Reports of the AAAI 2012 Spring Symposia

The six symposia held were AI, the Fundamental Social Aggregation Challenge (cochaired by W. F. Lawless, Don Sofge, Mark Klein, and Laurent Chaudron); Designing Intelligent Robots (cochaired by George Konidaris, Byron Boots, Stephen Hart, Todd Hester, Sarah Osentoski, and David Wingate); Game Theory for Security, Sustainability, and Health (cochaired by Bo An and Manish Jain); Intelligent Web Services Meet Social Computing (cochaired by Tomas Vitvar, Harith Alani, and David Martin); Self-Tracking and Collective Intelligence for Personal Wellness (cochaired by Takashi Kido and Keiki Takadama); and Wisdom of the Crowd (cochaired by Caroline Pantofaru, Sonia Chernova, and Alex Sorokin). The papers of the six symposia were published in the AAAI technical report series. The focus of the AI, The Fundamental Social Aggregation Challenge, and the Autonomy of Hybrid Agent Groups symposium was to explore issues associated with the control of teams of humans, autonomous machines, and robots working together as hybrid agent groups. Bill Lawless of Paine College kicked off the meeting by pointing out the need for a new theory of social dynamics. He showed that majority rule is far better than consensus for group decision processes and proposed a new mathematical model for characterizing social group dynamics based on interdependence.