AAAI 2008 Fall Symposia Reports

The titles of the seven symposia were (1) Adaptive Agents in Cultural Contexts, (2) AI in Eldercare: New Solutions to Old Problems, (3) Automated Scientific Discovery, (4) Biologically Inspired Cognitive Architectures, (5) Education Informatics: Steps toward the International Internet Classroom, (6) Multimedia Information Extraction, and (7) Naturally Inspired AI. The goal of the Adaptive Agents in Cultural Contexts symposium was to investigate agents and environments for behavior in social and cultural contexts and for realistic adaptation of such agents to changing situations. These fields are vast, variegated, informed by disparate theoretical and technical disciplines, and interrelated. This symposium was intended to examine the intersection of findings from the field, theory, and applications in such areas as autonomous agent models and simulations for research, international commercial enterprise, nongovernmental organizations, and military, as well as commercial, games. The symposium began with an invited talk given by psychologist Helen Klein of Wright State University, who addressed the dimensions of culturally specific cognition and surveyed behavioral phenomena across cultures.