Editorial Introduction to the Special Articles in the Summer Issue

This issue features expanded versions of articles selected from the 2015 AAAI Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence held in Austin, Texas. We present a selection of three articles describing deployed applications plus two more articles that discuss work on emerging applications. Since then, we have seen examples of AI applied to domains as varied as medicine, education, manufacturing, transportation, user modeling, military operations, and citizen science. The 2015 conference continued the tradition with a selection of 6 deployed applications describing systems in use by their intended end users, 13 emerging applications describing works in progress, and three papers in a new category for challenge problems. In the first article, Activity Planning for a Lunar Orbital Mission, John Bresina describes a deployed application of current planning technology in the context of a NASA mission called LADEE (Lunar Atmospheric and Dust Environment Explorer).