The AAAI 2008 Workshop on Mobility and Manipulation (held during the Twenty-Third AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence) showcased advances in mobility and manipulation through a half-day workshop and an exhibition. The workshop focused on possible solutions to both technical and organizational challenges to mobility and manipulation research. This article presents the highlights of that discussion along with the content of the accompanying exhibits.

Semantic memory is the subsystem of human memory that stores knowledge of concepts or meanings, as opposed to life specific experiences. The organization of concepts within semantic memory can be understood as a semantic network, where the concepts (nodes) are associated (linked) to others depending on perceptions, similarities, etc. Lexical access is the complementary part of this system and allows the retrieval of such organized knowledge. While conceptual information is stored under certain underlying organization (and thus gives rise to a specific topology), it is crucial to have an accurate access to any of the information units, e.g. the concepts, for efficiently retrieving semantic information for real-time needings. An example of an information retrieval process occurs in verbal fluency tasks, and it is known to involve two different mechanisms: -clustering-, or generating words within a subcategory, and, when a subcategory is exhausted, -switching- to a new subcategory. We extended this approach to random-walking on a network (clustering) in combination to jumping (switching) to any node with certain probability and derived its analytical expression based on Markov chains. Results show that this dual mechanism contributes to optimize the exploration of different network models in terms of the mean first passage time. Additionally, this cognitive inspired dual mechanism opens a new framework to better understand and evaluate exploration, propagation and transport phenomena in other complex systems where switching-like phenomena are feasible.

The Twenty-Fifth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-11) will be held at the Hyatt Regency in San Francisco, California, August 7-11, 2011. You won't want to miss this milestone event. Details check the IJCAI-09 and IAAI-09 websites County Arboretum, the Huntington about both conferences will be for updates to the slate of speakers. The IJCAI-09 conference will be the "Rose." Pasadena has a lively arts scene, on Innovative Applications of Registration, hotel, and student with such diverse offerings as the famous Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-09) will be housing information and forms are Pasadena Playhouse or Ice held in Pasadena, California at the available on the IJCAI-09 conference House Comedy Club, which has Pasadena Convention Center, July 11-web site at ijcai-09.org.

This summer's AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-08) and its sister Conference on Innovative Applications of AI (IAAI-08) continued their long tradition of being a focal point of AI. This year's conferences were held in Chicago at the Hyatt Regency McCormick Place, July 13-17, 2008. The multidimensional conference offerings included nine invited talks, 251 technical papers, 22 innovative applications of AI papers, three competitions (poker, AI video, and general game playing), three special tracks (AI and the web, integrated intelligence, and physically grounded AI), 15 tutorials, 15 workshops, and 11 intelligent system demonstrations, as well as a number of awards, a doctoral consortium, student poster session and programs, and a vendor exhibit. This translated into a plethora of choices for the 921 conference attendees. An additional 175 people exclusively attended the tutorials, workshops, or exhibit.

Early work in AI focused on the notion of a goal--an explicit target that must be achieved--and this paradigm is still dominant in AI problem solving. But as application domains become more complex and realistic, it is apparent that the dichotomic notion of a goal, while adequate for certain puzzles, is too crude in general. The problem is that in many contemporary application domains, for example, information retrieval from large databases or the web, or planning in complex domains, the user has little knowledge about the set of possible solutions or feasible items, and what she or he typically seeks is the best that's out there. But since the user does not know what is the best achievable plan or the best available document or product, he or she typically cannot characterize it or its properties specifically. As a result, the user will end up either asking for an unachievable goal, getting no solution in response, or asking for too little, obtaining a solution that can be substantially improved. Of course, the user can gradually adjust the stated goals. This, however, is not a very appealing mode of interaction because the space of alternative solutions in such applications can be combinatorially huge, or even infinite. Moreover, such incremental goal refinement is simply infeasible when the goal must be supplied offline, as in the case of autonomous agents (whether on the web or on Mars).

