Reports of the AAAI 2011 Fall Symposia

The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence was pleased to present the 2011 Fall Symposium Series, held Friday through Sunday, November 4-6, at the Westin Arlington Gateway in Arlington, Virginia. The titles of the seven symposia are as follows: (1) Advances in Cognitive Systems; (2) Building Representations of Common Ground with Intelligent Agents; (3) Complex Adaptive Systems: Energy, Information, and Intelligence; (4) Multiagent Coordination under Uncertainty; (5) Open Government Knowledge: AI Opportunities and Challenges; (6) Question Generation; and (7) Robot-Human Teamwork in Dynamic Adverse Environments. The highlights of each symposium are presented in this report. The goal of the AAAI Fall Symposium on Advances in Cognitive Systems was to bring together researchers who are interested in developing intelligent systems that demonstrate the full range of human cognitive abilities and to report progress on this daunting task. The original aims of artificial intelligence, when it was launched in the late 1950s, were to explain intelligence in computational terms and to reproduce the entire range of human cognitive abilities in computational artifacts. Although the field has seen impressive advances in the last few decades, many researchers have, in the process, forgotten or abandoned these important goals. The purpose of the Fall Symposium on Advances in Cognitive Systems was to bring together scientists who remained committed to AI's original vision. The meeting received 50 paper submissions and it was attended by more than 75 participants, suggesting that there remains substantial interest in this view on the discipline. Research in cognitive systems, as reflected by the contributors to the meeting, differs from what has become mainstream AI in five basic ways.