In the span of a few months, the AI community lost four important figures. The fall of 2002 marked the passing of Ray Reiter, for whom a memorial article by Jack Minker appears in this issue. As the issue was going to press, AI lost Saul Amarel, Norm Nielsen, and Charles Rosen. This section of AI Magazine commemorates these friends, leaders, and AI pioneers. We thank Tom Mitchell and Casimir Kulikowski for their memorial to Saul Amarel, Ray Perrault for his remembrance of Norm Nielsen, and Peter Hart and Nils Nilsson for their tribute to Charles Rosen. The AI community mourns our lost colleagues and gratefully remembers their contributions, which meant so much to so many and to the advancement of artificial intelligence as a whole.

This article describes TEAM, a transportable natural-language interface system. TEAM was constructed to test the feasibility of building a natural-language system that could be adapted to interface with new databases by users who are not experts in natural-language processing. An overview of the system design is presented, emphasizing those choices that were imposed by the demands of transportability. Several general problems of natural-language processing that were faced in constructing the system are discussed, including quantifier scoping, various pragmatic issues, and verb acquisition. TEAM is compared with several other transportable systems; this comparison includes a discussion of the range of natural language handled by each as well as a description of the approach taken to achieving transportability in each system.