The newly emerging field of machine ethics (Anderson and Anderson 2006) is concerned with adding an ethical dimension to machines. Unlike computer ethics -- which has traditionally focused on ethical issues surrounding humans' use of machines -- machine ethics is concerned with ensuring that the behavior of machines toward human users, and perhaps other machines as well, is ethically acceptable. In this article we discuss the importance of machine ethics, the need for machines that represent ethical principles explicitly, and the challenges facing those working on machine ethics. We also give an example of current research in the field that shows that it is possible, at least in a limited domain, for a machine to abstract an ethical principle from examples of correct ethical judgments and use that principle to guide its own behavior.

Multiagent Systems" was delivered by Mark W. Spong (University of Illinois (ICINCO 2007) "Toward Human-Machine Cooperation" was delivered by Patrick Millot (Université de Valenciennes, France), who is a renowned professor in Europe. ICINCO received 435 paper submissions, not including workshops, from more than 50 countries, in all continents. Sciences et Techniques de l'Ingénieur are researchers in one of the ICIN-and Robotics (ICINCO 2007) was The conference was also held in cooperation selected for poster presentation. The volume tracks: "Intelligent Control Systems will be published by Springer-Verlag. Autònoma de Barcelona, as a major international forum The two satellite workshops were Spain) and Janan Zaytoon (Centre de to debate technical and scientific the Third International Workshop on Recherche en Sciences et Technologies advances presented by researchers and Multiagent Robotic Systems (MARS de l'Information et de la Communication, developers both from academe and 2007), chaired by Joaquim Filipe, and Universite de Reims Champagne-industry.

The AAAI-07 workshop program was held Sunday and Monday, July 22-23, in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The program included the following thirteen workshops: (1) Acquiring Planning Knowledge via Demonstration; (2) Configuration; (3) Evaluating Architectures for Intelligence; (4) Evaluation Methods for Machine Learning; (5) Explanation-Aware Computing; (6) Human Implications of Human-Robot Interaction; (7) Intelligent Techniques for Web Personalization; (8) Plan, Activity, and Intent Recognition; (9) Preference Handling for Artificial Intelligence; (10) Semantic e-Science; (11) Spatial and Temporal Reasoning; (12) Trading Agent Design and Analysis; and (13) Information Integration on the Web.

Horvitz noted two emerging trends at the conference and in the AI field. Second is the work in scaling AI to be more integrative. Instead of the ongoing great successes of AI researches on "wedges" of AI expertise and reasoning, there's increasing work on delivering more depth and breadth of capabilities such as sensing, learning, and reasoning. "This is very hard," notes Horvitz, "(but already) I see bits and pieces here and there." Game Playing Competition, the Poker AAI's Twenty-second Conference (AAAI-07) continued a longstanding the 1,025 attendees to choose Competition, and the Human Versus tradition of excellence.

Marvin Lee Minsky, a founder of the field of artificial intelligence and professor at MIT, celebrated his 80th birthday on August 9, 2007. This article seizes an opportune time to honor Marvin and his contributions and influence in artificial intelligence, science, and beyond. The article provides readers with some personal insights of Minsky from Danny Hillis, John McCarthy, Tom Mitchell, Erik Mueller, Doug Riecken, Aaron Sloman, and Patrick Henry Winston -- all members of the AI community that Minsky helped to found. The article continues with a brief resume of Minsky's research, which spans an enormous range of fields. It concludes with a short biographical account of Minsky's personal history.

John McCarthy's contributions to computer science and artificial intelligence are legendary. He invented Lisp, made substantial contributions to early work in timesharing and the theory of computation, and was one of the founders of artificial intelligence and knowledge representation. This article, written in honor of McCarthy's 80th birthday, presents a brief biography, an overview of the major themes of his research, and a discussion of several of his major papers.

In the reverse direction, artificial intelligence brings a fresh perspective to some of the questions addressed by social choice. From a computational perspective, may not be feasible. The agent wants a cheap, we can look at how computationally we low-mileage Ferrari, but no such car exists. As we shall see later in may therefore look for the most preferred outcome this article, computational intractability may among those that are feasible. With multiple actually be advantageous in this setting. For agents, their goals may be conflicting. We may therefore look for the outcome an election is possible in theory, but computationally that is most preferred by the agents. Preferences difficult to perform in practice. From a are thus useful in many areas of artificial representational perspective, we can look at intelligence including planning, sche dhow we represent preferences, especially when uling, multiagent systems, combinatorial auctions, the number of outcomes is combinatorially and game playing.

This article provides an overview of the nature and role of autonomy for space exploration, with a bias in focus towards describing the relevance of AI technologies. It explores the range of autonomous behavior that is relevant and useful in space exploration and illustrates the range of possible behaviors by presenting four case studies in space-exploration systems, each differing from the others in the degree of autonomy exemplified. Three core requirements are defined for autonomous space systems, and the architectures for integrating capabilities into an autonomous system are described. The article concludes with a discussion of the challenges that are faced currently in developing and deploying autonomy technologies for space.

Chemotaxis can be defined as an innate behavioural response by an organism to a directional stimulus, in which bacteria, and other single-cell or multicellular organisms direct their movements according to certain chemicals in their environment. This is important for bacteria to find food (e.g., glucose) by swimming towards the highest concentration of food molecules, or to flee from poisons. Based on self-organized computational approaches and similar stigmergic concepts we derive a novel swarm intelligent algorithm. What strikes from these observations is that both eusocial insects as ant colonies and bacteria have similar natural mechanisms based on stigmergy in order to emerge coherent and sophisticated patterns of global collective behaviour. Keeping in mind the above characteristics we will present a simple model to tackle the collective adaptation of a social swarm based on real ant colony behaviors (SSA algorithm) for tracking extrema in dynamic environments and highly multimodal complex functions described in the well-know De Jong test suite. Later, for the purpose of comparison, a recent model of artificial bacterial foraging (BFOA algorithm) based on similar stigmergic features is described and analyzed. Final results indicate that the SSA collective intelligence is able to cope and quickly adapt to unforeseen situations even when over the same cooperative foraging period, the community is requested to deal with two different and contradictory purposes, while outperforming BFOA in adaptive speed. Results indicate that the present approach deals well in severe Dynamic Optimization problems.

We give some semantic results for an epistemic logic incorporating dynamic operators to describe information changing events. Such events include epistemic changes, where agents become more informed about the non-changing state of the world, and ontic changes, wherein the world changes. The events are executed in information states that are modeled as pointed Kripke models. Our contribution consists of three semantic results. (i) Given two information states, there is an event transforming one into the other. The linguistic correspondent to this is that every consistent formula can be made true in every information state by the execution of an event. (ii) A more technical result is that: every event corresponds to an event in which the postconditions formalizing ontic change are assignments to `true' and `false' only (instead of assignments to arbitrary formulas in the logical language). `Corresponds' means that execution of either event in a given information state results in bisimilar information states. (iii) The third, also technical, result is that every event corresponds to a sequence of events wherein all postconditions are assignments of a single atom only (instead of simultaneous assignments of more than one atom).