The main contribution of the book Rules of Encounter: Designing Conventions for Automated Negotiation, by Jeffrey S. Rosenschein and Gilad Zlotkin, is the formulation of a principled framework within which to study interactions among artificial heterogeneous agents. This framework is based on the theory of games, which is aimed at decision problems faced by agents in situations in which the agent's welfare depends not only on its own actions but also on the actions of other agents. The examples are numerous: The personal digital assistants (PDAs) that might one day keep track of their users' itinerary will have to negotiate with PDAs of other people to adjust and synchronize their meeting schedules. Software agents looking for the right kinds of information on the Internet on behalf of their users might have to negotiate with other such agents over the access to resources. Computer agents that control a telecommunications network will have to interact with computers that control other networks and might find it beneficial to come to agreement with them.

This article contains the reports of the AI for Human-Robot Interaction, Cognitive Assistance in Government and Public Sector Applications, Deceptive and Counter-Deceptive Machines, Self-Confidence in Autonomous Systems, and Sequential Decision Making for Intelligent Agents symposia, which were held November 12-14, 2015 in Arlington, Virginia. The titles of the six symposia were as follows: AI for Human-Robot Interaction, Cognitive Assistance in Government and Public Sector Applications, Deceptive and Counter-Deceptive Machines, Embedded Machine Learning, Self-Confidence in Autonomous Systems, and Sequential Decision Making for Intelligent Agents. This article contains the reports from five of the symposia. Human-robot interaction (HRI) is a broad community encompassing robotics, artificial intelligence (AI), human-computer interaction (HCI), psychology, and social science. In this meeting, we sought to bring together and strengthen the subset of the HRI community that is focused on the AI challenges inherent to HRI.

You watch the feed from the onboard camera as the rover rolls along the surface, when you notice the terrain changing ahead, so you instruct the rover to turn. The problem? You're 6 minutes too late. Due to the speed-of-light delay in communication between yourself and the rover, your monolithic multimillion dollar project is in pieces at the bottom of a Martian canyon, and the nearest repairman is 65 million miles away. There are, of course, solutions to this type of problem. You can instruct it to travel a very small distance and reevaluate the rover's situation before the next round of travel, but this leads to painfully slow processes that take orders of magnitude longer than they would on Earth.

Each session consisted of two papers, each of which was allotted 25 minutes for presentation, and a 25-minute discussion that was led by a member of the organizing committee. This format was adopted because the organizers believed that the single day that was allocated to the workshop was conducive to in-depth presentation of a small number of papers that would lead to issue-oriented discussions. The sections in this article bring forward points that were made during the workshop's four sessions. Recent attempts to develop larger and more complex knowledge-based systems have revealed the shortcomings and problems of centralized, single-agent architectures and have acted as a springboard for research in distributed AI (DAI). Although initial research efforts in DAI concentrated on issues relating to homogeneous systems (that is, systems using agents of a similar type or with similar knowledge), there is now increasing interest in systems comprised of heterogeneous components.

This article describes the winning entries in the 2000 American Association for Artificial Intelligence Mobile Robot Competition. The robots, developed by Swarthmore College, all used a modular hybrid architecture designed to enable reflexive responses to perceptual input. Within this architecture, the robots integrated visual sensing, speech synthesis and recognition, the display of an animated face, navigation, and interrobot communication. As any AI researcher knows, developing one robot for a real-world task such as serving hors d'oeuvres to a crowded room can be a significant undertaking. Our plan was to have a team of three agents participate in the hors d'oeuvres-serving contest and have one mobile robot attempt the Urban-Search-and-Rescue (USAR) event.

Society's expectation regarding the capabilities and intelligence of such systems has also grown. We have become a more complicated society with more complicated problems. As the expectation of intelligent systems rises, we discover many more applications for AI. Additionally, as the difficulty level and computational requirements of such problems rise, there is a need to distribute the problem solving. Although the field of multiagent systems and distributed AI is relatively young, the importance and applicability of this technology for solving today's problems continues to grow.

We applied mobile computing to community support and explored mobile computing with a large number of terminals. This article reports on the Second International Conference on Multiagent Systems (ICMAS'96) Mobile Assistant Project that was conducted at an actual international conference for multiagent systems using 100 personal digital assistants (PDAs) and cellular telephones. We supported three types of service: (1) communication services such as email and net news; (2) information services such as conference, personal, and tourist information; and (3) community support services such as forum and meeting arrangements. After the conference, we analyzed a large amount of log data and obtained the following results: It appears that people continuously used PDAs in their hotel rooms after dinner; email services were used independently of the conference structure, but the load on information services reflected the schedule of the conference. Postquestionnaire data showed that our trial was considered interesting, although people were not fully satisfied with the PDAs and services provided.

The algorithm successfully detects and tracks 11 objects (5 teammates, 5 opponents, and 1 ball) at 30 frames a second. The algorithm determines the position and orientation for the robots. In addition, a Kalman-Bucy filter (Kalman and Bucy 1961) is used as a predictor of the ball's trajectory. This prediction is an integral factor in our robots' control and strategic decisions. Before developing strategic behaviors, the robots need a general control mechanism.

The AAAI-99 Workshop Program (a part of the sixteenth national conference on artificial intelligence) was held in Orlando, Florida. The program included 16 workshops covering a wide range of topics in AI. Each workshop was limited to approximately 25 to 50 participants. Participation was by invitation from the workshop organizers. The workshops were - Agent-Based Systems in the Business Context - Agents' Conflicts - Artificial Intelligence for Distributed Information Networking - Artificial Intelligence for Electronic Commerce - Computation with Neural Systems Workshop - Configuration - Data Mining with Evolutionary Algorithms: Research Directions (Jointly sponsored by GECCO-99) - Environmental Decision Support Systems and Artificial Intelligence - Exploring Synergies of Knowledge Management and Case-Based Reasoning - Intelligent Information Systems - Intelligent Software Engineering - Machine Learning for Information Extraction - Mixed-Initiative Intelligence - Negotiation: Settling Conflicts and Identifying Opportunities - Ontology Management - Reasoning in Context for AI Applications Summaries of 13 of the 16 workshops follow.

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. IUI 2009 will be held February 8-11, 2009, on Sanibel Island in Florida, USA. AGI-09 will be held March 6-9, 2009, in Arlington, Virginia USA. AAMAS 2009 will be held May 10-15, 2009, in Budapest, Hungary.