RoboCup-97, The First Robot World Cup Soccer Games and Conferences, was held at the Fifteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. The world champions are CMUNITED (Carnegie Mellon University) for the small-size league, DREAMTEAM (University of Southern California) and TRACKIES (Osaka University, Japan) for the middle-size league, and AT-HUMBOLDT (Humboldt University) for the simulation league. The Scientific Challenge Award was given to Sean Luke (University of Maryland) for his genetic programming- based simulation team LUKE, and the Engineering Challenge Awards were given to UTTORI UNITED (Utsunomiya University, Toyo University, and Riken, Japan) and RMIT (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Australia) for designing novel omnidirectional driving mechanisms. RoboCup-98, the Second Robot World Cup Soccer, was held in conjunction with the Third International Conference on Multiagent Systems in Paris, France, in July 1998.

After a summary of the rules, we outline the high and low points of the competition. Then we suggest ways such competitions could better accommodate new teams in the future.

The Find-Life-on-Mars event of the 1997 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Mobile Robot Competition and Exhibition featured robots trying to find and collect stationary and moving colored objects in an arena littered with real rocks. The 2- day event had 11 entries participating in both single- robot and multirobot categories, both with and without manipulators. During the event, many of the robots successfully demonstrated object recognition, obstacle avoidance, exploration, and the collection and depositing of objects.

This article describes a milestone in our research efforts toward the real robot competition in RoboCup. We participated in the middle-size league at RoboCup-97, held in conjunction with the Fifteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Nagoya, Japan. The most significant features of our team, TRACKIES, are the application of a reinforcement learning method enhanced for real robot applications and the use of an omnidirectional vision system for our goalie that can capture a 360-degree view at any instant in time. The method and the system used are shown with competition results.

The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Spring Symposium on Interactive and Mixed-Initiative Decision-Theoretic Systems was held at Stanford University from 23-25 March 1998. The symposium attracted approximately 30 researchers from around the world. Topics discussed included incremental model construction, user interaction, explanation generation, and applications.

Five teams entered their robotic waiters into the contest. After a preliminary round to judge the safety of the robots, the robots served conference attendees at the opening reception of the Fourteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence.

Book review of "How the Mind Works, Steven Pinker, W. W. Norton & Co., New York, 1997, 660 pp., $29.90, ISBN 0-393- 04535-8. Book review of "How the Mind Works, Steven Pinker, W. W. Norton & Co., New York, 1997, 660 pp., $29.90, ISBN 0-393- 04535-8.

Researchers and technology developers from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), other government agencies, academia, and industry recently met in Pasadena, California, to take stock of past and current work and future challenges in the application of AI to highly autonomous systems. The meeting was catalyzed by new opportunities in developing autonomous spacecraft for NASA and was in part a celebration of the fictional birth year of the HAL-9000 computer.

Robot soccer competition provides an excellent opportunity for integrated robotics research. All these tasks demand robots that are autonomous (sensing, thinking, and acting as independent creatures), efficient (functioning under time and resource constraints), cooperative (collaborating with each other to accomplish tasks that are beyond an individual's capabilities), and intelligent (reasoning and planning actions and perhaps learning from experience). Furthermore, all these capabilities must be integrated into a single and complete system, which raises a set of challenges that are new to individual research disciplines. At RoboCup-97, held as part of the Fifteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, these integrated robots performed well, and our DREAMTEAM won the world championship in the middle-size robot league.