this year at Elephant Walk, which provided an opportunity for students and researchers to interact in an informal setting. We report on the eleventh annual SIGART/AAAI Doctoral Consortium, held in conjunction with the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-06). We discuss highlights and innovations of this year's consortium and include pointers to the consortium website. At the DC, Ph.D. students in artificial intelligence presented their proposed research and received feedback from a panel of researchers and other students. The primary goal of the DC is to give students feedback on their proposed dissertation research at a critical time, by independent, knowledgeable reviewers external to their institutions.