Congratulations to the 2008 AAAI Award Winners!

Eric Horvitz, AAAI president, and Alan Mackworth, AAAI past president and Awards Committee chair, presented the AAAI Awards in July at AAAI-08 in Chicago. The 2008 AAAI Classic Paper Award was given to the authors of the most influential paper from the Eighth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, held in 1990 in Boston, Massachusetts. The award was presented to Steven Minton, Mark D. Johnston, Andrew B. Philips, and Philip Laird for "Solving Large-Scale Constraint Satisfaction and Scheduling Problems Using a Heuristic Repair Method." This paper was honored for its seminal contribution to stochastic local search for constraint satisfaction and its broad influence on local search algorithms and applications in artificial intelligence. In addition, Pattie Maes and Rodney A. Brooks received honorable mention for "Learning to Coordinate Behaviors" and their pioneering work on machine learning applied to the field of robotics, and on advancing the field of behavioral robotics.