AI's War on Manipulation: Are We Winning? The next day was going to be a big day: Citizens of Bitotia would once and for all establish which byte order was better, big-endian (B) or little-endian (L). Little Bit Timmy was a big supporter of little endian because that would give him the best position in the word. However, the population was split quite evenly between L and B, with a small minority of Bits who still remembered the single-tape Turing machine and preferred unary encoding (U), without any of this endianness business. Nonetheless, about half of the Bits preferred big-endian (B L U), and about half were the other way round (L B U).

This article is a reflection on agent-based AI. My contention is that AI research should focus on interactive, autonomous systems, that is, agents. We see how recent developments in (multi-) agent-oriented research have taken us closer to the original AI goal, namely, to build intelligent systems of general competence. Agents are not the panacea though. I point out several areas such as design description, implementation, reusability, and security that must be developed before agents are universally accepted as the AI of the future.

After a general discussion about modeling and simulation, we address the basic concept of ABMS, focusing on its generative and bottom-up nature, its advantages as well as its pitfalls. The subsequent part of the article deals with application-oriented aspects, including selected tools and well-known applications. In order to illustrate the benefits of using ABMS, we focus on several aspects of a well-known area related to simulation of complex systems, namely traffic. At the end, a brief look into future challenges is given. Was this caused by climate changes?

With the growing importance of multiagent teamwork, tools that can help humans analyze, evaluate, and understand team behaviors are also becoming increasingly important. To this end, we are creating isaac, a team analyst agent for post hoc, offline agent-team analysis. With the growing importance of teamwork, there is now a critical need for tools to help humans analyze, evaluate, and understand team behaviors. Indeed, in multiagent domains with tens or even hundreds of agents in teams, agent interactions are often highly complex and dynamic, making it difficult for human developers to analyze agent-team behaviors. The problem is further exacerbated in environments where agents are developed by different developers, where even the intended interactions are unpredictable.

The need to save energy becomes even greater when considering an electric car, since heavy use of the climate-control system may exhaust the battery. In this article we consider a method for an automated agent to provide drivers with advice that will motivate them to reduce the energy consumption of their climate-control unit. Our approach takes into account both the energy consumption of the climatecontrol system and the expected comfort level of the driver. We therefore have built two models, one for assessing the energy consumption of the climate-control system as a function of the system's settings, and the other for modeling the human comfort level as a function of the climate-control system's settings. Using these models, the agent provides advice to the driver considering how to set the climate-control system.

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.