Reports on the 2006 AAAI Fall Symposia

The American Association for Artificial Intelligence was pleased to present the AAAI 2006 Fall Symposium Series, held Friday through Sunday, October 13-15, at the Hyatt Regency Crystal City in Washington, DC. The titles were (1) Aurally Informed Performance: Integrating Machine Listening and Auditory Presentation in Robotic Systems; (2) Capturing and Using Patterns for Evidence Detection; (3) Developmental Systems; (4) Integrating Reasoning into Everyday Applications; (5) Interaction and Emergent Phenomena in Societies of Agents; (6) Semantic Web for Collaborative Knowledge Acquisition; and (7) Spacecraft Autonomy: Using AI to Expand Human Space Exploration. This symposium brought together a number of researchers who are concerned with performance issues that robots face that depend, in some way, on sound. Many commercially marketed robotic platforms, as well as others that are moving from the laboratory into specialized public settings, already have rudimentary speech communication interfaces, and some are even being engineered for specific types of auditory tasks. In general, though, the ability of robots to monitor the auditory scene before them and to execute interactive behaviors informed by the interpretation or production of sound information remains far behind the broad and mostly transparent skills of human beings.