The Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence Conference was held 18-22 July 1999 in Orlando, Florida. Ramasamy Uthurusamy was the Program Chair and Barbara Hayes-Roth was the Program Co-Chair. Although all the IAAI-99 papers and talks were certainly interesting and important, we present in this special issue of AI Magazine only a select subset because of page and other limitations. We include two invited talks and four applications as a snapshot of IAAI-99.

The Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence Conference was held 18-22 July 1999 in Orlando, Florida. Ramasamy Uthurusamy was the Program Chair and Barbara Hayes-Roth was the Program Co-Chair. Although all the IAAI-99 papers and talks were certainly interesting and important, we present in this special issue of AI Magazine only a select subset because of page and other limitations. We include two invited talks and four applications as a snapshot of IAAI-99.

The Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence Conference

The Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence Conference was held 28-30 July 1998 in Madison, Wisconsin. Bruce Buchanan was the program chair and Sam Uthrusamy was the program cochair.

The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) held its 1997 Spring Symposium Series on 24 to 26 March at Stanford University in Stanford, California. This article contains summaries of the seven symposia that were conducted: (1) Artificial Intelligence in Knowledge Management; (2) Computational Models for Mixed-Initiative Interaction; (3) Cross-Language Text and Speech Retrieval; (4) Intelligent Integration and Use of Text, Image, Video, and Audio Corpora; (5) Natural Language Processing for the World Wide Web; (6) Ontological Engineering; and (7) Qualitative Preferences in Deliberation and Practical Reasoning.

The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) held its 1997 Spring Symposium Series on 24 to 26 March at Stanford University in Stanford, California. This article contains summaries of the seven symposia that were conducted: (1) Artificial Intelligence in Knowledge Management; (2) Computational Models for Mixed-Initiative Interaction; (3) Cross-Language Text and Speech Retrieval; (4) Intelligent Integration and Use of Text, Image, Video, and Audio Corpora; (5) Natural Language Processing for the World Wide Web; (6) Ontological Engineering; and (7) Qualitative Preferences in Deliberation and Practical Reasoning.

Over 60 researchers from 10 countries took part in the Third Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD) Workshop, held during the Eleventh National Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Washington, D.C. A major trend evident at the workshop was the transition to applications in the core KDD area of discovery of relatively simple patterns in relational databases; the most successful applications are appearing in the areas of greatest need, where the databases are so large that manual analysis is impossible. Progress has been facilitated by the availability of commercial KDD tools for both generic discovery and domain-specific applications such as marketing. At the same time, progress has been slowed by problems such as lack of statistical rigor, overabundance of patterns, and poor integration. Besides applications, the main themes of this workshop were (1) the discovery of dependencies and models and (2) integrated and interactive KDD systems.