The construction of computer systems that are intelligent, collaborative problem-solving partners is an important goal for both the science of AI and its application. From the scientific perspective, the development of theories and mechanisms to enable building collaborative systems presents exciting research challenges across AI subfields. From the applications perspective, the capability to collaborate with users and other systems is essential if large-scale information systems of the future are to assist users in finding the information they need and solving the problems they have. In this address, it is argued that collaboration must be designed into systems from the start; it cannot be patched on. Key features of collaborative activity are described, the scientific base provided by recent AI research is discussed, and several of the research challenges posed by collaboration are presented.

In this article, I claim that research on cognitive architectures is an important path to the development of general intelligent systems. I contrast this paradigm with other approaches to constructing such systems, and I review the theoretical commitments associated with a cognitive architecture. These entities were intended to have the same intellectual capacity as humans and they were supposed to exhibit their intelligence in a general way across many different domains. I will refer to this research agenda as aimed at the creation of general intelligent systems. Unfortunately, modern artificial intelligence has largely abandoned this objective, having instead divided into many distinct subfields that care little about generality, intelligence, or even systems.

The simulator, acting as a server, accepts action commands from fully distributed clients (agents) throughout a 100-millisecond cycle and then updates the world state all at once at the end of the cycle. Agents receive sensory perceptions from the simulator asynchronously and at unpredictable intervals. We view robotic soccer as an example of a periodic team synchronization (PTS) domain. We define PTS domains as domains with the following characteristics: There is a team of autonomous agents A that collaborate toward the achievement of a joint long-term goal G. Periodically, the team can synchronize with no restrictions on communication: The agents can in effect inform each other of their entire internal states and decision-making mechanisms with no adverse effects on the achievement of G. These periods of full communication can be thought of as times at which the team is "offline."

Robotic soccer is a challenging research domain that involves multiple agents that need to collaborate in an adversarial environment to achieve specific objectives. Robotic soccer is an example of such complex tasks for which multiple agents need to collaborate in an adversarial environment to achieve specific objectives. Robotic soccer offers a challenging research domain to investigate a large spectrum of issues relevant to the development of complete autonomous agents (Asada et al. 1998; Kitano, Tambe, et al. 1997). The fast-paced nature of the domain necessitates real-time sensing coupled with quick behaving and decision making. The behaviors and decision-making processes can range from the most simple reactive behaviors, such as moving directly toward the ball, to arbitrarily complex reasoning procedures that take into account the actions and perceived strategies of teammates and opponents.

This page includes all the AAAI sponsored conferences, conferences presented by AAAI Affiliates, and conferences held in cooperation with AAAI. AI Magazine also maintains a calendar listing that also includes nonaffiliated conferences at www.aaai.org/Magazine/calendar.php. ICWSM-09 will be held May 17-20, 2009, in San Jose, California. IJCAI-09 will be held July 11-17, 2009, in Pasadena, California. IJCAI-09 is cosponsored by AAAI.

The goal of the Electric Elves project was to develop software agent technology to support human organizations. We developed a variety of applications of the Elves, including scheduling visitors, managing a research group (the Office Elves), and monitoring travel (the Travel Elves). The Travel Elves were eventually deployed at DARPA, where things did not go exactly as planned. In this article, we describe some of the things that went wrong and then present some of the lessons learned and new research that arose from our experience in building the Travel Elves. The project was quite successful with impressive prototypes and many papers on the research.

Many different architectures have been proposed for the design of autonomous agents. In this article, the application of the belief-desire-intention architecture to the artificial soccer domain is described. We show how it supports efficient deliberation in a highly dynamic environment. The mapping from input to output can be done in simple ways (for example, strictly reactive) or in more sophisticated ways, for example, with models that are inspired by human decision processes. We found that mental notions such as capabilities-skills, belief, goals-desires, and intentions-plans are useful pictures to make agent programming transparent.

Much of our intelligence derives from our ability to manipulate our environment through collaborative endeavors. Most extant computer programs and interfaces do little to take advantage of such manifestly human talents and interests, leaving broad avenues of human-computer communication unexplored. Although it is still considered controversial, there are many who believe the harnessing of social communication to be rich in possibilities for modern software. In this article, we look at a number of autonomous agent systems that embody their intelligence at least partially through the projection of a believable, engaging, synthetic persona. Among other topics, we touch briefly on samples of research that explore synthetic personality, representations of emotion, societies of fanciful and playful characters, intelligent and engaging automated tutors, and users projected as avatars into virtual worlds.

TACAIR-SOAR flew all U.S. fixed-wing aircraft. The general goal was to generate behavior that "looks human" when viewed by a training audience participating in operational military exercises. Its most dramatic use was in the Synthetic Theater of War 1997 (STOW '97), held 29-31 October 1997 (Ceranowicz, 1998; Laird, Jones, and Nielsen 1998; Laird et al. 1998). STOW '97 was a United States Department of Defense (DoD) Advanced Concept Technology Demonstration (ACTD) that was integrated with the United Endeavor 98-1 (UE 98-1) training exercise. As an ACTD, the overall goal of STOW '97 was to permit an early and inexpensive evaluation of advanced technologies that show promise for improving military effectiveness.

This article shows how tools to create intelligent agents can be improved by taking advantage of established software-engineering principles such as high-level languages, maintenance-oriented development environments, and software reuse. We describe how these principles have been realized in the Herbal integrated development environment, a collection of tools that allows agent developers to exploit modern software-engineering principles. We present an example integrated agent development environment that realizes these principles and provides lessons for other agent architectures, both existing and in development. Creating complex software is not a new problem, and the software-engineering community has developed principles to guide solving complex problems with software. Developing intelligent agents is a complex software-engineering activity but the benefits of applying software-engineering principles such as high-level languages, maintenance-oriented development environments, and software reuse to intelligent agent development have not yet fully migrated to the agent-development community.