Editorial Introduction to the Special Articles in the Fall Issue

We present a selection of four 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, and citizen science. The 2014 conference continued the tradition with a selection of 7 deployed applications describing systems in use by their intended end users, and 14 emerging applications describing works in progress. This year's special issue on innovative applications features articles describing four deployed and two emerging applications. The articles include three different types of recommender systems, which may be as much of a critique of the role of technology in society as it is an indication of recent research trends.