To coordinate, intelligent agents might need to know something about themselves, about each other, about how others view themselves and others, about how others think others view themselves and others, and so on. Taken to an extreme, the amount of knowledge an agent might possess to coordinate its interactions with others might outstrip the agent's limited reasoning capacity (its available time, memory, and so on). Much of the work in studying and building multiagent systems has thus been devoted to developing practical techniques for achieving coordination, typically by limiting the knowledge available to, or necessary for, agents. This article categorizes techniques for keeping agents suitably ignorant so that they can practically coordinate and gives a selective survey of examples of these techniques for illustration.

The conference will be held July 18-22, 1999, at the Omni Rosen Hotel and the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, Florida. National Conference on Artificial by two keynote addresses: (1) AAAI is pleased to announce the Intelligence. This award will honor the author(s) of of AI in other organizations (for example, AAAI is happy to announce its sponsorship paper(s) deemed most influential, CRA, ACM, IEEE); or influential of the CHIKids program during chosen from a specific conference service as a government agency contract AAAI-99. The 1999 award will be given to monitor or program director, provides child care for conference the most influential paper(s) from the resulting in positive effects on the attendees' children, first started two First National Conference on Artificial field of AI. Nominees must be current years ago at the SIGCHI-96.

Victor Lesser (University of Massachusetts at Amherst) gave an invited talk on distributed interpretation and its of Hong Kong Polytechnic University, possible implication in DDM. Mining, brought interested researchers (Brigham Young University) and Salvatore The paper sessions ended with two and practitioners together and created Stolfo (Columbia University) working paper presentations by Billy an environment for crystallizing the presented the effects of class distribution Wallace and Juan Botia, Marcedes Garijo, fast-growing field of DDM. The concluding session was the panel Lawrence Hall, Nitesh Chawla, and 40 participants attended the workshop. Stolfo, George Cybenko Kevin W. Bowyer (all of University of The workshop had 13 presentations, Stolfo stressed suggested different techniques for Cybenko of Dartmouth University. Organizers sincerely hope that the session.

TACAIR-SOAR is an intelligent, rule-based system that generates believable humanlike behavior for large-scale, distributed military simulations. The innovation of the application is primarily a matter of scale and integration. The system is capable of executing most of the airborne missions that the U.S. military flies in fixed-wing aircraft. It accomplishes its missions by integrating a wide variety of intelligent capabilities, including real-time hierarchical execution of complex goals and plans, communication and coordination with humans and simulated entities, maintenance of situational awareness, and the ability to accept and respond to new orders while in flight. The system is currentl y deployed at the Oceana Naval Air Station WISSARD (what-if simulation system for advanced research and development) Lab and the Air Force Research Laboratory in Mesa, Arizona. Its most dramatic use was in the Synthetic Theater of War 1997, which was an operational training exercise that ran for 48 continuous hours during which TACAIR-SOAR flew all U.S. fixed-wing aircraft.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration Jet Propulsion Laboratory (Pasadena, Calif.) has developed The chip, which has The National Aeronautics and Chester, N.Y.) to improve its ability to been licensed by automaker Ford Space Administration (NASA) Goddard match reported wage information. Motor (Dearborn, Mich.), is designed Space Flight Center (Greenbelt, The solution will help the agency to augment current vehicle on-board Md.) has developed the The Philippines (Quezon City, The process for outside scientists wanting RoyScot Trust, the asset finance arm Philippines) has adopted an intelligent to use NASA's space telescopes. of the Royal Bank of Scotland (Edinburgh, agent-based software system to The system is designed to capture and Scotland), has implemented an manage mission-critical tax processes maintain key scientific knowledge expert system-based solution to automate across The Philippines. The intelligent while it reduces common errors made the credit-underwriting process. The firm has set up a credit control management of the bureau's entire Johnson Controls (Milwaukee, Wis.), system, The turnkey expert installs and maintains. By integrating component has deployed a speech-recognition- frequent air travelers through U.S. math data with work-cell visualization based application for its frequent flier Immigration inspection in less than software, engineers can simulate customers.

The Second International Symposium on Intelligent Data Analysis (IDA97) was held at Birkbeck College, University of London, on 4 to 6 August 1997. The main theme of IDA97 was to reason about how to analyze data,perhaps as human analysts do, by exploiting many methods from diverse disciplines. This article outlines several key issues and challenges, discusses how they were addressed at the conference, and presents opportunities for further work in the field.

This article presents an experiment of expertise capitalization in road traffic-accident analysis. We study the integration of models of expertise from different members of an organization into a coherent corporate expertise model. We present our elicitation protocol and the generic models and tools we exploited for knowledge modeling in this context of multiple experts. We compare the knowledge models obtained for seven experts in accidentology and their representation through conceptual graphs. Finally, we discuss the results of our experiment from a knowledge capitalization viewpoint.

This paper introduces AntNet, a novel approach to the adaptive learning of routing tables in communications networks. AntNet is a distributed, mobile agents based Monte Carlo system that was inspired by recent work on the ant colony metaphor for solving optimization problems. AntNet's agents concurrently explore the network and exchange collected information. The communication among the agents is indirect and asynchronous, mediated by the network itself. This form of communication is typical of social insects and is called stigmergy. We compare our algorithm with six state-of-the-art routing algorithms coming from the telecommunications and machine learning fields. The algorithms' performance is evaluated over a set of realistic testbeds. We run many experiments over real and artificial IP datagram networks with increasing number of nodes and under several paradigmatic spatial and temporal traffic distributions. Results are very encouraging. AntNet showed superior performance under all the experimental conditions with respect to its competitors. We analyze the main characteristics of the algorithm and try to explain the reasons for its superiority.

Robotic soccer is a challenging research domain that involves multiple agents that need to collaborate in an adversarial environment to achieve specific objectives. In this article, we describe CMUNITED, the team of small robotic agents that we developed to enter the RoboCup-97 competition. We designed and built the robotic agents, devised the appropriate vision algorithm, and developed and implemented algorithms for strategic collaboration between the robots in an uncertain and dynamic environment. The article then focuses on the agent behaviors, ranging from low-level individual behaviors to coordinated, strategic team behaviors.

RoboCup-97, The First Robot World Cup Soccer Games and Conferences, was held at the Fifteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. The world champions are CMUNITED (Carnegie Mellon University) for the small-size league, DREAMTEAM (University of Southern California) and TRACKIES (Osaka University, Japan) for the middle-size league, and AT-HUMBOLDT (Humboldt University) for the simulation league. The Scientific Challenge Award was given to Sean Luke (University of Maryland) for his genetic programming- based simulation team LUKE, and the Engineering Challenge Awards were given to UTTORI UNITED (Utsunomiya University, Toyo University, and Riken, Japan) and RMIT (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Australia) for designing novel omnidirectional driving mechanisms. RoboCup-98, the Second Robot World Cup Soccer, was held in conjunction with the Third International Conference on Multiagent Systems in Paris, France, in July 1998.