Moving toward true robot autonomy may require new paradigms, hardware, and ways of thinking. The goal of the AAAI 2008 Workshop on Mobility and Manipulation was not only to demonstrate current research successes to the AAAI community but also to road-map future mobility and manipulation challenges that create synergies between artificial intelligence and robotics. The half-day workshop included both a session on the exhibits and a panel discussion. The panel consisted of five prominent researchers who led a discussion of future directions for mobility and manipulation research. Andrew Ng of Stanford University (along with students Ashutosh Saxena and Ellen Klingbeil) focuses on opening arbitrary doors through learning a few visual keypoints, such as the location and type of door handle.

The Fourth International Conference on Knowledge Capture was held October 28-31, 2007, in Whistler, British Columbia. The topics covered in the invited talks, technical papers, posters, and demonstrations included knowledge engineering and modeling methodologies, knowledge engineering and the semantic web, mixedinitiative planning and decision-support tools, acquisition of problem-solving knowledge, knowledge-based markup techniques, knowledge extraction systems, knowledge acquisition tools, and advice-taking systems. These events, which were from web-based game-playing systems. The title of his talk was "Human Ken Barker and John Gennari Derek Sleeman noted in his introductory Etzioni's invited talk and had primary responsibilities for comments, knowledge capture is gave some technical details of the systems the conference and workshop programs. In the The best technical paper Since the K-CAP series was initiated, last decade or so, knowledge capture award was presented to Kai Eckert, the K-CAP and European Knowledge has again expanded its horizons significantly Heiner Stuckenschmidt, and Magnus Acquisition Workshop (EKAW) meetings to embrace information-extraction Pfeffer for their paper "Interactive have been held in alternate years, techniques, and more recently Thesaurus Assessment for Automatic with the K-CAP meetings taking place the web and enhanced connectivity Document Annotation."

The International Environments conference has been held four times now. The first meeting was held in 2005 at the University of Essex, the second in 2006 at the National Technical University of Athens, and the third in 2007 at the University of Ulm. The conference is unique in its field, providing a leading edge forum for the international community to present the latest academic research and commercial developments. The realization of intelligent environments requires the convergence of different prominent disciplines. As a result, the conference has relevance to individuals working in the fields of information and computer science, material engineering, artificial intelligence, architecture, health care, sociology, design, networking, and intelligent agents.

SPARK'08 was the first edition of a workshop series designed to provide a stable, longterm forum where researchers could discuss Workshop (SPARK) was established to help address this issue. Building on precursory events, SPARK'08 was the first workshop designed Scheduling (ICAPS-08) held in Sydney, Australia, in September 2008. Like its immediate predecessor (the ICAPS'07 Workshop on Moving Planning and Scheduling Systems), the 2008 SPARK workshop was collocated with the International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS), a premier forum for research in AI planning and scheduling, and the International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming (CP). A handful of outstanding application-oriented papers are presented each year at the ICAPS conference. Time and again, in invited talks and in open microphone discussion sessions such as ICAPS's Festivus (where conference participants air their grievances in an open and entertaining way), researchers have lamented the small number of applications papers accepted at conferences such as ICAPS, CP, and the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence.

AAAI was pleased to present the AAAI-08 Workshop Program, held Sunday and Monday, July 13–14, in Chicago, Illinois, USA. The program included the following 15 workshops: Advancements in POMDP Solvers; AI Education Workshop Colloquium; Coordination, Organizations, Institutions, and Norms in Agent Systems, Enhanced Messaging; Human Implications of Human-Robot Interaction; Intelligent Techniques for Web Personalization and Recommender Systems; Metareasoning: Thinking about Thinking; Multidisciplinary Workshop on Advances in Preference Handling; Search in Artificial Intelligence and Robotics; Spatial and Temporal Reasoning; Trading Agent Design and Analysis; Transfer Learning for Complex Tasks; What Went Wrong and Why: Lessons from AI Research and Applications; and Wikipedia and Artificial Intelligence: An Evolving Synergy.