The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence was pleased to present the 2012 Fall Symposium Series, held Friday through Sunday, November 2–4, at the Westin Arlington Gateway in Arlington, Virginia. The titles of the eight symposia were as follows: AI for Gerontechnology (FS-12-01), Artificial Intelligence of Humor (FS-12-02), Discovery Informatics: The Role of AI Research in Innovating Scientific Processes (FS-12-03), Human Control of Bio-Inspired Swarms (FS-12-04), Information Retrieval and Knowledge Discovery in Biomedical Text (FS-12-05), Machine Aggregation of Human Judgment (FS-12-06), Robots Learning Interactively from Human Teachers (FS-12-07), and Social Networks and Social Contagion (FS-12-08). The highlights of each symposium are presented in this report.

The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence was pleased to present the 2012 Fall Symposium Series, held Friday through Sunday, November 2–4, at the Westin Arlington Gateway in Arlington, Virginia. The titles of the eight symposia were as follows: AI for Gerontechnology (FS-12-01), Artificial Intelligence of Humor (FS-12-02), Discovery Informatics: The Role of AI Research in Innovating Scientific Processes (FS-12-03), Human Control of Bio-Inspired Swarms (FS-12-04), Information Retrieval and Knowledge Discovery in Biomedical Text (FS-12-05), Machine Aggregation of Human Judgment (FS-12-06), Robots Learning Interactively from Human Teachers (FS-12-07), and Social Networks and Social Contagion (FS-12-08). The highlights of each symposium are presented in this report.

The general goal of the symposium was to advance the state of the art in the direction of developing an AI system (the system) capable of understanding the mechanism of a joke at a level sufficient for providing a punch line to a human generated setup (even if unintentional) and conversely, for computer reacting competently to a human generated punch line that follows a setup, generated by either participant. The effort is multidisciplinary in nature, and the participants from several of the contributing disciplines, viz., computational semantics, knowledge representation, computational psychology, humanoid robotics, human-computer interface, human factors, to name just a few, took part in the work of the symposium.

This exercise in metatheory presents what any theory consists of and what properties it should have. It, then, adjust the general recipe to a theory of humor and computational humor. In this light, it reviews the state of the art in computational humor and suggests the main lines of development.