The Ninth Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE) was held October 14–18, 2013, at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts. The mission of the AIIDE conference is to provide a forum for researchers and game developers to discuss ways that AI can enhance games and other forms of interactive entertainment. In addition to presentations on adapting standard AI techniques such as search, planning and machine learning for use within games, key topic areas include creating realistic autonomous characters, interactive narrative, procedural content generation, and integrating AI into game design and production tools.

The Ninth Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE) was held October 14–18, 2013, at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts. The mission of the AIIDE conference is to provide a forum for researchers and game developers to discuss ways that AI can enhance games and other forms of interactive entertainment. In addition to presentations on adapting standard AI techniques such as search, planning and machine learning for use within games, key topic areas include creating realistic autonomous characters, interactive narrative, procedural content generation, and integrating AI into game design and production tools.

The computer game industry has become a multibillion-dollar commercial enterprise, comparable in size and scope to the film industry. Game system requirements are an important driver of hardware and soware innovation in the computer industry, and games have expanded to fill market niches opened by new platforms such as mobile phones, consoles, tablets, and social media. Artificial intelligence is a major component contributing to this success, creating the conditions for more complex virtual environments, realistic non-player characters, and engaging experiences.

Internal conflict, in which a character is torn by opposing motivations, is central to drama. Actors portray such conflict in part by mimicking involuntary behaviors that occur as a result of such conflicts. In this paper, we examine the role of timing – pauses and hesitation, in particular – in internal conflict. We argue that virtual actors can be made more expressive if we can emulate the underlying structures of inhibition and conflict detection believed to operate in the human system. We discuss work in progress on this problem that uses the Twig procedural animation system.

Many biological models of human motivation and behavior posit a functional division between those subsystems respon- sible for approach and avoidance behaviors. Gray and McNaughton's (2000) revised Reinforcement Sensitivity Theory (RST) casts this distinction in terms of a Behavioral Activation System (BAS) and a Fight-Flight-Freeze System (FFFS), mediated by a third, conflict resolution system — the Behavioral Inhibition System (BIS). They argued that these are fundamental, functionally distinct systems. The model has been highly influential both in personality psychology, where it provides a biologically-based explanation of traits such as extraversion and neuroticism, and in clinical psychology wherein state disorders such as Major Depressive Disorder and Generalized Anxiety Disorder can be modeled as differences in baseline sensitivities of one or more of the systems. In this paper, we present work in progress on implementing a simplified simulation of RST in a set of embodied virtual characters. We argue that RST provides an interesting and potentially powerful starting point for cognitive architectures for various applications, including interactive entertainment, in which simulation of human-like affect and personality is important.

The titles of the eight symposia were as follows: (1) AI Meets Business Rules and Process Management, (2) Architectures for Intelligent Theory-Based Agents, (3) Creative Intelligent Systems, (4) Emotion, Personality, and Social Behavior, (5) Semantic Scientific Knowledge Integration, (6) Social Information Processing, (7) Symbiotic Relationships between Semantic Web and Knowledge Engineering, (8) Using AI to Motivate Greater Participation in Computer Science The goal of the AI Meets Business Rules and Process Management AAAI symposium was to investigate the various approaches and standards to represent business rules, business process management and the semantic web with respect to expressiveness and reasoning capabilities. The Semantic Scientific Knowledge Symposium was interested in bringing together the semantic technologies community with the scientific information technology community in an effort to build the general semantic science information community. The Social Information Processing's goal was to investigate computational and analytic approaches that will enable users to harness the efforts of large numbers of other users to solve a variety of information processing problems, from discovering high-quality content to managing common resources. The purpose of the Using AI to Motivate Greater Participation in Computer Science symposium was to identify ways that topics in AI may be used to motivate greater student participation in computer science by highlighting fun, engaging, and intellectually challenging developments in AI-related curriculum at a number of educational levels.

The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) was pleased to present the AAAI 2008 Spring Symposium Series, held Wednesday through Friday, March 26–28, 2008 at Stanford University, California. The titles of the eight symposia were as follows: (1) AI Meets Business Rules and Process Management, (2) Architectures for Intelligent Theory-Based Agents, (3) Creative Intelligent Systems, (4) Emotion, Personality, and Social Behavior, (5) Semantic Scientific Knowledge Integration, (6) Social Information Processing, (7) Symbiotic Relationships between Semantic Web and Knowledge Engineering, (8) Using AI to Motivate Greater Participation in Computer Science The goal of the AI Meets Business Rules and Process Management AAAI symposium was to investigate the various approaches and standards to represent business rules, business process management and the semantic web with respect to expressiveness and reasoning capabilities. The focus of the Architectures for Intelligent Theory-Based Agents AAAI symposium was the definition of architectures for intelligent theory-based agents, comprising languages, knowledge representation methodologies, reasoning algorithms, and control loops. The Creative Intelligent Systems Symposium included five major discussion sessions and a general poster session (in which all contributing papers were presented). The purpose of this symposium was to explore the synergies between creative cognition and intelligent systems. The goal of the Emotion, Personality, and Social Behavior symposium was to examine fundamental issues in affect and personality in both biological and artificial agents, focusing on the roles of these factors in mediating social behavior. The Semantic Scientific Knowledge Symposium was interested in bringing together the semantic technologies community with the scientific information technology community in an effort to build the general semantic science information community. The Social Information Processing's goal was to investigate computational and analytic approaches that will enable users to harness the efforts of large numbers of other users to solve a variety of information processing problems, from discovering high-quality content to managing common resources. The goal of the Symbiotic Relationships between the Semantic Web and Software Engineering symposium was to explore how the lessons learned by the knowledge-engineering community over the past three decades could be applied to the bold research agenda of current workers in semantic web technologies. The purpose of the Using AI to Motivate Greater Participation in Computer Science symposium was to identify ways that topics in AI may be used to motivate greater student participation in computer science by highlighting fun, engaging, and intellectually challenging developments in AI-related curriculum at a number of educational levels. Technical reports of the symposia were published by AAAI Press.

In an attempt to solve as much of the AAAI Robot Challenge as possible, five research institutions representing academia, industry, and government integrated their research into a single robot named GRACE. This article describes this first-year effort by the GRACE team, including not only the various techniques each participant brought to GRACE but also the difficult integration effort itself.

In an attempt to solve as much of the AAAI Robot Challenge as possible, five research institutions representing academia, industry, and government integrated their research into a single robot named GRACE. This article describes this first-year effort by the GRACE team, including not only the various techniques each participant brought to GRACE but also the difficult integration effort itself.

The AAAI-2002 Robot Exhibition offered robotics researchers a venue for live demonstrations of their current projects. Researchers ranging from undergraduates working on their own to large multilab groups demonstrated robots that performed tasks ranging from improvisational comedy to urban search and rescue. This article describes their entries.